I often get questions about The Essential Guide to Episode I, a book that was announced in the press but never released. Here's an overview of what it would have been, and you might be surprised by how much of it you've already read!

Written in '99-00, The Essential Guide to Episode I was going to be a mix-and-match update that drew from the format of the previous Essential Guides, but with content that focused exclusively on The Phantom Menace.

Looking back, you can see how this would have been a clunky concept if it had been adopted as the new standard. (Sure, you could have done Episodes II and III in this way, but what about the New Jedi Order, or the Clone Wars, or KOTOR?) In light of this, it was announced in late '00 that the book would be repurposed as The Ultimate Guide to Episode I, and would be co-authored with Haden Blackman. Haden and I expanded the existing material with new sections and material for nifty fold-out charts, but by this time it was becoming clear that the market for Episode I tie-ins was overfished.

But Star Wars lore has a way of finding its way out to the public. LFL had already read and approved the Essential/Ultimate manuscript, and incorporated some of the material into its Holocron where it leaked out into other products. Haden and I also incorporated this pre-approved material into other, later releases.

The Essential Guide to Episode I had five subsections: Characters, Vehicles & Vessels, Weapons & Equipment, Planets & Moons, and Aliens & Creatures.

CHARACTERS
All the characters from TPM were featured here, and almost all of them got their full due a couple years later in the New Essential Guide to Characters.
--- This was the first mention of Mace Windu's Vaapad fighting style, as well as the two-bladed Jar'Kai style (named after a trophy your player can accrue in the computer game X-Wing Alliance).
--- This was also the first mention of Chancellor Valorum battling the "Flail terrorist group," a reference that later became a Wizards of the Coast adventure seed.
--- I conceived of Saesee Tiin as a starfighter ace who flew a fast ship, the Sharp Spiral. Haden picked up this info and ran with it, even incorporating the Sharp Spiral into the video game Jedi Starfighter, which pleased me to no end.
--- Haden added a bio for Raith Sienar during our "Ultimate Guide" reworkings, which I later appropriated for the New Essential Guide to Characters.

VEHICLES & VESSELS
All the starships and tanks from TPM went here, many of which Haden later covered in the New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels.
--- There's a couple neat tidbits here, like the name of Palpatine's cruiser, Perpetuus, which I don't think ever got officialized. (So that means it's not official.)
--- I had kind of a thing going for water here, stating that the Queen's ship was submersible, that the Trade Federation invaded the Gungan underwater cities using OTTs (Ocean Troop Transports), and that the N-1 starfighters could float while moored to docks and take off over the surface of lakes.
--- The name of Darth Maul's speeder, Bloodfin, snuck out from here into another licensed product (though I forget what). I was thrilled when I saw at Celebration III that Bloodfin was the name of the Indianapolis garrison of the 501st.

WEAPONS & EQUIPMENT
Lots of gadgets were covered here, and many later saw print in Haden's New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology.
--- My favorite dude, Captain Panaka, got a shout-out explaining his development of the liquid-cable shooter that enables the Naboo Royal Security Forces to scale buildings. Later, I got to show Panaka field-testing the liquid-cable shooter in the short story The Monster.
--- The following oddity appeared in the backstory for the Gungan electropole: "Coiled in the watery darkness beneath rock piles and coral ridges, the zeelzaddal secretes prodigious quantities of slimy mucus to line its lair. It totters about on the vestigial leg-stumps studding its serpentine body and raises its young inside its mouth. And when it sees a potential meal, it shocks the prey stone-cold dead with 2400 volts of electricity."
--- To accompany the line, "The range of an energy catapult is an amazing 450 meters," I notice that I had written the following footnote: "This is, in fact, the world distance record for a trebuchet catapult." Huh. Who knew?

