Disney and Epic Games have been promising a ‘persistent, open and interoperable’ universe since February 2024, when Disney took a $1.5 billion equity stake in Epic Games, and Bob Iger called it the company’s biggest foray into games ever. Two and a half years and a handful of Fortnite islands later, we’re finally getting something that behaves like what was actually promised: a Disney park experience that connects, mechanically, to Fortnite itself.
Most of what’s arrived since that 2024 announcement has been a slow drip of standalone content rather than anything tied to the parks. Disneyland Game Rush launched in November 2025 as a Creative island celebrating Disneyland’s 70th anniversary, dropping players into mini games modeled on Space Mountain and Haunted Mansion — fun, but built entirely inside Fortnite, with nothing connecting back to an actual park visit. A Percy Jackson: Siege of Monsters island followed that December, timed to the Disney+ show’s second season.
On the parks side, Imagineering has been running its own parallel experiments with a lot of the same underlying tech. Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin at Magic Kingdom now uses Unreal Engine to power real-time scoring.
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And this past June, I exclusively got an early look at the next-generation animatronic system that debuted at Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland. This pirate transforms into a skeleton in real time, driven not by traditional animatronic mechanics but by a projection pipeline built on Unreal Engine-based rendering tools.
It’s proven to be a divisive addition among park fans. Still, it’s also more proof that the line between “ride system” and “game engine” has been blurring inside Imagineering for a while now, well before Fortnite entered the picture.
What none of those individual pieces actually did was talk to each other. That changes now, though, as Disney and Epic have unveiled Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run | Fortnite. It’s not the most original name, but it essentially combines Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run — the ride inside Galaxy’s Edge at both Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando, FL, and Disneyland Park in Anaheim, CA — with a new Fortnite island called Smugglers Gambit. And it’s the first time riding a physical attraction produces something you bring into Fortnite — not just a shared theme, but an unlockable reward tied to a specific action you took inside the park.
According to Julia Humphreys, VP of Production at Disney Digital Entertainment, who walked me through the thinking in an exclusive interview, that’s exactly the point. “Smugglers Gambit is definitely a first step and not a finish line,” Humphreys told me.
“With this foundational experience we wanted to prove out something that we’ve believed for a long time: that a story doesn’t have to end when you leave the park, and it doesn’t have to start over from zero when you pick up a controller.” Progress, discoveries, and relationships with characters, she said, are meant to actually carry over between the ride and the game rather than resetting every time a guest switches from one to the other.
Starting August 16, 2026, guests entering Galaxy’s Edge can accept Hondo’s mission through the Disneyland or Disney World’s My Disney Experience app, then ride Smugglers Run as usual. Finish it, and you’ll get word — in the app or by email — that Hondo’s waiting on the Smugglers Gambit island in Fortnite with, fittingly, “your cut of the profits.” If you link an Epic Games account to your MyDisney equivalent, the reward will automatically unlock. If you can’t link or choose not to, they’ll email you a redeemable code. It’s free with park admission, and Fortnite is, of course, still free to play.
I haven’t gone hands-on with Smugglers Gambit myself, but between the screenshots Disney shared and my conversation with Humphreys, the game puts players in the role of a smuggler working the Outer Rim. Environment art shows a hazy, sun-bleached Mersa Veta Station, freighters docked along exposed gangways with towering scrap-metal walkers looming in the fog, and ships like the Quadjumper parked in dim, blue-lit hangars. Quests run across a location called Ord Ryla, and combat screenshots show players in flooded, fire-lit corridors, consistent with the co-op missions, class and leveling system, and run-ins with pirates, Imperial remnants, and hostile wildlife Disney has described.
Graphically, it’s a noticeable step down from the ride’s own visual bar — but that tracks with what you’d expect from a Star Wars experience running in Fortnite rather than on Imagineering’s custom multi-GPU hardware. Whether the Falcon itself shows up as a flyable or interactive ship in Smugglers Gambit remains to be seen.
(Image credit: Disney/Epic Games)
The technical connection between the two experiences is where my own time on Smugglers Run at Disney World comes back into play. Back in June, I covered Imagineering’s overhaul of the ride, including the engineer role that lets guests pick between three different planets and steers the whole mission depending on how they play — powered, Imagineering confirmed, by a heavily customized, multi-GPU build of Unreal Engine 5.
Smugglers Gambit, on the other hand, was built in UEFN — Unreal Editor for Fortnite, Epic’s own related but distinct toolset that sits on top of the same underlying engine. That shared foundation, Humphreys said, meant the teams “didn’t have to start from a blank page”: ships, characters, and environment objects originally modeled for the physical ride were translated directly into the Fortnite experience rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Getting the two sides to actually talk to each other wasn’t simple. Humphreys described it as “a team effort across Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney Digital Entertainment, and so many other teams across Disney, Lucasfilm, and Epic Games” — everything from new physical signage in the park queues to the backend account-linking infrastructure to the Fortnite ecosystem work needed to make the in-game rewards possible.
It’s also a bet backed by real numbers. This new experience builds on the Star Wars IP Toolkit, the creator toolset that powered a wave of Star Wars content in Fortnite this past May, shortly before The Mandalorian and Grogu hit the big screen. Disney says it pulled in close to 8 million players in its first 72 hours — not a small feat.
This new experience feels like the start of something we’ve been promised and have been waiting to see for a while. Will it drive more people to the parks just to unlock the Fortnite tie-in? My guess is that the impact will be minimal — the broader investment in parks and the kind of full-ride retheming Imagineering did with the Falcon itself make a far more compelling case for a visit than a Fortnite reward does.
The real impact is this: the experience you have flying the Falcon with Mando and Grogu over Endor or Coruscant can now carry beyond your time at the park. And that spreads the Star Wars story — your story — farther.
That’s a long wait for a promise this specific — but Humphreys sounded like she’d have waited even longer. “As someone who loves both theme parks and games, this is the start of a collaboration I’ve wanted to see for years,” she said. “It’s very much the opening chapter with Epic Games, and I can’t wait for people to experience where this relationship goes next.”
Taken together, this is a cool first step — not because any single piece of it is groundbreaking on its own, but because it’s the first time Disney has actually wired the reward loop between a park and Fortnite, instead of just theming a Fortnite island around a park. The ride itself is genuinely better than it was even a few months ago; my June story covered how the three-planet, choose-your-own-adventure overhaul already made Smugglers Run more replayable. Now that same ride experience feeds into a Fortnite island that, if it delivers at scale, could become a real destination on its own — one where Hondo is voiced by the same actor as on the ride, for what it’s worth.
The redemption structure is a nice touch, too: finish the mission, and you get a Fortnite reward of an exclusive outfit for taking the ride. I’d expect Disney and Epic to keep tuning that loop over time, the same way Imagineering has kept iterating on the ride itself; more skins, more unlocks, deeper crossover content wouldn’t be a heavy lift if this lands with players.
What I’m more curious about is where the “connected” half of this idea goes next. If riding the Falcon can unlock something in Fortnite, there’s no obvious reason Disney stops at Star Wars. A Toy Story Mania tie-in wouldn’t be a stretch, and we’ve already seen a version of WEB-Slingers in Fortnite, so why not give that attraction a similar tie-in?
Now that the plumbing between a ride and a persistent game world actually works, the list of places Disney could point it next gets long fast.
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
