8 Bits Of Science You Didn’t Know Ruin Iconic Video Game Scenes

Though many a Star Wars game had tried to reproduce The Empire Strikes Back’s iconic AT-AT trip, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire marked the first time players could truly experience the thrill of bringing down their own hulking grey Imperial behemoth.

The method is disarmingly simple: use your tow cable to entangle the walker’s legs. The cable draws taut and over it goes.

In reality, however, this is not a good idea. As per this Popular Mechanics article, draw the cable taut and you place tremendous strain on the speeder’s airframe, potentially leading to an in-flight break-up. Worse, to have any chance of success the Snowspeeder would need to fly such insanely tight circles, at such an insanely low altitude, that even if incapacitating G-forces aren’t a thing in Star Wars impact with the walker’s legs or the ground becomes a very real threat.

Try to maintain a safe distance and, failing putting fatal tension on the cable, all you will succeed in doing is to fly literal circles around the AT-AT, laying a nice neat coil of cable for the Imperial crew to laugh at as they pass by.

Were it not for the fact that Shadows of the Empire foregoes all that tension nonsense, not to mention keeps the cable floating magically in the air, the sequence would have been totally impossible.