To celebrate the birthday of the Force, we went for broke with the whole multiple cover scenario. What would happen if we launched 30 separate covers (what other number could we do?) each devoted to a character from the six movies? It was quite an undertaking, just ask our exhausted art director Ian Stevens who took on the personality traits of a wookiee by press week. Lucasfilm emptied their entire picture archive to locate the perfect TIE fighter pilot shot or the ideal Jabba, while the office broke down into violent factions over which particular heroes or villains or Ewoks would land their own special cover.

And now, finally, it is has all come to fruition, and you get to chose from 30 Empire covers, subdivided because we are true geeks at heart into special collector sets. Thus you could amass your own collection of 'Troopers' or 'classic heroes' or 'droids' or 'bounty hunters' each helpfully colour coded. The Sith come in red, like Man. Utd.

I'm also fibbing because we haven't actually done 30 covers. We've done 32. What madness is this? Have we got our dates all mucked up? Are we plain stupid? Could we simply not leave out Salacious Crumb? (sadly, we could). No the reason is that we have also created two special edition covers, one (a classic shot of the four original heroes from 1977) specially for our lovely subscribers, the other a cover so rare only ten are in existence and could be anywhere in the country. Find this 'golden ticket' style edition of Empire and you could win a hatful of Lucasfilm goodies as well as the respect of your peers. Who, you might ask, adorns its cover? Why JarJar of course… See what we did there?

Mulling over how we could celebrate 30 great years of our favourite science fiction saga inside the magazine, we were troubled. What was there left to say? Hadn't we covered the universe George built from every possible angle? In the end, it was those covers that guided us - to genuinely work out who the best characters were and why. For each of our top 30, a writer was assigned to consider their merits, their history, and their damn longevity. To say something unique about them. Or at least try. From the Gamorrean Guards to Mace Windu to Mr. Han Solo, you can read and ponder those character that have touched our lives over the last three decades.

What's more we have unearthed a never before seen interview with George Lucas done prior to going into production on A New Hope (then known as The Star Wars). It's amazing just how ambitious he was even then. Plus, there's a fantastic array of pictures from that fateful 1976 shoot, and we've tracked down a bunch of ladies who like to dress up as slave-girl Leia. Same old same old? I think not.

So, there you have it, 30 covers for 30 years, sniffle...

Mark Dinning
Editor, Empire
mark.dinning@emap.com