Hi,
I was reading some thread and there was a mention about lightsaber colors, and about the purple lightsaber. Someone pointed out that the purple lightsaber of Mace Windu was a request by Samuel L. Jackson from George Lucas to make his character stand out in the movie (info taken from Wikipedia, I guess).
Now... I'm pretty sure I've known about purple lightsabers long before episodes I-III of Star Wars, and namely due to a lovely girl called Mara Jade. So, I started to Google about this thing, read Mara's Wookiepedia page, and so forth, but didn't really find much information on where the purple lightsaber made it's first appearance. Just a lot of speculation about whether the purple lightsaber Mara Jade used was crafted from the crystal taken from Mace Windu's lightsaber, and so on.
Now, Episode I was released in 1999, so it's safe to say Sam Jackson wasn't signed on to do it, or didn't ask for the lightsaber very much before that. Perhaps 1998, or 1997 in the earliest.
Masters of Teräs Käsi, however, was released in 1997. Mara Jade, who was introduced earlier in a book, is also one of the characters in that game. If you look at this little video here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icLFiQPVRyc
...you'll see Mara Jade using a purple lightsaber. She draws it at around 0:35. I'm sure I've seen Mara Jade wielding a purple lightsaber in other places as well, but this would certainly put to rest the claim that the whole concept of a purple lightsaber was Sam Jackson asking Lucas "Hey could lightsabers be purple? Can I have one?".
What I'm interested, though, would be the first documented case of a purple lightsaber, whether described on the pages of a Star Wars book, or depicted on the cover of one, or something like that. We know it appears in MoTK in 1997 (which was in development at least in 1996, 1995 I'm sure), but are there earlier instances of a purple lightsaber?
Also as a side note, since Windu and Jade both were or at least ended up on the light side, I personally was a bit disappointed that the purple crystal was given to Imperials in SW:TOR, but oh well.