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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Meta’s Muse: How we launched the most successful consumer product this year | Mona Sarantakos by Lenny Rachitsky
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 12:24 PM

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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Muse is the #1 app in the App Store and arguably the fastest-growing AI consumer product of all time. Mona Sarantakos has led product on it since day one. She’s VP of Product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a 10-year Meta veteran with over 20 years of experience as a PM. This is her first podcast interview.

We discuss:

1. How a weekend with OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi turned into Muse

2. Why Muse waited seven months to launch, despite getting started before most of its competitors

3. How Nat Friedman, Alex Wang, and Mark Zuckerberg each left their imprint on the product

4. How the team uses “agent swarms” to surface user insights at scale

5. The use case nobody on the team predicted

6. How Jolly, a placeholder avatar, became an icon

7. The two levers that actually move activation for an AI agent

8. The #1 thing Mona looks for in PMs today

—

Brought to you by:

WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more

DX—Engineering intelligence for the AI era

—

Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/metas-muse-how-we-launched-the-most

—

Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0

—

Highlights: https://lennyspodcast.com/mostreplayedmoments

—

Where to find Mona Sarantakos:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-sarantakos-a85873

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@monachaudhuri

—

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Teaser

(01:24) Introduction and Mona’s background

(02:14) A weekend with an early agentic AI

(09:08) The seven-month launch timeline

(14:07) "The claw is the law"

(15:53) Nat, Alex Wang, Zuckerberg, and how leadership shaped Muse

(23:37) The Jolly origin story

(29:53) Priority use cases and the shopping surprise

(35:03) Agentic commerce and how shopping works

(38:03) Agent swarms and synthetic data

(42:48) Evals: structure, hierarchy, and who writes them

(46:37) Activation and word of mouth

(51:09) The design bets that defined Muse

(57:04) Prototyping culture and the two Muses that fought

(01:01:54) How the PM role has changed

(01:09:05) Muse's first prototype

(01:10:37) The board meeting prototype that almost didn’t work

(01:12:00) Team size, closeness, and culture

(01:20:55) What comes next: ambient agents and financial betterment

—

Referenced:

• Muse: https://muse.ai

• Introducing Muse Spark: MSL’s First Model, Purpose-Built to Prioritize People: https://about.fb.com/news/2026/04/introducing-muse-spark-meta-superintelligence-labs

• Nat Friedman’s website: https://nat.org

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai

• From skeptic to true believer: How OpenClaw changed my life | Claire Vo: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-openclaw-changed-my-life-claire-vo

• Personal Superintelligence: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence

• The Future is for Everyone: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone

• Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot

• How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-we-built-grok-bot-in-a-month

• Claude Duet: https://claude.com/product/claude-duet

• Dots: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots

• Alex Wang on X: https://x.com/alexandr_wang

• Alex Cornell’s website: https://www.alexcornell.com

• How I AI: How Meta designed Muse with Alex Cornell: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-i-ai-how-meta-designed-muse-with

• Christine Awad on X: https://x.com/christinesed

• Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/linears-secret-to-building-beloved-b2b-products-nan-yu

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.



To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com



Download audio: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/api.substack.com/feed/podcast/224231309/2cdd86d5061669c9821d9a2157b09063.mp3
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My game is out! Why am I happy and sad? This was a VERY important experiment on the future of Game Dev. by Code Monkey
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 12:23 PM

Game Dev Report
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Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

This is a super lengthy newsletter, lots of important topics to discuss, I hope you're enjoying reading these!

It's finally GTA6 week! Wohoo! Can you believe it? GTA5 came out 13 YEARS ago! It's been a while since I played a AAA game (I think last one was Assassin's Creed: Shadows?) so I'm planning to really enjoy this one!

Also Unite Tokyo is happening this week! I've seen what is on the roadmap behind closed doors and it is GOOD, don't miss it!

It's a shame this year they didn't do a Unite in Europe, it's always my favorite time of the year to meet up with all of you in person, hopefully next year!

  • Game Dev: My game is out! Why am I happy and sad?

  • Game Dev: One of the BEST games this year used AI to fix a bug, got review bombed

  • Gaming: PS5 hits 100 MILLION! Can GTA 6 give the whole industry a boost?

