We all have our favorite games and, in some cases, our obsessions with games that never quite let us go.Star Wars Galaxiesis one of those games that left an indelible impression on me. We do a lot of things to preserve our time with a game. We take screenshots. We buy merchandise. We make our favorite videogame art the background on our phone, computer, or tablet. We use these digital keepsakes to remind us of our time with our favorite piece of media. I do something a little different. I join groups and forums filled with players on private, emulated Star Wars Galaxies servers.
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Since I’m talking about a game that hasn’t had an official server since December 15th, 2011, allow me to shine a bit of a light on what Star Wars Galaxies actually was. The MMO genre was still in its childhood years and there were some different ideas about what an MMO could be. Star Wars Galaxies laid claim to the idea of a player-driven experience where you lived in the Star Wars setting.
That meant Jedi were extremely rare and hunted. Players could create a character who never engaged in combat, but made incredible buildings or wondrous vehicles. You needed to be social because your character couldn’t do it all alone. They could merely do a fraction of what you’d need during your time with the game. In fact, you couldn’t even understand every species when they spoke unless someone of that species taught you the language.
Star Wars Galaxies wasn’t just an adventure or a series of quests to co-op - it was a sandbox for my best friend and I to digitally live in. Player-made cities were quite common because the game had an overly-ambitious player-housing system. We had neighbors who were shipwrights and creature handlers. We knew doctors who would patch up our wounds and entertainers who would buff us before we set out on adventures.
Even now, I feel childishly giddy reminiscing about those experiences from 2005. Unfortunately, unlike your favorite single-player titles, MMOs are something of a living community. When the servers went down, I could no longer revisit those old, familiar locations and memories. I certainly couldn’t re-experience things the way another fan might re-experienceKnights of the Old Republic.
Fast-forward a few years, and I stumble upon a Facebook group dedicated to Star Wars Galaxies. I joined it because I wanted to connect with people who were as nostalgic as me about this game so many people had forgotten. Well, the group turned out to be more than just nostalgia. People were posting screenshots and talking about experiences they were havingright then and thereon private servers.
This prompted me to do a little digging. There were quite a few groups like this one. Not only were people recreating the Star Wars Galaxies experience, they were cherry-picking their favorite years of the game.
Some servers are dedicated to the original experience with a rare handful of Jedi and all of the sandbox elements old-school players remember. Other servers modeled themselves on the New Game Experience version of SWG that followedWorld of Warcraft’ssuccess. This made Jedi a starting class and gave players linear questlines to follow, trimming back on the idea of the sandbox and things like non-combat classes. Each server had their own community, rules, and slice of Star Wars history that they were preserving.
I started to hang out in some of these groups because the communities were just as I remembered: friendly, and welcoming people joined together by fandom. In fact, these servers turned that up to 11 because these players wereworkingto keep these servers up. Soon I found myself donating a small amount of money to a server whose community I really jived with. It takes money to keep these things going, so communities often pool together their resources.
Occasionally, I even gave members advice on how to level up a commando, one of my favorite classes from back in the day. I recommended using a heavy weapon called The Emperor’s Cigar Lighter, which was a tiny pistol akin toMen in Black’sLittle Cricket. It was funny to think that I’d dusted the cobwebs off of knowledge I hadn’t used in over a decade to help someone out - I felt like a retired veteran, handing down knowledge to a new generation who were exploring these worlds for the first time (sure, it’s just as likely they’re older players experimenting with new classes, but indulge me here).
Despite never playing on the server, I’d come to know certain people and the stories of their lives. Chatting in these groups wasn’t so different from rubbing shoulders with someone up in the cantina on Tatooine. These groups, even though I don’t play, allow me to keep a toe in the water.
One of my small daily delights comes in the form of screenshots peppered throughout my social media feeds. People will post group photos or random screenshots of creatures out in the world. At one point, several photos of those campfire moments where the crew is playing instruments and recuperating in the middle of a journey gave me fond flashbacks to the times I’d set up an elaborate camp on the side of a near-sheer cliff.
These screenshots are never shiny, new-looking photos. They aren’t 4K masterpieces that make you do a double take. They’re low-res photos of a nearly twenty-year-old game that was never known for its graphics. But I’ll still look at a low-poly piece of armor and go “sick.” They bring my right back to my computer, to late nights with my best friend, to adventures of taking down Krayt Dragons for pearls.
So, why don’t I join a server and play on it? I ask myself that a lot. Seeing people’s screenshots and hearing about their friendly communities makes the idea of playing again incredibly tempting. And yet, I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for. I love modern games and have plenty of them to play. I’m busier today than I was back in those days, and don’t think I’d have time to recreate my original time-intensive MMO experience. Even with that incredible fan-made Star Wars Galaxies Restoration project entering version 1.0 around the time of this very article, I feel content to leave those memories in the past.
Most of all, I don’t think I want a new experience, because I alreadyhadan experience with Star Wars Galaxies, and it was an incredible one. What I want is that little time capsule to remind me of something I loved. I want to remember great times with great people, because sometimes remembering a moment is even stronger than re-experiencing it.
