My first thought upon seeing the trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer at The Game Awards 2025 was "hell yeah, a new podracing game!" My second thought, a few moments later, was "wait, where are all the podracers?" Admittedly, the chaos of the award show made me miss the obvious tease of Sebulba's iconic podracer engine noise, but there's an arguably even more notable detail that eluded me at the time: the Dug has really managed to get the last laugh over Anakin Skywalker.
Just in case there was any doubt, the older, bearded Dug at the end of the trailer is officially Sebulba, as confirmed in a StarWars.com interview. "There's so much love for Sebulba on the team and across the Star Wars community," Matt Webster, co-founder of Galactic Racer dev Fuse Games, says. "There are particular reasons why he finds his way into our trailer as well as a detail in this shot that may lead to even more questions…the answers to which we'll have to leave to another time!"
The trailer for Galactic Racer mostly focuses on a race across Jakku, with the same graveyards of crashed Star Destroyers we see in The Force Awakens. Those shipwrecks hit the planet during the Battle of Jakku, which marks the official defeat of the Empire a year after the events of Return of the Jedi on the Star Wars timeline.
That means we're seeing Sebulba in this trailer some time after Darth Vader's death aboard the second Death Star. After a humiliating defeat from Anakin in the Boonta Eve race in The Phantom Menace, it looks like Sebulba actually managed to outlive his old rival. I mean, Anakin had a whole fall and redemption arc while the Dug was apparently just being a racetrack villain, but hey, survival is often the most important victory of all.
This actually isn't Sebulba's only recent gaming appearance, as he also appears in the mixed reality game Star Wars: Beyond Victory, which launched earlier this year. That game, however, takes place at the height of the Empire's reign, so an evil Anakin was still out there somewhere, breathing ominously. Who knows – maybe he and Sebulba would've had something in common by then.
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