MASSIVE Guide on publishing Steam games for success!

Game Dev

My game is out! Why am I happy and sad?

I’ve just published my 10th Steam game, Cards: Tidy Up! It combines sorting a giant mess of cards with upgrades and automation. It was a fun project to make, I enjoyed the development and I really enjoy playing it, if you're a fan of the Tidy Up genre I think you might like it. I made a video on this topic. And I made the game as the example project for my How to Publish Your Game on Steam course.

But I also used this game for a very important experiment: could I use AI to help make a genuinely enjoyable game? Are the tools good enough to make something good rather than just AI slop or a quick tech demo?

Based on the quality of the final game I would say the result of my experiment is "yes." The result is roughly 40,000 lines of code, and I didn’t write a single one, instead, I worked as the game designer and creative director: playing, deciding what needed changing, explaining those changes, and testing again.

And that part is REALLY important. The models are really good right now but they are NOT "game-makers," the way to use this tech is to make AI-assisted games. The AI does not make the game by itself, YOU as the human developer act as the guide, the AI is simply the virtual senior engineer implementing what you tell it to implement. It also does NOT work like "type one prompt and receive a finished game." If you do that you just get slop. Between development and marketing, I estimate I used 200–300 prompts. The mechanics, progression, abilities, tutorial, and polish came from constantly iterating. The first prototype looked nothing like the finished game!

The project took about a month alongside making the course. My estimate is roughly two weeks of focused game-development work, compared with perhaps 15–20 weeks if I were to build it manually. That is an enormous difference! Even if you dislike AI it's hard to ignore a tool that makes you 10x more efficient!

I built it using Codex (ChatGPT) with 6 Astra and 6.1 Sol connected through the Unity CLI. In terms of cost, I'm on the $200mo plan and it was made in 1 month so that would make it a $200 cost to make the game. Although that does not include all the assets. AI is not yet good at 3D model generation so most 3D models are from asset packs that I have bought over the years, the one I used most was Synty Casino along with various UI, VFX, SFX packs.

So throughout this whole experiment I'm of two minds. On one hand, I'm extremely happy because I made something I genuinely enjoy playing, and focusing on the game design side of development was a really fun change of pace.

On the other hand, I really missed programming. I’m called Code Monkey for a reason! I’ve been writing code for almost thirty years, and figuring out how to build things is something I genuinely LOVE. Losing that part is rough, but I can't argue with the productivity benefits.

One of the fears I have is that if I start using AI more and more in my game development work then my skills might atrophy and I might just become dumber, that's a genuine problem that is happening to a lot of people. My strategy for counteracting that is pretty simple. Thankfully earlier this year I started my Game Dev Practice Lab where the whole goal is to complete game dev challenges. So for the future I will be using this AI-assisted workflow to make my games, but in order to keep my skills sharp I will keep doing the weekly challenges on the Lab by hand. That way I hope I can both benefit from the increased efficiency without giving up all my knowledge.

But my biggest takeaway from this experiment is clear: AI is an extremely useful tool nowadays for AI-assisted development. AI handled the implementation, but I still had to decide what was worth building and keep improving it, I had to be the game designer and creative director. So AI is NOT replacing game developers, the future still requires humans in the loop, it will simply be human game dev + AI.

Another reason why I made this experiment was to think about the future of my teaching work. Views on some of my big tutorials have dropped significantly, (Kitchen Chaos down 50% compared to January) and course sales (which are what makes the free teaching financially possible) have also dropped significantly. I spent 10 months making my FREE C# Course, there's no way I could justify spending that amount of time building it nowadays. Sadly there's just not that much demand for learning content.

My channel was started as a way for me to teach game development and specifically programming, so what do I do if suddenly no one wants to learn programming any longer because AI can just do it for them? Honestly, I just don't know, I have no idea what I will do in the future, I just know what I've been doing for the past 8 years can't be done for the next 8. Maybe I’ll focus more on teaching game design, maybe focus more on the publishing/marketing side (like I just did with my Steam course), or maybe I'll try teaching useful AI workflows. Or perhaps I'll simply go back to doing what I was doing for 10 years before before I ever started my YouTube channel, maybe I’ll just spend my time focused on making games full time again.

