I don’t know if this is the ‘appropriate’ place for this, and I suspect this will tread dangerously close to outright blogging. But, I don’t have a blog, and I’d intended this to be a discussion for anyone even remotely interested, so here we are.
I. Introduction – An Adventure Manual
II. The Decline and Fall of the Corellian Empire
III. Sandbox Starbound
IV. Interplanetary Socialite
V. The Forced
VI. Take to the Skies
VII. Night Elf Thanksgiving
VIII. Age of the Meta, Age of the Wiki
IX. You Can Never Go Back
X. …Can You?
----------I. Introduction – An Adventure Manual----------
—Here and Now, There and Then—
A few weeks ago, I started earning a livable wage for the first time in my 36 years of life. Given… well, everything, this is a development that I feel strangely guilty about. Avoiding obvious social commentary about how this is what it’s supposed to be for everyone, I’ve been seizing the opportunity to experience familiar things without the Sword of Rentocles hanging directly over my head. It was in this spirit that, during my first week on the job, I found myself listening to BT’s album Emotional Technology.
Released in early August of 2003, I picked up EmoTech the first week it came out, a few weeks before I went back to college for my sophomore year. The album featured heavily in the next ~18 months of my life – a period characterized by literal failing grades due to undiagnosed ADHD, a supremely awkward living situation in a substance-free dorm with a strict, uncompromising RA as a roommate, a neglectful lack of support from home due to parents in a loveless relationship well into the process of slow collapse, and a blanket of depression that I would frankly call a natural response to the above. BT played a big part in helping me maintain some semblance of sanity.
So, how was listening to it again from a position of relative security? Hard to say for sure, but I don’t think ‘cathartic’ is quite it. Perhaps closer to the mark is that the melancholy of late 2003 was the sea salt sprinkled on top of a gourmet confection, and EmoTech was the sweeter for it. Reexperiencing it in retrospect was having the culinary understanding to appreciate the confection for what it truly is.
Emotional Technology was also released just over a month after LucasArts’ new hit MMORPG, Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. Published at the tail end of June 2003 by Sony Online Entertainment, SWG sought to bring well-funded brand recognition to a genre just beginning to flex its muscles in a freshly burgeoning period of high-speed internet. BT’s album circumstantially became my unofficial soundtrack for Galaxies, often accompanying me late into the evening as I underwent my maiden voyage into MMO gaming. To say I merely played this game during its golden age, or even that I played it a lot, would be a gross understatement; on the other hand, it would be equally unfair to say that I tryharded Galaxies, as for reasons that will be discussed in some detail, the experience itself was hardly at all about reaching some sort of endgame. Suffice it to say that the game was formative to the person typing this, molding how I viewed, played, enjoyed, critiqued and reflected upon my favorite hobby.
—House Flylighter—
Early August, 2003. I had just returned home to Maryland from a week-long trip to New Jersey. I had used the trip as an excuse to quit my summer job at Target early, as I’d be returning to college out of state soon thereafter, and I didn’t feel like coming back to town just to spend my last meager weeks of free time jockeying a cash register. I went to spend the day with a childhood friend, whom we’ll call Matt (mostly because that is in fact his name), and the day’s events led us to an evening in front of his computer. He had a game to show me.
I had watched several different friends play Everquest before, but due to hardware limitations, the graphics came down just this side of bad abstract art. It would only be technically accurate to say that it ran at multiple frames per second, framerate being a concept I didn’t even have the vocabulary to explain at the time. In both instances, I quite literally couldn’t tell what was going on. But this new game, Star Wars Galaxies… it was beautiful, and it was silky smooth. I could see what was going on, and I could tell that those other real people in the world with Matt’s character were, in fact, other real people.
After a few minutes spent in Theed, Naboo doing lord remembers what, Matt unceremoniously takes off towards one of two huge orange beacons. He had acquired a pair of missions for cash, and while they weren’t precisely in the same direction, it didn’t seem to matter. It probably took him near four minutes of straight running to get to his first mission, but the economy of time was lost on me in the moment. He arrived at his first mission, which turned out to be just a pile of brush and rock surrounded by these little chubby froglike creatures. Matt whipped out a pistol of some sort, got a bead on one of the frogs, and started blasting. The frog closed the distance within maybe six seconds, and started taking chunks out of him. The next ~20 seconds consisted of Matt’s character shooting at his own feet like an absolute fool. Rinse and repeat for the other four or five frogs around the nest; there was also some ineffectual running around mixed in for good measure. It was ridiculous, and I loved it.
Matt then demolished the nest, taking care of the few froggy stragglers that came out of the nest to defend it, and upon mission completion, a hearty fistful of credits were added directly to his inventory through some arcane means. His inscrutable trio of ‘life bars’ were all low, so he plopped down onto the grass to let them regenerate. After maybe thirty seconds of this, during which his bars slowly edged towards full, Matt said, “oh yeah!” and then dropped a GOD DAMN CAMPSITE right where he was standing. A tent or two, couple of torches, and a campfire. Maybe a stool. He then resumed sitting, except in a grassy campsite instead of the plain ground. I’m not certain it made a lick of difference to how fast his life bars came back. In that moment, I was sold anyway.
