Gather ‘round, folks. Take a seat by my campfire. Turn off the lights. (I don’t know why my campfire exists in a room with lights…) Now, prepare to learn the scary lore behind a creepy little droid that briefly appears in the newly released Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. You might think you know the story already because you read the headline, but I assure you, dear reader, there’s more to this terrifying tale of death and cursed metal.
When playing Skywalker Saga, you can encounter a random, silent droid hanging out in Mos Espa on Tattooine. When you spot the droid a small cutscene plays in which you see it holding a valuable Kyber Brick before it poofs away near the entrance of a small building.
If you dare enter and follow that droid, you’ll experience the one and only creepy moment in this game. Inside, you find an abandoned home filled with cobwebs. The droid bolts away when you enter, seeming to vanish into thin air as creepy music plays. If you’re brave enough to push further into the home in pursuit of the droid, you’ll be treated to a short cutscene of it staring at you with a tilted head as ominous music builds and the camera zooms into its blank, emotionless face. Then it runs off into a nearby room and vanishes, seemingly for good this time.
So uh…what the hell was that all about? Well, this isn’t a random droid. Instead, this is a strange and haunting Easter egg referencing a disturbing droid named Nobot. Nobot is a figure of Mos Espa folklore, and since the eerie droid doesn’t tell its own story, for that, we must rely on a Mos Espa resident steeped in the town’s history and legends.
According to Jira, a local fruit vendor in Mos Espa, Nobot arrived in the city years ago. When Nobot first showed up, it was covered in blaster marks and dried blood. Nobot now wanders the town aimlessly and endlessly. From time to time its communication module, which is broken, will play what sounds like a young woman pleading for her life before being murdered. According to Jira, this woman was pregnant and Nobot witnessed her death. Or, depending on who you ask, Nobot actually killed the woman and left her body to rot beneath the two suns.
Because of its missing serial number and due to it being so old, nobody really seems to know if it killed anyone, where it came from, or why it still operates. Even weirder, there are stories of this droid being taken out into the desert and left to die, only for it to find its way back to Mos Espa every single time. Some even tried to destroy the ghostly droid, but often their weapons would fail or other mishaps would occur, sparing the bot and injuring the aggressor in the process.
Nobot briefly appears in Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. However, as with most background characters in Star Wars films, Nobot is never given a name during the movie. Instead, all of this lore came afterward. As explained on Wookieepedia, the story for Nobot was written by Shaun Flaherty as part of an ongoing series of fan-created stories that were treated as real parts of the then canon pre-Legends Extended Universe. A lot of characters and concepts first created in these stories by fans would end up in other Star Wars media, so this was more than just fan fiction being shared by Lucasfilm.
Today, Nobot and most of the rest of these stories are part of Star Wars Legends, though its appearance in this game does seem to at least indicate that Disney and Lucasfilm might be open to bridging a version of this creepy droid back into the Star Wars canon of today.
Or someone at TT Games snuck a very disturbing bit of Star Wars lore into a game aimed at kids. In any case, it’s pretty cool to see this obscure and unsettling Star Wars tale get a nod in the family-friendly series. It takes all kinds of stories to make a galaxy, after all.
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