I have very mixed feelings about this whole journey like I said, and I have no idea what the future will bring both to the industry as a whole and to my job specifically. I'm doing what I recommend all of you do as well: adapt to the new reality and figure out how you can use these tools in your workflow to help you be the best game dev you can possibly be.

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Check out the course HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Pathiral, publisher with lots of useful tools for AI, gameplay and visual effects!

Get the FREE Screen Damage which adds blood splatter and hit blur when your player takes damage, plus pulsing effects at low health. It even includes a customizable health system!

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My Code Monkey Bundle is BACK to celebrate the End of Summer with 80% OFF!

You’ve got 12 of my courses covering C#, Problem Solving, Multiplayer, DOTS and tons more, plus 9 of my Steam games and 1 month of my Game Dev Practice Lab to put those skills into practice!

Grab the whole bundle 80% OFF with coupon SUMMER2026. Get it HERE!

Game Dev

One of the BEST games this year used AI to fix a bug, got review bombed

This week House House disclosed that it used AI during Big Walk’s development, and a wave of negative Steam reviews followed. But the actual use case is what makes this story so frustrating to me.

According to the studio’s explanation, a shadow-rendering problem made the game run significantly slower at sunrise and sunset. They investigated it themselves but couldn't fix it, then consulted a Unity engineer, who ultimately concluded their proposed solution wasn’t possible. Finally, they asked an AI chatbot. After some dead ends, it suggested an approach they extensively modified into a working fix. That particular fix was about 10 lines of code, with no generative AI used elsewhere in development.

And to me it feels like even if you absolutely hate AI, this seems like a perfectly reasonable use of the tool!

They didn’t blindly generate an entire game. They investigated a difficult problem, got a suggestion, adapted it, and fixed the slowdown. The game didn’t suddenly become "AI slop" when players learned how that happened.

Personally, I’m not interested in being on team pro-AI or anti-AI. I just see it as a tool. When used correctly it is good, when used badly it is bad. But for some people they see no nuance in anything, any usage is horrible no matter how small, no matter the purpose.

Thankfully it seems like most people are not that extremist, it seems there are reasonable people who dislike AI but see this is a valid use case. The game got review bombed (losing it's Overwhelmingly Positive status) but then more and more people saw the backlash as completely out of proportion and in turn reviewed the game positively to counteract that.

And in general I've long said how I feel AI is going to take the same route as Game Engines and Asset Flips. 15 years ago you weren't considered a "real developer" if you used a game engine instead of building your own from scratch, then 10 years ago you weren't considered a "real developer" if you bought assets from the asset store. Nowadays those arguments are seen as quite silly by most people, everyone understands how engines and assets are genuinely good things (again when used properly, any tool can make slop) and what really matters is making a GOOD GAME.

For example the game Slotbound has Very Positive reviews while openly disclosing AI-generated assets "I’m not a developer and this slot machine roguelike defense game was built almost entirely with AI". Then recently SLAM TANK also discloses AI assistance, and it was one of the most successful games in the recent next fest.

These examples don't prove that AI is good or bad, it proves that it's just a tool and all players care about is having good games to play, regardless of what tools you use to make them.

I hope that this story might be a sort of turning point. Hopefully most people see this backlash as genuinely insane and start to realize that there's nuance in this topic.

Weekly Game Mechanic Challenges to help you learn by DOING!

Gaming

PS5 hits 100 MILLION! Can GTA 6 give the whole industry a boost?

GTA 6 is finally almost here! Rockstar has the launch scheduled for November 19, and Sony has just confirmed that PS5 passed 100 million consoles shipped. Those are some pretty big milestones! But the interesting question is whether this becomes more than just an enormous success for Rockstar.

The past few years have felt rough for the people making games, and GDC’s latest survey still shows widespread layoffs, part of the reason for that is growth has been stagnant.

That is why the potential GTA 6 effect is so interesting. The release is expected to help drive current-generation console adoption. For someone still happily playing on an older machine, perhaps THIS is finally the game that convinces them to upgrade.

