Merkie Howzat

"I have your viewscreen."
"My...? Where? How did? You got it from a Meatlump, didn't you? They attacked my speeder."

―A spacer and Vani Korr^[src]

Merkie Howzat was a male Human Meatlump criminal who lived on the planet Corellia during the Galactic Civil War. After the Battle of Yavin, he was a sublieutenant of the Meatlumps, a group of fanatical anti-technology thugs, in Coronet.^[2] Around 1 ABY,^[1] Howzat discovered that the Corellia Times reporter Vani Korr was investigating the Meatlumps. Merkie Howzat and his stooges attacked the speeder of the reporter, overturned it while she was driving. Korr was thrown clear and knocked unconscious. As CorSec troopers arrived to rescue the woman, Howzat stole her viewscreen and ran away.^[3] A short time later, a spacer clashed with Meatlump stooges in Coronet. The fight turned into a violent firefight and some Meatlumps were killed. Merkie Howzat intervened to support his henchmen but he was also killed in the confrontation.^[2] The spacer then found Vani Korr's viewscreen on Howzat's body and decided to bring it back to its owner.^[3] The adventurer was eventually hired by Vani Korr and actively participated in her investigation about the Meatlumps.^[4]

Behind the scenes[edit | edit source]

Merkie Howzat was a non-player character in the 2003 video game Star Wars Galaxies, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts,^[2] prior to its closure on December 15, 2011.^[5] Merkie Howzat was added to the game with the "Publish 21", released on August 4, 2005.^[6]

With the release of "Publish 21", Merkie Howzat appeared in the game upon the player killed a group of Meatlump stooges in Coronet. Killing Merkie Howzat allowed to recover Vani Korr's viewscreen and then start Vani's quests: "Corellian Times Investigations".^[3]^[4] Vani Korr's quests were later widely expanded as part of "Chapter 10: The Search for the Meatlump King", released on June 19, 2008.^[7] With this update, a new series of quests were proposed by Vani Korr. They directly followed the original pre-NGE quests and introduced the so-called "Meatlumps Theme Park".^[8] Furthermore, a new quest that just consisted in killing Merkie Howzat was added to make a transition between Vani Korr's original quests and the "Legacy Quest", the main quest line in the game.^[2]