"What's happened to Sebulba, what has he been through?": At Star Wars Celebration, I exploded a podracer and talked to Star Wars: Beyond Victory's director about bringing back the prequels legend

"I'm so sorry, I'm wrecking your beautiful podracer," was not a sentence I expected to blurt out at this year's Star Wars Celebration, but that was before I was invited to be one of the very first people to play a taster of Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset.

Now, my regular GamesRadar+ beat is movies and TV – hence my attendance at Star Wars Celebration in Japan this year – but I got myself strapped into the Meta Quest headset and prepared to enter the elite sport of podracing because, well, it just sounded like so much damn fun.

Naturally, though, my podracing prowess didn't quite match my enthusiasm, which is what led to me frantically apologizing to director Jose Perez III when I crashed (and exploded) my vehicle. Well, these things happen.

Back to the track

I was a little surprised when I first entered the game's VR space, mostly because I'd been anticipating a first person podrace where I'd be careening around a track in an experience that would likely have given me worse motion sickness than my flight to Tokyo. Instead, though, the podrace in the demo takes place on a floating holoboard – though, a section of the story does take place in an immersive first person point of view, and I had a good time looking around the racer garage and noting the diligent attention to detail during an exposition scene.

My key impression from the brief demo is how much fun I had. As a prequels kid, I'll always love podracing, and getting to pilot a racer around the track had me grinning. The game board makes a lot of sense, because it allows you to keep an easier eye on your opponents and the track itself than a first person perspective would.

But, I got a little too carried away with using my boosters, which led to me jumping over – and then into – obstacles and crashing my way around the course. It also led to my podracer just outright exploding after I put it through maybe too much stress with my haphazard driving style. Luckily, a second chance was swiftly delivered, and this time I managed to place fourth on the leaderboard – a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Podracing, of course, is most closely associated with the prequels, thanks to Anakin Skywalker and Sebulba's famous showdown in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. But Beyond Victory is set much later on the Star Wars timeline – though it brings back that podracing legend Sebulba – and it revolves around a new, original character, Volo Bolus.

"Reign of the Empire was the perfect era to put this in," Perez tells me after I've finished trying the game. "You've got Volo Bolus who is dealing with a struggling garage; his garage is falling apart. You've got the Empire just bringing down all of the pain across the galaxy, and how does an everyday person get through in that world? I think that's such a fun Star Wars story to tell, when you start with somebody that's at the bottom, and what does it mean to go through this? That was really the main thing, we just wanted that oppression of the Empire to be there, so that you could see the struggles of these everyday people that just happen to be racers and into podracing and own a garage."

And, yes, Sebulba is making his return to Star Wars. So, why bring him back specifically? "It's Sebulba," Perez says, understandably. "How can you do podracing and not go directly to Sebulba? Whenever we're getting to work on any of these experiences, for me, it's like, I'm a huge Star Wars nerd. So any time I get to bring an iconic character in, it's there. And Sebulba is one of those characters that everybody knows, but you don't really know that much about him. You know he's kind of a jerk, maybe. But this is a lot of years later; this is ten years before the Battle of Yavin. What's happened to Sebulba, what has he been through, and how does he relate to Volo? Is he still this bad guy, maybe he's turned over a new leaf? I think it's just really fun to get to explore that story in this era and think about what happened to that character 30 years later."

Now this is podracing

This weekend's Star Wars Celebration is the first time people will get to try the game, too, which has Perez excited – not just because people will be playing the demo, but because there's far more still to come.

"I worked on this thing, so I want people to love it," he says. "I just want people to get a little bit of that nostalgia – having been somebody that loved the prequels, getting to see Sebulba there and have that experience, I want people to feel that and walk away knowing that this is a very, very small part of a project. There's three different modes. We've got our adventure mode, which is our story. We've got our arcade mode, which we just played when you did the podracing thing, and that's also in the story. Then we've got this playset mode that I hope people are champing at the bit to figure out what that actually means. I'm here for the Star Wars fans and I'm hoping I'm giving them something that they like."

When I say I hope no one wrecks their podracer as badly as I did, Perez has an easy answer: "Volo works on pods, it'll be fine. They'll bring it back in, they can fix it up later. It's all good."

Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset is still in development. If you're attending Star Wars Celebration 2025, head to Hall 4, Booth #20-5 to try your own podracing skills.