Star Wars: The Force Awakens LEGO Game Shows Us What Happened Before The Movie

Episode VII left fans with many unanswered questions. How did Lor San Tekka get part of Luke’s map? What were Han and Chewie doing alone on a ship full of deadly Rathtar? The answers to these and other burning questions arrive next month in LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Like previous games in the series, LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens will give players a chance to play through blocky, family-friendly versions of the events of the movie. But as the “New Adventures” trailer demonstrates, the game is also going beyond the film through a series of special levels designed specifically to flesh out events that were glossed over on the big screen.

For example, the movie opens with the dashing Poe Dameron arriving on Jakku to retrieve a map to Luke Skywalker from Max von Sydow’s Lor San Tekka. In LEGO Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, players will play as Lor San Tekka as he procures the map. In an interview with Time, lead writer Graham Goring reveals that another side mission sees Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma searching for Lor San Tekka on the planet Ottegan, a trail that eventually leads them to the opening of the film.

We’ll also get to experience hunting and capturing the Rathar with Han and Chewie in a side mission that might explain why the smuggling duo are all alone on a giant ship when we meet them in the film.

What’s amazing about these side missions, aside from the fact that they feature new dialogue recorded by the cast of the movie (Harrison Ford saying “Wookie Cookies” is the best thing ever), is that this is all technically canon material. In the Time interview Goring explains how the new material came about.

So how that happened is, Lucasfilm came to us and said, ‘These are bits of background information you could expand upon and turn into levels.’ They had a very good idea of what people would want to know, like C-3PO’s red arm, or what was Lor San Tekka doing before the start of the film. He appears briefly in it, but you know, other stuff like what happened to the rest of Han’s crew when they hunted the Rathtars.

Mind you the C-3PO red arm question was answered in a Marvel Comics one-shot last month, but much of the side mission content coming in next month’s LEGO game is all-new canon material based on background information given to the game developers by Lucasfilm. It’s a unique opportunity to expand the Star Wars universe for fans in a very strange place.

LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives on consoles, handhelds and PCs on June 29. And for the first time in LEGO Star Wars video game history, we’re going to have to worry about spoilers. Hooray!