Recently Marvel announced that it was bringing to an end its current era of Star Wars comics—bringing an end to the increasingly unhinged amount of things it’d managed to stuff in the single year of the Star Wars timeline between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Now, the publisher is beginning to tease what’s next. And what is next? Well, it certainly looks like a mobile game from 2015.
Today the official Star Wars website revealed the latest in a trickling set of teasers for Marvel’s plans for its Star Wars comics after it wraps up the current volumes of Star Wars and Darth Vader later this year. All signs were already pointing to the publisher going into the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi—first with a new Ewoks miniseries set shortly after the Battle of Endor, and now with Star Wars: Battle of Jakku – Insurgency Rising, a four-part miniseries from writer Alex Segura, and artists Leonard Kirk and Stefano Raffaele. Insurgency Rising will see the newly formed New Republic face its first major crisis when a “mysterious” new Imperial goes on the offensive… and all roads will eventually see the Imperial Remnant and the nascent Republic go to battle over the planet of Jakku, long before it becomes Rey’s home.
The thing is, the new Imperials are not quite so “mysterious” once you get a glance at Phil Noto’s covers for the series. Anyone who was around for Lucasfilm’s first big canonical marketing push for new storytelling back in 2015’s “Journey to The Force Awakens” transmedia initiative probably recognizes at least, Governor Adelhard and Purge Trooper Commander Bragh, the villains of the short lived mobile phone game Star Wars: Uprising. One of the first games to be canonized as part of the rebooted Star Wars continuity, Uprising told the story of Adelhard’s Iron Blockade, a complete shutdown of the Anoat Sector—a major trade sector of importance due to Tibanna gas mining on Bespin—in the wake of the Empire’s defeat at Endor, forcing local insurgents to band together to try and resist against the Imperial blockade, unaware that the Empire has begin to fall around them.
It was an interesting idea, and of import given that it was one of Star Wars‘ first prominent sources for post-Return of the Jedi-era stories in the wake of the continuity reboot. But it was also one Star Wars didn’t really capitalize on, and faced a kind of problem it rarely had to deal with in the age of the Expanded Universe: Uprising was not a particularly successful mobile game, and shut down just over a year after it launched in November 2016. Suddenly, access to this narrative—quote unquote “important” to official Star Wars continuity—was impossible outside of third party sources to play offline versions.
Now of course, in the days of the EU, certain sources got harder and harder to get over the years—books and comics could get reprinted, games could still be found on the aftermarket or ported to other platforms. Rarely did something just entirely pop out of existence and remain inaccessible so soon after it first released—even if you look at the closest analogue, the tumultuous tale of the Star Wars MMORPG Galaxies, that game at least ran for eight years. There are probably more people playing it now through private servers than there are Star Wars: Uprising! Issues like those faced by the likes of Star Wars Uprising just weren’t really a thing in the EU’s heyday, but they suddenly mattered in a revised continuity where every single official release was deemed to be canonical.
Just how much Insurgency Rising directly takes from the story of Uprising remains to be seen, outside of key figures like Adelhard and Bragh. But at least some elements of that story will be more accessible again—whether you find the series on shelves or digitally, when it begins October 2.
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