What's This Guy's Story?

This article is about the RPG contest. You may be looking for StarWars.com's What's The Story? feature.

"What's This Guy's Story?" was an advertising campaign and related contest from Wizards of the Coast coinciding with the early days of the company's Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Print ads and contest promotions appeared in issues of Star Wars Insider, various comic books^[1] and roleplaying game magazines^[2] in 2000 and 2001.

This should not be confused with the later What's The Story? feature of StarWars.com's Hyperspace, which allowed fans to write the stories of background movie characters.

Details

In 2000, the company released a series of print ads showing a scene from a Star Wars film with a circle around a minor unnamed character, asking "What's this guy's story?"^[3] It was meant to suggest players of the game could create their own characters involved in the Star Wars universe alongside the main characters. The advertisements included scenes from Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, and Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back.

The contest running from October 2000 through February 2001, and promoted with similar print ads as far back as August 2000,^[1] allowed contestants to submit a maximum 500-word story about one of four background characters from The Phantom Menace. The contest ads were a tie-in to the Invasion of Theed Adventure Game (also known as the Episode I Adventure Game). The top five entries from each month were to be published in either Star Wars Gamer or on the Wizards of the Coast website. Winners would also receive a subscription to Star Wars Gamer and "a special prize bag full of fun Star Wars goodies."^[4]

Various announcements about the contest can be found archived online,^[5] but no winning entries were published in Star Wars Gamer or are known to be online. One character used for the contest was the Quarren later named Jisk Barer in an article from Star Wars Insider 131.^[4]^[6]