With a brand new Star Wars trilogy in the making, everyone is anxious to return to that galaxy far, far away. But Disney isn’t settling for three new films that follow the saga’s main characters and some new players–it’s also creating multiple new standalone Star Wars films, with each promising to offer a new perspective on the sci-fi universe. Collectively, these films are called the Star Wars Anthology. The first of these, Star Wars: Rogue One, follows a group of Rebels who steal the plans for the first Death Star.
But if you’re a fan of Star Wars games, you may be thinking, ‘Hey–didn’t I already steal the Death Star plans back in 1995?’ Well, you’d be right! But since Disney has effectively erased most stories from the Star Wars Expanded Universe from official canon, many of the side stories that Star Wars video games have told are now no longer recognised. Here are three of our favourite side stories Star Wars games have told which we’ll miss the most.
Who Stole The Death Star Plans?
Because Star Wars games tended to take more liberties with established canon than other tie-in media like films and comics, there are multiple conflicting instances of the Death Star plans being stolen by different people. It’s easy to see why: the theft of the plans is an important event that kicks off the very first Star Wars film. But the most regularly referred-to theft was conducted by Kyle Katarn, the protagonist of Star Wars: Dark Forces, a first-person shooter released in 1995. In the game’s opening level, Katarn infiltrates an Imperial base, shoots a lot of Stormtroopers, and recovers a chip holding the Death Star’s schematics.
But the theft of the Death Star plans didn’t stop there; Star Wars games also filled in how the plans made their way into the hands of Princess Leia. A mission in Star Wars: X-Wing requires to you protect a shuttle as it physically transports the schematics to Leia’s blockade runner, the Tantive IV. And who was in that ship? A character who actually featured in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope named Biggs Darklighter, one of Luke Skywalker’s wingmen whose X-Wing blew up during the Death Star trench run.
How did the Rebels get from Yavin to Hoth?
You can bet the Empire would be pretty pissed after a farm boy blew up its superweapon–and even though it did blow up, the Rebels’ presence on Yavin 4 was still no longer secret. So, they had to pack up shop and skedaddle. But how did they move all their stuff from Yavin to Hoth in the short time between A New Hope and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back?
It’s an event that’s covered by a couple of different Star Wars games, firstly in X-Wing’s expansion pack, X-Wing: Imperial Pursuit. As the Empire moves to blockade the Yavin system, the Rebels prepare their capital ships to jump to hyperspace. The player must protect these frigates from waves in TIE Bombers, giving them time to evacuate the system. The evacuation ends with a dramatic transfer of a crippled capital ship’s crew to a functioning vessel, after which the player scuttles the massive craft as the last of the Rebels flee the system.
Because the evacuation was so rushed, not every Rebel convoy managed to jump to the same location. A mission in Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader picks up soon afterward, with the scattered convoys attempting to reach a rendezvous point. As Skywalker’s convoy arrives, they find the other Rebels have been ambushed and destroyed, and must flee the meeting point to arrive at Hoth with only a fraction of their supplies and manpower.
Who killed all those Bothans?
There aren’t many other lines in the original Star Wars trilogy that inspired so many off-shoot stories as “Many Bothans died to bring us this information”. The plans for the second Death Star were acquired by this group of people, yet we know almost nothing about them. Think about it–do you even know what a Bothan looks like? (It’s a furry human.)
Rather than create a scenario where you play as the Bothans and steal these plans from the Empire, Star Wars: TIE Fighter included a tour of duty where you hunt down and massacre the Bothans as they flee with the technical readouts in tow. This isn’t just a single mission where you gun down ships labelled “Bothans”, but a multi-stage campaign that involves capturing Bothan spies and delivering them to Darth Vader, destroying a massive Bothan dreadnought, and then sneaking into the Rebel fleet to double-check they believed the plans and would therefore fall into Vader’s trap in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Indeed, many Bothans died, and most of them by your hand.
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