The most infamous and feared of all assassin droids, he carved out a career as a murderous bounty hunter. The tall, slender, gray metallic droid was given pseudo-sentience and independence by his programmers at the high-security Holowan Laboratories as part of Project Phlutdroid. They were repaid by being murdered by IG-88 and three other IG-88 droids that the original droid programmed itself. Ig-88 and his "clones" took over the droid production planet Mechis III, giving special programming to every model produced. IG-88 planned to rule the galaxy one day by instigating a droid revolt with the broadcast of a simple signal. Ig-88 worked in and around the Galactic Core, despite the fact that forty systems hunted him with "dismantle on sight" orders. But he was hard to capture, having already killed more than 150 beings with a built-in arsenal of weapons including a blaster rifle, grenade launcher, flame thrower, and missiles. An array of head sensors let IG-88 see in all directions at once. The droids C-3PO and R2-D2 encountered IG-88 some time before the Battle of Yavin when the assassin came to hunt and taunt crooked businessman Oleg Greck. IG-88 was one of six bounty hunters-including Boba Fett-summoned to Darth Vader's ship, Executor, after the Battle of Hoth and challenged to find Han Solo's Millenium Falcon. The droid secretly installed a homing device on Boba Fett's Fett beat him to Rebel hero. Fett destroyed one IG-88 clone with an ion cannon on Cloud City; he blew up two others in their ships over Tatooine. The original IG-88 hijacked the computer core of the second Death Star, and transplanted his programming into it. Effectively, then, the second Death Star was a gigantic IG-88. The droid was just about to broadcast the droid activation signal for his galactic takeover when the Rebel Alliance destroyed the battle station.
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