This Week in Aurebesh

This week, let’s examine a pair of posters that regular visitors to the Republic’s Carrick Station or any player of Huttball will surely recognize.

The orange banner is another travel poster, this time for an interstellar transport firm called DGB. The meaning of the initials and the numbers along side them are unknown to me. The second poster with its delightfully Eighties contrasting blue and pink color scheme advertises a galactic marketplace.

I can only speculate on the meaning of the large letter Besh: Balmorra? Bespin? Buy n Large? The Mern or M letter, however, is a common element on some other marketplace posters. I’ve speculated on its specific meaning before, and see no reason to stop now. The double Ms could very well stand for the Migrant Merchants Guild, which seized control of Coruscant’s Old Galactic Marketplace.

Both posters use design elements seen elsewhere in the game. The triangular “triforce” symbol and the connected hexagons are often seen on their own in any neon-soaked location from the Huttball arena to Nar Shaddaa’s Promendade.

It seems that even in a galaxy far, far away corporate branding is as inescapable, as it is in our own.

One of my favorite flashpoints is Kaon Under Siege. From its slow build to its crazy mutant-space-zombie apocalyptic climax, it’s an effective and thrilling bit of storytelling. One of Kaon’s most distinctive environments is the abandoned auditorium. Players often race through the theater quickly. pausing only to deal with a pair of rogue security droids patrolling the area. However, passing through an area that would normally be bustling but is currently devoid of life adds to the flashpoint’s mounting sense of unease. Prior to the arrival of the Rakghoul plague, I’m sure it was a lovely place to catch a holovid.

The auditorium’s screen features a large display that, as far as I can tell, appears no where else in the game. It has three sections of scrolling Aurebesh, several inset portraits of aliens and animated graphics of maps and geometric shapes.

The Aurebesh itself is non-specific and draws from SWTOR’s often used pool of mostly random text that can be seen around the galaxy, from the scrolling text that the bottom on the holonet newsfeed in the cut scene that introduces players to the Rakghoul Resurgence event to the Eternal Empire’s Zakuulan language monitors.

This translation includes all four repeating lines that are shared in the two side boxes as well as the crawl atop the screen. To add some visual variety to the repeating letters, the Aurebesh at the top of the graphic is mirrored, and the text in the side boxes is upside down. This technique is common both in SWTOR and in the Aurebesh seen in the Star Wars prequels.

There are items of interest in the content of the Aurebesh. First is the word “slothfurnace” which seems to be a reference to a real company that makes replica Star Wars props such as lightsabers and blasters. I suspect this secret bit of buzz marketing slipped by without official notice. Finally there is a long series of numbers in the first line of the side boxes. I can’t say for sure, but these digits look like a pair of dates to me: June 28, 1976 and November 16, 1977. A couple of birthdays perhaps?

If you’ve ever dropped a token in a cantina jukebox or have one as a stronghold decoration, you may have noticed that the monitor on the machine will light up with text when activated.

The three different screens that flash through display Aurebesh that, when translated, is revealed to be, not surprisingly, lists of songs, the machine’s playlist as it were.

Looking at the names of the songs, there are several items of interest. First, it’s amusing how easy it is to turn a line from the Star Wars movies into a convincing song title. “You know it to be true.” Is that a threat from a Dark Lord of the Sith, or a refrain from a love song? Context matters!

In addition, one of the songs in the listings is not just a KOTOR reference but an actual use of the term “KOTOR.” Whether this leaves your fourth wall shattered is up to you, but I’d say it barely counts as a crack.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that many of the songs displayed on the jukebox are actual songs from the game’s soundtrack. They can be selected using the cantina jukeboxes and can be heard on the stronghold decoration versions as well.

On a related note, it’s not well known, but SWTOR’s wonderful soundtrack is available for download for free from swtor.com. My favorites are the tracks for Tython and Balmorra. It’s worth a listen!

This week, let’s look at two Alert posters that can be found on Dromund Kaas, a world that really knows how to make visitors feel welcome.

This notice is posted on many walls throughout the capital. At first glance it seems to be a pretty standard “If you see something, say something” poster not unlike one that might be seen in a major city or airport in this day and age, but the addition of the macrobinoculars makes it clear that not only do the Sith want you to keep an eye out for trouble, they actively want you to be spying on your neighbors, even at a great distance.

I’ve only seen this poster in one dark corner of Dromund Kaas and have tweaked the contrast to make it more readable. Again, this poster looks to be a typical “No trespassing” sign until you get to the last line. You’ve got to admire the efficiency of the Sith Empire. They won’t waste time threatening scofflaws with arrest, prosecution or imprisonment; instead they’ll just let you know that if you cross that line, they’ll kill you. No muss, no fuss. Somewhat ironically, this fenced off area can only be accessed by the Jedi Knight character during the climatic chapter of their class story.

Good day. Our topic today continues last week’s theme of Aurebesh signage inspired by movies. This one found on Corellia recalls the great tragedy of haunted Elsinore, with its murderous uncle, lost daughter, a mouse trapped in a bottle and a flying dog named “Hosehead.” I refer, of course, to the cinematic classic of the Great White North, Strange Brew.

The saga of Bob and Doug McKenzie has inspired a host of stories through the ages including Star Wars. George Lucas has often remarked that in his original vision, Obi-wan and Anakin’s final duel would take place on ice skates and involve hockey stick-shaped lightsabers and Force empowered cross-checking. Sadly, ILM had not yet mastered the technology of rendering digital ice so the entire sequence had to be scrapped and restaged with lava and higher ground. In a final twist of fate, a Betamax copy of Strange Brew fell through a rupture in the time-space continuum and emerged in Elizabethan England where it was discovered by a little known playwright and plagiarist, William Shakespeare. A mere hired player, Shakespeare only owned a VHS machine, so he was forced to crack open the cassette and studied the film frame by frame in order to reconstruct the story for a play he called Hamlet, a Danish word meaning “hoser.” Without access to the original dialogue, several historical inaccuracies made their way into Shakespeare’s “adaptation.” Had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thought to save a jelly donut, for example, the young prince surely would’ve survived his ordeal. For this reason, Hamlet is typically dismissed by scholars as something between “Legends” and fan-fiction.

This week, let’s look at a couple posters, which can be seen throughout the galaxy. They advertise exciting getaways for vacations and new starts for the restless citizens of the Republic and Empire.

To me, this poster recalls the movie Bladerunner and its ambient and inescapable advertisements to escape to the off-world colonies. However, like the company towns of the old American west, the requirement of little to no credit, is almost certainly a double-edged sword.

The floating metropolis and the orange and red tones of the second poster are meant to evoke another movie, which is, of course, The Empire Strikes Back. Wookieepedia tells me that Bespin’s most famous port of call had not yet been constructed in the time of SWTOR, so I guess we should say this is a cloud city, not the Cloud City.

These two particular posters can be found in a ruined cantina on post-apocalyptic Ziost. I can only hope that a few lucky people were convinced to take leave of Ziost before that world met its tragic, final fate.