Although the site you are reading is 100% Fantha Tracks through and through, it does have its roots in another site that launched 20 years ago today. Lightsabre.co.uk – previously known as Wirezone – arrived on 28th June 1999 in the time period between the US and UK releases of The Phantom Menace at a time where the internet was flooded with Star Wars sites.
From small beginnings, Lightsabre grew from a site that began with 1200 page views per month to ten years later hitting almost 150,000 per month. During that time myself and my co-owner Louis Turfrey developed the site from what was initially a home for our fan fiction and RPG campaign material (Fantha Tracks own Brian Cameron used to use the RPG material in RPG sessions back in the early 2000s when he was at university) into a news and interviews site, where we caught up with over 140 guests (interviews which we run here on Fantha Tracks every Sunday afternoon), speaking to Star Wars superstars such as Irvin Kershner, Rick McCallum, Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels as well as launching our podcast Setnin Radio in 2005 and exhibiting at Celebration Europe in 2007.
Lightsabre ended in 2009, when I decided to change direction and joined the writing staff at Jedi News in 2010 for a seven year stint, and in 2017 was part of the team that launched Fantha Tracks. Despite all these moves, Lightsabre and the work that the team of myself, Louis, our RPG editor Jonathan Hicks, Paul Squire and Jason Brown remains very close to my heart.
In time, Fantha Tracks will have its own Setnin sector area of the site, where all of the fiction written from 1982 to the present day will live, but until then I’m raising a bottle of duarga and eating a plate of cockons in honour of Lightsabre.co.uk.
