Despite a flop of a start at its release in 2003, over 20 years ago, Star Wars: Galaxies is looked upon pretty fondly for its flexible playstyle, so much so that private servers are running and updated 14 years after official servers shut down. Its Executive Producer Rich Vogel felt proud enough to take that victory lap in an interview with Kotaku, in which he reminisces about its success.
Much of Vogel’s pride in Galaxies lies in the game being feverishly ahead of its time. While it was likely much of the reason it had a rough start, he pulled no punches in pointing to modern-day equivalents of games and social spaces—and the overlaps between the two modern phenomena.
For instance, he pointed out that in an era before consistent, all-encompassing communication and social media apps, Galaxies let players communicate.
“It was pre-Facebook, right?” he explained to Kotaku. “There were people in the military, a woman who played with her husband together at night, just so they could talk to each other. I thought that was really special.”
Vogel boldly (and probably correctly) took it a step further and went at Meta and even Fortnite’s entire modern “metaverse” social and content model. “Star Wars Galaxies was absolutely a metaverse. What Fortnite is saying they did first? We did that in 2005. We hired people and volunteers to come in and do events, we had a whole event system layered on top. We had bands come and play, It was amazing!”
He was also quite proud of the in-game procedurally generated settings, which he compared to No Man’s Sky, though plenty of other games have taken a similar approach in recent times.
“With Star Wars Galaxies, we basically did No Man’s Sky in 2003,” he said in the interview. “It was all procedurally generated terrain, all the Star Wars settings and historic places were layered on top of the procedural world. We even had procedural ways of developing points of interest. It was well, well beyond what other people were doing at the time.”
Vogel is working on a new project with T-Minus Zero Entertainment, founded last May and featuring Mark Tucker of DOOM 2016 and Fallout 76, former Bethesda producer Scott Malone, and Galaxies lead artist Jeff Dobson. He says it’ll be a “session-based” action title based on a public domain IP, and he’s just as optimistic as ever about his forward-thinking mentality towards online worlds.
