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Right now, certain times seem not so long ago and certain galaxies not all that far, far away. The two-pronged assault of Star Wars Battlefront and The Force Awakens means that, willingly or not, we're all reliving memories of George Lucas' space saga: what it meant to us when we first experienced it, what it means to us now and what it might mean moving forward if Disney pursue their rather Imperial-sounding aim of putting out a new Star Wars movie every year until our planet goes the way of Alderaan.Of course, this is a universe that has always been aggressively expanding in one way or another, through avalanches of merchandising both covetable and tacky, plus novels, comics and other ancillary spin-offs. Games have emphatically played their part, with dozens of beloved titles that have either simulated iconic moments from the films - with DICE's Battlefront resetting that particular bar extraordinarily high - or grafted their own dense mythologies onto the existing Lucas lore. What is weird, though, is that one of the games I most associate with Star Wars has no real connection to the franchise at all. If there's a bright centre to the officially licensed universe, Shufflepuck Cafe would probably be on the planet that it's farthest from. But to me, it's as evocative of Mos Eisley as a mint-condition Greedo action figure or poor Ponda Baba's severed arm.
If there were any lawyers hovering over this particular intergalactic boozer, original developers Broderbund*could point to various key differences between the Shufflepuck Cafe and Tattooine's most notorious space-jazz hangout. Droids are allowed, for one thing, and while the rest of the patrons are a motley, often mottled bunch of gamblers, princesses and alien rogues, there is no exact correlation (Corellian or otherwise) with existing Star Wars characters.
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