It was an ideal fit for the type of MMOG that Koster and the Galaxies team set out to make. The expanded universe treated Star Wars as a world with depth upon which the original films had only touched. It has a place in a line of Star Wars work that begins with the original trilogy and extends through novels by authors such as Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, the Dark Horse comics, and simulator-style games such as X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter.

Star Wars Galaxies was, then, far more influenced by the work done in Star WarsвЂ™ expanded universe through the вЂ™80s and вЂ™90s than it was by the new films being produced by Lucasfilm. The gameвЂ™s development overlapped with the early part of the prequel trilogy, and its developers had chosen to set the game in the period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. It was a less strange fit for the Star Wars licence than you might think. If an aspiring Han Solo wanted a drink, then they should be able to buy one from a player who-for whatever reason-aspired to be that bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina. If the player wanted to be an adventurer, the logic went, then they should be an adventurer in an ecosystem that also included craftsmen, doctors, dancers, pilots and farmers. In the view of Koster and his team, an MMOG was a persistent world driven by systems that emphasised player participation at every level. GalaxiesвЂ™ creative director, Raph Koster, had been a lead designer on Ultima Online. In its final form, Star Wars Galaxies was a mess of contradictory creative urges whose design and technological foundations had been stripped out from under it-but it was an ambitious mess, the type of game that players often ask for but rarely get. The gameвЂ™s scope could belong to an unlikely sounding Kickstarter pitch, so perhaps itвЂ™s little wonder that Sony Online Entertainment shuttered its Star Wars MMOG in December 2011.

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