And of course once someone owns that machine, perhaps they start exploring everything else available. They finish GTA, try another big release, discover an interesting indie game, and become a more active customer. That is the kind of boost I would love to see: more opportunities for everyone, not just one company making billions!

Of course, that is a possibility, not a guarantee. Someone might buy a console almost exclusively for GTA. And one massive hit won’t magically fix every studio’s finances or make layoffs disappear. Still, I really hope this becomes a positive turning point. Hopefully bringing more people into gaming and giving them reasons to keep exploring, I think that would be awesome.

I am really looking forward to the game, it's been ages since I played a GTA game. I still remember as a kid when I was WAY too young to be playing, I think I was 9 when I played the first one in school? Fun times!

Download Project Files and Complete the Challenges, can you do it?

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey


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I brought back WordPad on Windows 11, and it beats the AI-stuffed Notepad Microsoft wants you to use instead by Abhijith M B
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 7:13 AM

Windows Latest
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For all us folks of culture, WordPad was the proper middle ground between the basic Notepad text editor and the full-fledged Word. Unfortunately, it was mercilessly removed from Windows 11 version 24H2. But it’s not like the OS can’t run decades-old programs! So, I copied WordPad from a fresh Windows 10 installation and pasted it to my Windows 11 26H2 PC. It can format text, add pictures, and open RTF files, all without sign-in prompts or AI features.

A few days back, I saw someone on X complain about the new Notepad. I couldn’t comprehend the hate, because the Copilot branding is gone, the Writing Tools can be switched off, and formatting or tables isn’t hurting anyone. But most replies were in favour of the post, with people wishing for an old app that just works. Well, nothing fits that description better than WordPad.

WordPad running on a Windows 11 26H2 PC
WordPad running on a Windows 11 26H2 PC. Credit: Windows Latest

Microsoft removed WordPad in Windows 11 24H2, and it’s still missing in 26H2

Microsoft deprecated WordPad in September 2023, saying it was “no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.” In March 2024, the company confirmed WordPad would be gone from all editions of Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025, and they kept their promise when the 2024 update rolled out later that year.

wordpad core app files in windows 11 23h2
WordPad core app files in Windows 11 23H2. Credit: Windows Latest

There were specifically three files that got removed, as Microsoft’s developer documentation mentions: wordpad.exe, wordpadfilter.dll, and write.exe. It also confirmed that Windows no longer has a built-in RTF reader. Microsoft recommends you to Word for rich-text documents like .rtf and .doc, and Notepad for .txt files. Although the software giant didn’t give a reason for killing WordPad, they probably wanted one less app to update in Windows 11.

Notepad, WordPad and Word running side by side in a Windows 11 PC
Notepad, WordPad and Word running side by side on a Windows 11 PC. Credit: Windows Latest

I recently updated my father’s PC to Windows 11 26H2, and he asked me if it had WordPad. When I told him Microsoft had deprecated it, he just sighed and said it was enough for him. Yes, he has a point. A letter or a list doesn’t need Word. He just wanted a digital version of his notepad (the physical one, that is).

WordPad does proper rich text, while Notepad’s formatting is Markdown

WordPad sat gracefully in between Notepad and Word for almost three decades. Its Office-style ribbon came with Windows 7, and the Home tab has fonts and sizes, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript and superscript, text highlighting and font colors, plus alignment, indentation, line spacing and bulleted lists.

WordPad was the perfect middle ground between Notepad and Word
WordPad was the perfect middle ground between Notepad and Word. Credit: Windows Latest

The Insert group lets you add pictures, date and time, and objects from other apps. It even has a ruler that lets you drag paragraph margins. This might come as a surprise for a few, since WordPad documents save as RTF by default, but it can also save .docx, .odt, and plain text files.

But where I see people misunderstand WordPress is with Tables. It has no option to insert or edit a table, and Microsoft’s old Knowledge Base article Q135079 lists tables, borders, shading and columns among the Word formatting that disappears in WordPad, calling it “a design limitation of WordPad.”

