Star Wars fans are rediscovering that Mace Windu existed before The Phantom Menace, just not as Samuel L. Jackson’s Jedi

For Star Wars lore hunters, this is the kind of continuity tangle that sends people back to old sourcebooks. A resurfaced fan post has put the spotlight on a strange bit of franchise history: a version of the name Mace Windu was in licensed Star Wars material years before Samuel L. Jackson played the Jedi in The Phantom Menace.

A fandom rabbit hole, summed up in one post

The reason this has caught attention is simple. Mace Windu feels inseparable from Jackson’s stern Jedi Master, who first appeared in Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, which opened on May 19, 1999. But the name, or at least a close version of it, was already circulating in Star Wars long before that film reached theaters.

That chain of dates came back into view in August 2026, when a fan account lined them up and marveled at how odd the whole thing was.

X post: “This is WILD! How did I not know of this short story?! A different character named Mace Windu. The name first appeared in the 1973 draft. (Knew this bit) Didnt know it was used in a West End Games sourcebook in 1993. Then this short story was written by Pablo Hidalgo in 1996. https://t.co/uKwMalBtUT”

The short version is that Jackson’s character was not the first place Star Wars used that name family. A Squib droid dealer in old licensed material got there earlier, and the trail goes back even further to George Lucas’s earliest Star Wars writing.

Before the Jedi, there was a Squib in Mos Eisley

The first stop on that trail is Galaxy Guide 7: Mos Eisley, a 96 page reference book written by Martin Wixted and published by West End Games in 1993 for players running tabletop Star Wars adventures. Its whole purpose was to fill in the spaceport with the kind of side characters a game master might need, from bartenders to dock workers to shopkeepers.

One of those background figures was a Squib connected to the used droid trade. The guide describes him as having once worked as a bartender on a salvage cruiser, then getting stranded on Tatooine. From there, he ended up moving secondhand droids for a shop owner named Aguilae. In the guide’s Mos Eisley material, the droid dealer works out of a place called Jawa Traders.

The guide identifies the character with the spelling Mace Windy. He is also described as small, furry, and, like other Squibs across tie in fiction, inclined to haggle at every opportunity. At the time, there was nothing especially loaded about using the name. This was exactly the kind of tiny bit of local color those books existed to provide, and Lucasfilm approved it for publication.

That helps explain why the character sat quietly in print as one more Mos Eisley entry. He was not a secret future star. He was a walk on from a roleplaying supplement, built to make the galaxy feel lived in.

The name itself was much older than either character

What makes the story more interesting is that West End Games did not invent the name from scratch. Lucas had already written it in January 1973 in The Journal of the Whills, an early handwritten treatment that runs about 13 pages and predates the 1977 film by four years.

In that version, the spelling was again Windy rather than Windu. The character was introduced as Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi, and the story was framed as being related by C.J. Thorpe, described as a padawaan learner to the famed Jedi. Almost none of that setup survived into the movies people know.

The name dropped out as Star Wars evolved through later drafts and then through the original trilogy. For roughly two decades, it remained a discarded piece of Star Wars trivia. That made it easy for a licensee to pull from the old pile and attach it to a background alien without setting off alarms.

Lucas began writing The Phantom Menace on November 1, 1994, using an outline he had made in 1976. Somewhere in that process, the abandoned name returned again, this time for a member of the Jedi Council. That meant the franchise briefly had two versions of the same name in circulation: one attached to a future Samuel L. Jackson character, the other to a furry Mos Eisley secondhand droid seller on Tatooine.

The 1996 twist makes the whole thing even stranger

The oddity did not stop with the 1993 guide. In November 1996, Star Wars Adventure Journal issue 11 published a short story called Spare Parts by freelance writer Pablo Hidalgo. The story is set in Mos Eisley and centers on an accounting droid carrying information that a local criminal wants to use as leverage over Jabba the Hutt.

That story is where the Squib gets a fuller name. There, Mace Windu turns out to be short for Macemillian-winduarté. It is a tiny, playful piece of tie in world building, but it became more notable later because of who wrote it.

Hidalgo joined Lucasfilm in January 2000, eight months after The Phantom Menace reached cinemas. In 2014, he became a founding member of the Lucasfilm Story Group alongside Leland Chee and Kiri Hart. That group is tasked with keeping Star Wars continuity aligned and deciding what does and does not count as official.

That is the part fandom tends to love most. A writer who once gave a Mos Eisley Squib the elaborate full name Macemillian-winduarté eventually became one of the people helping oversee Star Wars canon itself. For readers who enjoy tracking how stray details from old licensed books echo across decades, it is a perfect piece of galaxy sized trivia.