Lucasfilm’s VR wing, ILMxLAB, partnered with Oculus to launch Vader
Immortal in May, a three-part VR game for the new Quest headset.
space mission. It’s a motion-simulator ride.
The Falcon doesn’t actually go anywhere.
At least, not in our universe. In the Star
Wars universe ... well.
So now, me, in the pilot’s seat, a light flash-
ing: I’m a fan, so I reach for the lever in, I’ll
admit it, a transport of delight. It’s metal, a
little cold, takes some real force to pull back.
It feels perfect. I mean, this is exactly what
it feels like to pilot the Millennium Falcon.
Sure, under the dashboard are leaf
springs and gears, shaking haptics torqued
to within a play-tested centimeter of their
lives to give good feedback. But, like, that’s
not what I mean. What I mean is, how could
pulling that lever feel perfect? How could
it feel like anything? There’s no such thing
as hyperspace. There’s not even any such
thing as a Millennium Falcon. It’s Hollywood
magic, polyurethane, and pixie dust.
There’s a full-size Falcon at the entrance
to the ride, yes—and another in the corre-
sponding park in Florida. They’re props,
basically, dressing for a heightened envi-
ronment, like Hogwarts at Universal Stu-
dios or Gotham City at Warner Bros. World
in Abu Dhabi. Except unlike those, Galaxy’s
Edge doesn’t end here. It is, in native nerdish,
“in canon.” What happens in Galaxy’s Edge
happens in the official Star Wars universe.
Me again: I’ve pulled the lever. Lots of little
computational beeps and tweets. And then,
wooooooooOOOO-shoom! The stars blur
backward into speed lines, and something
like acceleration pushes us all back into our
seats. We have made the jump to hyperspace.
THERE ARE TWO ways to talk about Galaxy’s
Edge. Both are true.
One:
The remote planet of Batuu was once
covered with trees thousands of feet tall.
After a cataclysm petrified them, only their
trunks remained. For mysterious reasons,
one looks like obsidian, giving a town that
grew up around it its name: Black Spire Out-
post. A disreputable trader named Hondo
Ohnaka recently opened a cargo business
there, for which he is recruiting pilots to fly
off-books cargo runs that may also be in support of the
galactic Resistance movement. Stormtroopers from
the First Order have just arrived to hunt for Resistance
sympathizers.
Two (this one is longer):
In 2012, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt
Disney Company for $4 billion. As intellectual property
goes, Star Wars is unusual, in that sanctioned stories exist
inside a rigorously enforced storyworld stretching mil-
lennia into the past and future. Disney, with producer
Kathleen Kennedy heading the new division, would make
new movies and TV shows (as well as comic books, nov-
els, toys, videogames, and so on). In 2014, Disney CEO
Bob Iger added theme parks to the mandate.
At the time, Scott Trowbridge was the head of research
and development at Disney Imagineering, the compa-
ny’s theme-park design arm. A USC film major who’d
spearheaded the immersive Harry Potter attractions
when he ran Universal Creative, Trowbridge proposed
a novel way to capitalize on the newly acquired IP. He
pitched Disney’s “first franchised, story-universe-based
creative development studio.” It would include mer-
chandise, product development, even food service, and
it would build not just rides but entire stories that’d feed
from the parks back into the canonic maw.
Disney brass not only went for it, they put Trowbridge
in charge, telling him to build a new land every bit as
significant as Tomorrowland or Fantasyland. From the
moment anyone stepped across the threshold, they’d
be totally immersed in the Star Wars universe.
That’s trickier than it sounds. “For an immersive
world, it’s not so much a linear narrative arc as an emo-
tional arc,” says Margaret Kerrison, whose title is man-
aging story editor. She’s a fast talker, code-switching
between in-canon discussions of lightsaber technique
and meta-canonic conversations about “Starwarsifica-
tion.” “As a fan, what are the various aspirational things
we want to do in order to have that fulfilling Star Wars
experience? We talked about taking control of the Fal-
con, drinking blue milk, visiting the cantina.”
Not the cantina from the first Star Wars, though. The
Disney imagineers decided to build a whole new world.
Batuu would have to feel like Star Wars even though it
was utterly original. “A lot of us were like, the universe
is a big place. That meant not going back to a planet
where we’ve been before,” Kerrison says. “We wanted
to create a new settlement or city so that all of us could
create an experience from scratch.”
With Lucasfilm’s Story Group onboard, the imagi-
neers set out to compile a several-hundred-page bible
of Galaxy’s Edge background stories. Maintaining it was
Kerrison’s first job with the imagineers, who Starwars-
ADAM ROGERS (@jetjocko) is a senior cor-
respondent who covers science and culture.
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