Welcome to 2024, and what better way to kick off the year than to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Lucasfilm.com, launched to compliment the work already being done by StarWars.com to promote the saga (and the road to The Phantom Menace, also 25 years old this year) and also update fans on what was happening in the wider world of Lucasfilm with LucasArts, ILM, Skywalker Sound and much more. The indispensible Wayback Machine took its first snapshot of the site on 7th December 1998, and from that day to today the site has grown and grown into the must-read site it is today.
Back in 1998, it was perhaps the busiest period in the company’s history to date. Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound worked on client productions as varied as Deep Impact and Saving Private Ryan. Our former games division, LucasArts, released titles like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the Nintendo64 and Star Wars: Droid Works for the home computer (the latter a collaboration with Lucasfilm’s educational group). The consumer products and publishing teams (at that time their own full-fledged division) were organizing one of the biggest campaigns ever undertaken in the movie business for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Set to premiere the following spring, Episode I, as it was widely known, was arguably the most anticipated film made up to that time. No doubt, Lucasfilm’s hundreds of employees across every division and team were focused on this space fantasy adventure when Lucasfilm.com made its debut. The necessity to recruit more employees to fuel the company’s growth in this new and exciting era likely necessitated the website’s creation.
Happy 25th Lucasfilm.com, and as always stay tuned as later this year we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Lightsabre.co.uk which arrived on 28th June 1999, starting a decade of news, reviews, interviews and fan fiction.
