The story of Tarkin's Revenge begins a long time ago...
Picture it: A group of developers got together to form the "SWG Content Development" group on the old SWGEmu forums. Liberator was the SWGEmu official project server, and Basilisk had not yet launched. The year was 2008. The developers? Kinshi, Zetlaux, and a few others.
They then joned the SWGANH forums, and the idea of "SWGCanon" was born. Under this platform, our heroes got as far as a test server, but the ANH project failed to take off as SWGEmu did.
Around this time, Zetlaux got busy with that thing called "real life." Kinshi got all the assets turned over to him, and began actively recruiting for people to join the project. To put this into perspective - this was about 6 months before Basilisk launched. About a month after Basilisk, SWGCanon launched in beta. Our current staff member, Skolten, was a part of the team now as well, as a web developer. And the following year, on May the Fourth, SWGCanon moved from beta to Live.
In the summer of 2013, the current admins, ParadymShift and Liakhara joined the server, and became staff members: Paradym as a community lead and Liakhara as a junior developer.
In those still-early days, a disgruntled troll of a player filed a bogus DMCA takedown order against SWGCanon. While Kinshi was in the process of getting that sorted out, he re-branded the project under the "Tarkin" name.
During those days, SWGEmu servers were still under a 2-hour time-restricted restart schedule. That didn't daunt the players - hard dungeons became a race against time. And when the time restriction was finally lifted, with the caveat that servers using the new engine must open source their code, Tarkin was ahead of the curve, having been open source since the beginning.
The community size ebbed and flowed, and 6 years of active development wore on Kinshi, the sole admin of the Tarkin project.
On April 9, 2015, Kinshi made the announcement that he would be shutting down the Tarkin server for good, on May the Fourth. At the time, they were the oldest SWGEmu server other than Basilisk that had never suffered a wipe.
And in the Fall of 2016, Paradym and Liakhara came together with the intent to revive the old Tarkin, re-branded this time as "Tarkin II." Months of breakneck-pace development ensued. The launch was in July of 2017, two months after Paradym and Liakhara moved in together. Not long after, Publish 9 hit. Most of the staff they had recruited got pulled back into real life. The prospect of a major update seemed so daunting after so long in active development. Offsite hosting was expensive, and dev resources scarce. In early 2018, Tarkin II closed its doors.
But our two admins, ever suckers for punishment, just couldn't bear life without Tarkin in it. In November of 2018, they made the ultimate decision. They agreed to become partners for life, and began developing "Tarkin's Revenge." It was meant to be everything SWGCanon/Tarkin set out to be, but never finished. They invested in hardware, learned more than they ever wanted to know about the back end of server hosting, and dove headfirst into the C++ and Lua that make up our Galaxy.
On March 29, 2019, Tarkin's Revenge launched. In June, the admins got married in a lovely small ceremony by a lake. And the rest? Well, that's history...
Below, you'll find some screenshots and videos from various points in Tarkin's history.
