Sergio Salvador

Our Names in the Digital Dust: Forging a Life at the Edge of the Star Wars Galaxy

It feels like a lifetime ago – maybe not the full three decades my memory sometimes fondly stretches it to, but certainly an aeon in the rapidly shifting landscape of online worlds. The early 2000s were a time of immense promise and excitement. This was a period when the prospect of living in a galaxy far, far away was not merely a marketing gimmick, but rather a tangible and intoxicating possibility for the first time. For those of us who immersed ourselves in Sony Online Entertainment's Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, which first appeared on our CRT monitors in the summer of 2003, it felt more like a second life, embedded in the digital stardust of planets we had only imagined.