Notepad has tables but WordPad doesn't
Notepad has tables, but WordPad doesn’t. Credit: Windows Latest

Funnily enough, what was supposed to be the basic text editor, Notepad, got a Create a table option for everyone in January 2026. But those tables, along with bold, italics, headings, and lists, are stored as Markdown in a plain-text file. So, Notepad is great for quick notes, while a letter with your choice of font, color, and a photo is still WordPad territory.

Notepad’s AI Writing Tools are optional, but WordPad doesn’t have any

Heavy backlash has forced Microsoft to drop the Copilot branding in Notepad, but the AI is still there under a new name, Writing Tools. Write generates text from a prompt, Rewrite changes the tone or length of what you’ve written, and Summarize shortens it. Microsoft’s support page says these features are powered by GPT, which also means that you have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use them.

Toggles in Notepad lets you remove Formatting, Spell check, Autocorrect, and Writing tools
Toggles in Notepad lets you remove Formatting, Spell check, Autocorrect, and Writing tools. Credit: Windows Latest

Fortunately, you can turn the Writing Tools off from Notepad’s Settings under Advanced features, and disabling formatting gives you back the barebones Notepad. Personally, I don’t mind these new features, and I sometimes use them.

But WordPad has no account prompt or AI button, and it won’t get any updates. Ironically, Microsoft did test Office banner ads inside WordPad in a January 2020 Windows 10 Insider build, but they were hidden behind a feature flag, and regular users didn’t see them.

WordPad can’t replace Microsoft Word, and here’s what it can’t do

Feature WordPad Microsoft Word
Fonts, colors, bold and italics Yes Yes
Pictures and bulleted lists Yes Yes
Tables No Yes
Spell check and word count No Yes
Track changes and comments No Yes
Headers, footers and footnotes No Yes
Mail merge and citations No Yes
AI writing tools No Yes (Copilot)
Cloud collaboration No Yes

 

For me, a missing spell check is the one that hurts the most, especially when the new Notepad has it. Also, if you open a Word document with headers, footers or comments and save it in WordPad, Microsoft’s old WordPad help page warned that you’d lose that content.

So, for a resume or a document with tracked changes, Word (or the free Word for the web) is still the right tool. For letters, notes, and simple memos, WordPad does the job.

How to restore WordPad on Windows 11 26H2 using files from Windows 10

I recently installed a fresh copy of Windows 10, and as expected, WordPad was there in C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories.

WordPad files in a Windows 10 PC
WordPad files in a Windows 10 PC. Credit: Windows Latest

On my Windows 11 26H2 PC, the folder still exists, but only the en-US folder is left inside. I copied WordPad’s files without modifying them and uploaded the archive to Windows Latest, so you don’t need an older PC.

Windows 11 26H2 doesn't have WordPad core files
Windows 11 26H2 doesn’t have WordPad core files. Credit: Windows Latest

Copy WordPad’s files to the Accessories folder

The archive has wordpad.exe, WordpadFilter.dll and an en-US folder with wordpad.exe.mui, which holds WordPad’s English text.

  1. Download the WordPad archive and extract it.
  2. Open File Explorer and go to C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories. 
  3. Copy wordpad.exe, WordpadFilter.dll and the en-US folder into it, and approve the administrator prompt.

    Windows 11 26H2 with WordPad files pasted
    Windows 11 26H2 with WordPad files pasted. Credit: Windows Latest
  4. Double-click wordpad.exe to open WordPad.

If your Windows display language isn’t English (US), you’ll need the matching language folder from a PC that uses it. WordPad also won’t appear in the Start menu search this way, so pin it to the taskbar, and set it as the default app for .rtf files from Open with > Choose another app.

Keep in mind that WordPad doesn’t get security fixes anymore, so avoid opening RTF or DOCX files from people you don’t trust.

WordPad is a reminder of when Windows apps did one job well

WordPad arrived with Windows 95 in August 1995, replacing Microsoft Write, and the Windows 95 Reviewer’s Guide admitted that “it is not a full-blown word processor.” It didn’t need to be. It came free with every copy of Windows, and small tools like it are a big part of why people still remember Windows XP and 7 so fondly.

