The Long History of How the Rebels Originally Stole the Death Star Plans

In current Star Wars canon, the plot to steal the Death Star’s technical plans is incredibly straight forward: it’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the tale of Galen Erso’s sacrifice and the ragtag team that swooped down to Scarif and gave their lives to ensure that data fell into Rebel hands. But in the expanded universe, one of Star Wars’ most legendary games set the stage for a much larger, more complicated process.

Dark Forces, released in 1995—and re-released this week with a new remaster across PC and consoles—was one of the first slices of Star Wars gaming, alongside the flight sim X-Wing a couple years prior, to let gamers live out an incredible dream: as Kyle Katarn, be the hero to swipe the Death Star plans from under the Empire’s nose, and set the stage for the events to come in A New Hope. The problem is, in the years since, “steal the Death Star plans!” became just as buzzy a video game fantasy as “play the battle of Hoth!” or “become a Jedi!”—and as the Expanded Universe kept, well, expanding, version after version of the plot to steal the Death Star plans kept getting told, and needed to all interconnect in some logical way.

The result was Operation Skyhook: after learning of the existence of the Death Star while it was still under construction, Alliance leadership tasked a series of raids and intelligence operations designed to acquire information, and ultimately liberate technical data, relating to the battlestation’s superstructure, and any indicators of weakness that could be exploited. Playing out across over a decade of video games, comics, and books—and of course culminating in the events of A New Hope—Skyhook was the scattered story of how the Alliance won its first key victory against the Galactic Empire.