Matt’s other mission involved a camp of about five gangsters. Unlike his previous amphibian prey, all five of the gangsters started fighting back, shooting back, as soon as Matt attacked. He might have gotten one or two before the rest of them laid his character out on his back. “What now?” I asked. “We get up and do it again,” he replied simply, and his character got right back up. It turns out that the answer to “what now” isn’t always quite so simple, but this was low level content, so Matt parked his ass on the grass again for another minute or two, then polished off the gang.
Two notable things happened on the way back from his missions. Not far from his own scene of the crime, some other player was fighting a handful of BIG ol’ beasts of some kind or another. I asked Matt if he was gonna help out. “Fuck ‘im,” Matt said, and with comically perfect timing, the poor soul got full-on Worldstarred and ate shit the instant Matt was passing by. The beasts, it turned out, were aggressive, and they immediately turned on Matt, who pressed F5 on his keyboard and watched as his character gained a momentary boost of speed that left the whole affair in his cowardly dust. Sold, again!
Closer to town, there were a handful of small buildings in a little cluster. “Those are probably some people’s houses.” Upon walking up to investigate, that is exactly what they were, signs on the front of each matter-of-factly proclaiming ‘Suchandsuch’s House’. Matt tried two front doors. One was locked, but the other opened automatically as he waltzed up to it. The house was practically barren, some random gear nonsense on the floor in the main room and maybe a table and chair. Seventeen years later, I can’t claim to remember such details. I DO remember Matt explaining that you could decorate houses in SWG while simultaneously trying to steal just about everything there (to no avail). I also remember being sold. Again.
It turns out that this was going to be the only evening I got to hang out with Matt, as his family was going on their own weeks-long family vacation to Myrtle Beach the next day. I told him there was no way I wasn’t getting the game, and the only tidbit of information he gave me was that your character has a first name and a last name, and that he and his two brothers all took the surname Flylighter.
—Guide of Expectations—
The very next day, I went to Best Buy and procured BT’s Emotional Technology and a copy of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. I didn’t make the trip until evening, as I spent the day with a different friend who escaped the lure of SWG entirely, although he was ironically one of the two who showed me Everquest, and I did yank him into World of Warcraft with me in the years to come. So it was that sunset comprised the backdrop for my first listen and installation. I can’t explain exactly why I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I feel like starting that day off early would have been a shame.
The installation was long and arduous, and there was patching involved. Much in keeping with other PC games of the time, the installation screen featured a slideshow of various screenshots from the game showing you the type of things you could get up to, but my mind wasn’t exactly on the presentation. See, when I was watching Matt, there were a lot of moving parts that I didn’t understand. I wanted to step into the game with at least some knowledge of how to play, and the game shipped with this veritable encyclopedia of game information.
And it had character, too – over 170 pages of stuff worth knowing, with semi-regular ‘breaks in transmission’ by a smuggler named Shug Ninx in order to give an in-character primer on the relevant topic. The manual looked great, it had weight, it had flavor, and I ended up reading through almost the entire thing before starting the game. (Naturally, I couldn’t find a PDF of the thing to save my life, at least not of the old version, so I sloppily scanned it in myself) There was a bit of an inherent flaw to this approach, as half a novel’s worth of info ingested all at once is invariably going to go in one ear and out the other, but I ended up using it more as a way to see all the gears in the machine at a glance. I decided mid-read that, same as any other game, I would learn to play as I played, and I’d just take the opportunity to learn what to expect.
So, what can the reader expect? Masturbatory drivel, mostly, because I am ENTIRELY untrained in this sort of thing. Self-deprecation aside, while re-listening to EmoTech wasn’t quite cathartic, I expect this mind palace exercise will be. Finding people to talk to about Galaxies at length is nearly impossible nowadays, but I still have a need to get my thoughts out. There was a time where I would need others to love the game like I do, but I’ve grown past that. There was a time where I would need others to play the game like I have, but I’ve grown past that. I have not, however, grown past the need for others to know the game in some capacity. I guess that is part of the feeble need to be understood that we all possess.
Well, I’m here to talk all about it. I want to explain the game, inside and out – at least for the period of time that I played it. These discussions will be interspersed with contextual first-hand recountings of events as they unfolded, a la The Most Interesting Man in the Galaxy. While these stories won’t be embellished in any intentional way, a lot of them happened in a manner that I suspect make my character sound like a hero. The thing is, any apparent storybook heroism is really owing to the systems that comprised the game’s world, a byproduct of necessary social interactions. I expect any other player that was even remotely invested in their character has similarly spectacular tales. It’s what made the game so god-damn mystical. It’s why I obsess about it seventeen years later, even though I don’t play it anymore.
After this memory expedition, I will go experience it again, in some fashion. However, like the recent release of WoW Classic, you only get one second first impression (lol). Therefore, I find it necessary to focus the part of my life that held these most treasured moments first, in order to assign the proper weight to when I once again breathe Nabooian air under the happiest of sad circumstances.
Khylan Flylighter of the Eclipse galaxy was born in the city of Tyrena on planet Corellia, just after midnight on August 9, 2003.
