Star Wars Galaxies
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) is highly-popular Star Wars MMORPG where a player can live out his fantasies of being one of nine iconic professions in the Star Wars universe. Released in June 2003, it quickly became the most popular MMO ever produced, even surpassing the already astronomical numbers of competitors such as World of WarCraft.
Players can choose to play a wide variety of original professions such as feared bounty hunters, rogue smugglers, and even Uncle Owen-esque crafters! Advancement is as simple as beating on thousands of creatures repeatedly, or doing exciting and engaging story-line based quests such as "Working for Watto" and "Mystery of the Meatlumps!" Future updates include a fresh and exciting take on the Battle of Hoth, where players must fly snowspeeders to destroy AT-AT Imperial Walkers, before heading into Echo Base itself and helping the Rebel evacuation.
[edit] Development
The development of SWG was not an easy process. Despite his franchise's great success in theatres and in video games, George Lucas found few developers willing to listen. He was rebuffed, with each CEO telling him that there was simply no potential in a massively multiplayer game in the Star Wars universe. It simply did not appear to be the right fit to anyone but the creative genius Lucas. That was until Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) received the treatment for SWG. Even this was not the perfect fit as SOE originally found great difficulty in convincing its parent company Sony that a Massively Multiplayer game could be successful on the Personal Computer format. Despite its misgivings, Sony allowed SOE to proceed with the project, rather than asking them to switch development to the Playstation 2 entertainment system.
