As much as some would like to forget, BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic is not the first massively multiplayer online game to tread the waters of the galaxy far far away. Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies was the first MMO I ever played, and the oddball experience has colored my approach to every MMO after.

My love for the franchise compelled me to start playing SWG in the final stages of the beta, where everything was still broken as hell. Characters who sat in a certain chair in a campground would teleport to the exact middle of the world, where a set of women’s underwear hung in the air and graphic glitches played off the plains like thunder. It was charming as hell.

The game encompassed ten planets, all rendered as wide-open 15 km by 15 km squares of terrain. You could go anywhere, walk up any surface, swim across any body of water. Each planet featured a few movie landmarks — Jabba the Hutt’s palace and the droid’s escape pod on Tatooine, the lakes of Naboo, the Massassi temples on Yavin IV, and the Ewok village on Endor, to name a few.

They were fun to explore, but more like theme parks than anything else. The game had a few World of Warcraft style quests, but most players turned to the mission assignments for money and experience. Computer terminals randomly assigned a mob lair to destroy, which could be Womp Rats on Tatooine, smugglers on Corellia, or Rancors on Dathomir.

I loved the beta and all its flaws so much that I picked up SWG when it was released on June 26, 2003, and started playing the next day (the log-in servers were tellingly broken on the first day). I joined the Damorian Corporation, which constructed the first guild hall on the Chilastra server and later spawned Nova Enterprises.

SWG had six basic professions and 24 advanced ones in a tree-like structure that let players mix and match or specialize as they wanted. You could be a martial artist tailor, a sniper with a little first aid training, or a swordsman with 100% dodge. I was a guitar-carrying gunslinger — pistol specialist bounty hunter all the way, with a little experimentation with the entertainer tree.

The professions were constantly unbalanced. First anyone with a little bit of the Creature Handler tree could have the strongest beasts in the game as a pet, so everyone had Rancors and Gurrecks and other monstrosities. It definitely did not look like Star Wars.

The non-combat professions made the game much more dynamic. Crafting professions produced and sold all the game’s items, which never dropped off mobs. Medic professions healed and buffed in town. Entertainers, who repaired mind damage, formed bands in the city cantinas and played all the instruments from the Mos Eisley bar in A New Hope alongside Twi’lek dancers in skimpy outfits desparate for tips.

I remember watching a fat, hirsute wookiee on Naboo strip dance provocatively and shout, “Ten more for my shirt, ten more for my shirt. Okay here goes my shirt. Need a hundred credits for my pants. Okay here go my pants. Yeah.”

Not to harp on the stripper phenomenon, but once I went with a friend to a Star Wars Galaxies strip club on Tatooine. Twenty players sat around a stage in a sandstone building as the first dancer, a Twi’lek in a wedding dress, came out and did her thing. Then somebody shot her.

No one knew how it happened, and no one could resurrect the dead stripper. For the rest of the evening, other dancers came out and spun and grinded on her dead corpse while she whispered messages to the crowd asking people to revive her. It was fucking ridiculous.

There was something like Second Life to this game. Anyone could wear armor (and craters eventually made armor with over 90 percent resistance), but few people understood how it worked. I opted for stylish threads. Tailors could custom craft garb from a bunch of movie-based patterns and color them by request.

My friend and I went to a tailor on Talus named Ophi who took breaks from sowing our vests to deal with “The Boss,” her memorable euphemism for her infant son. Coming from Counter-Strike, it felt very surreal to interact with a person like this, in a game that started with me shooting butterflies with my laser pistol.

Once my friend and I bought crates full of these Shriner-type hats in yellow and red and had them named “Party Hat.” We passed them out to everyone we grouped with, everyone we saw, and everyone in our guild. It was so satisfying to see some random somebody walking around in one of our party hats.

Players could set up houses and fill them with trophies from quests, which were useless other than for showing off accomplishments. Shop-owners would try to get their stores as close as possible to the galactic nexus of Coronet on Corellia, then fill them with the most prestigious and rarest of loots, including the coveted Tusken Raider gear and strangely rare melon, which faded into obscurity after the first few weeks.

I loved exploring. I loved trekking out into the pathless wild, killing mobs of hostiles with my pistol, checking out player homes and cities to see their product and decoration. First I went on foot, which was tedious as hell, and later when they added mounts and then vehicles I drove up the desert crags of Tatooine with a joy no WoW level 40 can ever understand.

I loved looking for deals and craftsmen in a world where the economy was an art, where all items were crafted by players, and where you could make a killing harvesting variable quality resources and energy. Homes, guild halls, fusion power plants, and the writhing forms of harvesting units dotted the landscape, between clusters of Dantari tribesmen, Dark Force adepts, and Star Wars beasties.

Combat was a blast. Groups allowed 20 people, and most people took advantage of it. You could never tell how skilled anyone was, since no one had levels, so everyone just formed up groups of whoever was around. Experience was so easy to get — I leveled up from nothing to Master Swordsman in 8 hours with some ridiculous gear and buffs — and loot didn’t matter, so nobody really cared about anything but having fun.

Player-versus-player combat was also fun. Most players joined the Rebel Alliance, so I went for the Galactic Empire. I helped defend the glorious imperial bases, saved up faction points for a few Darktrooper followers, and did my best to eliminate the Jedi threat. SWG experimented with the omniprestent hostility between dual factions that is a major feature of WoW, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online, and it was a lot of fun.

The best part of this open world game was that it made you find your own fun. You had to write your own story based on incomplete, incongruous plots. So many aspects were broken, unpolished, and unrefined. Players killed moderators, Jedi were prolific, and fans of the game got anxious.

SWG changed dramatically with the Combat Revamp and the New Game Enhancements, which reduced the 30 skill-trees to nine archetypes, including Jedi. The third and fourth expansion packs, Rage of the Wookiees and Trials of Obi-Wan, added much more generic, linear experiences, with pathed worlds and pre-written quests.

There were in-game protests. People shouted in front of the capital buildings in Theed and Coronet. My friend and I launched a hundred fireworks in the busiest player hub and spammed, “CRASH THE SERVER.” Sony’s response? They shut down servers, banished protesting players into space, and ruined the game anyway.

In other MMO’s I’ve played, I always tried to recapture that sense of exploration, of finding your way off the beaten path, and of creating your own story within the game world. That open milieu, which might be attributed to lazy or mishandled development, defined SWG and made it a fantastic community enterprise.

It was freeform adventure. There weren’t any instances, and there wasn’t any bullshit. You just did what you wanted to do in the galaxy far far away.