PLANETS AND MOONS
This section featured extensive profiles of Coruscant, Tatooine, and Naboo, and smaller ones for Malastare, Moonus Mandel, and Makem Te. Much of the material for Coruscant made its way into the Coruscant and the Core Worlds Sourcebook (which I co-authored). Much of the material for Tatooine appeared in WOTC's Secrets of Tatooine (which I didn't). Haden included much of the Naboo backstory into the in-game database for the computer game Galactic Battlegrounds.
--- Makem Te was later expanded in Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds. I loved the art created for this planet, including this piece.
--- "Elsinoré den Tasia" was provided here as the name of the monarch who sponsored the colonization mission that brought humans to Naboo. Haden later incorporated the info into Galactic Battlegrounds, and I put the same info into the New Essential Chronology. But in truth it's a Byzantine, extremely geeky Easter Egg. I had the idea that Queen Tasia could have sponsored many similar colonization missions, many of which went off-course and became "lost colonies." And, given the vaguely old-world European culture of Naboo, it's possible that a little Spanish infuence could crop up in naming conventions, making it possible to refer to Queen Tasia as "Reina Tasia." And if, perhaps, one of these lost colonies later happened to find themselves in Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, they might appreciate the retcon.

DROIDS
All the droids from TPM went here, and pretty much all of them will finally see their due in the upcoming New Essential Guide to Droids, including:
--- PK worker droids, who have a backstory I worked out with Aaron Allston in what seems like a lifetime ago
--- "Boutique models" of the 3PO protocol line, including the TC and the 3PX.

ALIENS & CREATURES
This was my absolute favorite section to work on, with profiles of Neimoidians, Toydarians, Dugs, Quermians/Xexto, Chagrians, Vulptereens, Anx, Troigs, and many, many creatures. The backstories for Toydarians, Dugs, and Troigs subsequently appeared in WOTC's Secrets of Tatooine and Secrets of Naboo. Some elements of Neimoidian culture, such as the garhai and the Spherical Flame, made it into James Luceno's Cloak of Deception. Craig Carey, Jason Fry, and I later expanded the histories of the Quermians/Xexto, Chagrians, and Anx for the "University of Sanbra Guide to Intelligent Life" feature in Star Wars Gamer.
--- I always liked this bit about an animal from the Anx homeworld (which also appeared in the Gamer article): "The Medx homunculi is an unsettling little creature, looking uncannily like a bony human scaled down to thirty centimeters in height. They inhabit the wispy treetops of Gravlex Med and - while not sentient - are quite clever for animals. The striking resemblance between these chittering creatures and the species that rules the Galactic Republic is a private joke among the Anx."
--- A Gungan legend created for the pikobis entry explains how the creature got its long nose.
--- There's some background on the Gungan trickster god Nododo, "who can only appear in physical form as an opee sea killer, a kaadu, a peko peko, or a shaak." This was a bit of extreme referencing, extrapolated from the Lucas Learning children's game Yoda's Challenge where one of the puzzles revolved around the player recovering some sacred statues from a series of catacombs. The statues were in the shape of an opee sea killer, a kaadu, a peko peko, and a shaak, which seemed to fit well into the already-established tenets of Gungan pantheism.
--- Early during the writing of the Essential Guide to Episode I, I came across a George Lucas reference that the Gungans may have kept an army due to a past conflict with "bear-like creatures." Thinking this would be a cool thing to flesh out, I asked Amy Pronovost to come up with some designs. Her creature, the bursa, didn't make it into this product but did appear as a dangerous antagonist in the computer game Galactic Battlegrounds, and as a lavishly-illustrated beastie in the beautiful Wildlife of Star Wars. (Another of Amy's designs for the Essential Guide, the fox-like Amarans, also made it into the Wildlife book.)
--- The entry for the sando aqua monster mentioned that physical evidence of the species was limited to a tooth that had washed up on a beach, which was later carved into a desk. This played up the mythical nature of the creatures (a theme in The Monster) and doubled as a reference to the novel The Truce at Bakura, in which dental-obsessed bad guy Governor Nereus owned a desk made from the tooth of an "extinct sea creature." Nereus' use of the word "extinct" allowed me to tie into the (at the time, popular) notion that Naboo had suffered some terrible cataclysm between the time of the prequels and the Classic Trilogy.

Dan
(writing projects and current releases)