Credit where it’s due, Windows 11 still runs a Windows 10 copy of a 1995-era app without complaint, which is more than macOS can say for 32-bit apps after Catalina dropped support for them in 2019.

My father doesn’t need Copilot or a Microsoft 365 subscription to write a letter. He needs WordPad, and it takes two minutes to bring it back.

The post I brought back WordPad on Windows 11, and it beats the AI-stuffed Notepad Microsoft wants you to use instead appeared first on Windows Latest

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Database Performance: Up to 11× Faster Workloads with Connection Pooling by David (dotNetDave) McCarter
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 7:12 AM

dotNetTips.com
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Connection pooling significantly enhances database operation efficiency by reusing existing connections, reducing setup time. In SQLite benchmarks, pooling achieved up to an 11× speedup under heavy concurrency. While beneficial for applications with frequent connections, pooling should be enabled by default, with exceptions for specific cases requiring immediate connection release.
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#588 - 15th November 2026 by Howard van Rooijen
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 7:12 AM

azureweekly.info
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.NET 11 was released this week, with Day 1 support on Azure Functions. This milestone also means .NET 8 & 9 go out of support. The Developer Tools section is particularly busy this week with related updates.

Other highlights include:

And a reminder that Microsoft Ignite runs from 17th to 20th November. The Learning and Certifications section has session guides for PostgreSQL, SQL, Arc, Defender, Sentinel and more.

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50th Anniversary of 'Star Wars' Celebrated with iMax 70mm Re-Release, Special Events, New Movie by EditorDavid
Sunday November 15th, 2026 at 12:16 AM

Slashdot
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"Lucasfilm and Disney have restored the original Star Wars (1977) and will release the film in multiple formats, including Imax 70mm [starting February 19], as part of the franchise's 50th anniversary celebrations," reports Deadline. The original film will also be displayed in its original 16:9 format on the center of Cosm's 12K+ LED Dome, in a special presentation developed with Disney, Lucasfilm, ILM, and MakeMake. They're calling it a "Shared Reality production" where "the surrounding visual environments dynamically evolve to immerse the audience in iconic Star Wars locations and moments." Deadline reports more 50th anniversary celebrations In addition to the Imax 70mm screenings, the film will also be presented in Digital Imax, Digital Cinema, 70mm, 35mm, and 4DX. On May 4th, 2027, Lucasfilm will release a new behind-the-scenes documentary, The Hero Awakens, from filmmaker R.J. Cutler on Disney+. Star Wars events already on the calendar for 2027 include Shawn Levy's [movie] Star Wars: Starfighter, which will be released May 28. There's also a new poster paying homage to the original 1977 film, reports the Disney news site Mickey Visit, plus a newly orchestrated score by John Williams that they assume "will be used on all the projects that debut this year." On April 2-3, [Disney] will debut the new "Star Wars in Concert: The Skywalker Saga" at the Hollywood Bowl. The show will be hosted by Anthony Daniels, known for his role as C-3PO. Special performances of John Williams' iconic film scores will feature scenes and music from all nine Skywalker Saga films. The concert is a sweeping celebration of the stories, themes, and music that have inspired audiences around the world for five decades... They also teased that new and legacy licensees — including Hasbro, the LEGO Group, adidas, Mars, Aston Martin, Steinway, Hajime Sorayama presented by Complex, and more — will introduce 50th-anniversary collections... In the opening of the press release, Disney mentioned that as part of the announcements there will be "reimagined Disney Parks and Cruise Line offerings." The article adds that the April's Star Wars Celebration at the Los Angeles Convention Center has already sold out. There's more Star Wars news, writes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 A light saber used by Darth Vader in the "Star Wars" movies The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi sold Thursday for nearly $5 million in an auction. The light saber, which was used in the climactic duel in Cloud City in which Vader tells Luke Skywalker "I am your father" sold for $4.875 million at the Ultimate Star Wars Auction held by Heritage Auctions. The sale marks a world auction record for any "Star Wars" collectible, according to the auction house. The previous record was Heritage's $3,750,000 sale of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and severed hand effects rig on July 15, 2026. And they're still auctioning more Star Wars memorabilia...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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