LucasFilm boss Kathleen Kennedy teased us yesterday by mentioning a forgotten Star Wars game relegated to the scrapheap when Disney took over. But it’s not the only one.
Star Wars has a history of games being being cancelled. Some after they were announced, others that never made it past the concept stages and were revealed only after LucasArts had abandoned them them. They all share one thing in common; we still want to play them.
Star Wars 1313 was the game in question that Kennedy mentioned this week: "We don’t want to throw any of that stuff away," she said about it and other unreleased material. "It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further."
That’s a stretch from might be revived, especially since Star Wars games have been sub-licensed to EA for a decade, but it’s better than concrete confirmation of the cancellation.
Announced at E3 in 2012, Star Wars 1313 was to tell the story of Boba Fett in early adulthood, as he was becoming the renewed bounty hunter we met (properly) in The Empire Strikes Back in an underground area of Coruscant called 1313. The announcement came early in development, and following Disney’s acquisition of LucasFilm, it decided to pause all LucasArts projects in 2013 and close it as a developer — so in essence, unless it gets revived by a new developer by EA, it’s cancelled.
The twice cancelled Rogue Squadron Trilogy lingered for two console generations, and was finished, before it was eventually cancelled for the second time — somewhat surprisingly, because it was simply a re-release of three games already available, which is all the rage for publishers now. As the title suggests, it was to be a remastered collection bundling the Nintendo 64’s Rogue Squadron (1998), GameCube launch title Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (2001) and follow-up Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike (2003).
It was first planned for Xbox — and two GameCube third party exclusives later being re-released for another platform wouldn’t have surprised anyone. It was half-complete when management changes at LucasArts in 2003 saw it cancelled.
After developer Factor 5 finished making Lair for PS3, it revived the idea, this time for Rogue Squadron Trilogy on Wii. It further enhanced the remastering work originally done for Xbox, and added motion controls and development finished. However, the global financial crisis struck in 2008 and as development wrapped up, Level 5 found itself with a finished Star Wars game for an extremely popular console, but no publisher. When Factor 5 filed for bankruptcy, the game and its rights reverted to LucasArts (therefore now Disney), but it remains unreleased.
When the remastered trilogy was cancelled for the first time, Factor 5 turned its attention to the proper sequel. Rogue Squadron: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was planned as an Xbox 360 launch title, and was going to introduce multiplayer to the series. Development was well underway when LucasArts decided to pull the plug because it wasn’t confident in releasing a launch title for an unknown console.
When Factor-5 began talking to Sony about making a PS3 exclusive, it offered a fourth Rogue Squadron game with Sony as publisher (pending licensing from LucasArts), but it declined in favour of a new IP. That game was Lair. In hindsight it’s easy to say Sony made the wrong decision.
The untitled Darth Maul game made headlines earlier this year for similar reasons to Star Wars 1313. A developer did an AMA on Reddit, and revealed development has slowly continued in the hope of eventually pitching the idea to EA — but there’s no confirmation even that will happen, let alone it getting a green light.
He revealed the game, which was cancelled in 2011, would have told the story of a young Darth Maul, around 10 years old, to show how he became a Sith. “We wanted to show what he went through to become a Sith. Showcase the torture the Emperor put him through. Show how you as the player would have made the same mistakes and ended up a Sith,” said Dan Borth of Red Fly Studios.
That’s recent information, from just six weeks ago, but the 30 seconds of footage appeared early last year. We now have more context, and it’s promising to hear a developer say it wants to try and re-pitch a game that was cancelled due to a change in ownership rather than something wrong with it — but we’re not sure EA is going to invest in a Prequel era game.
Star Wars: First Assault is one of the strangest cancelled games, because it’s basically a smaller version of Battlefront for last-gen consoles. It was in development at LucasArts until early-2013, when Disney shutdown everything, and even managed a technical beta test on Xbox 360. A few assets appeared from that a few years ago, and last month we got footage of it, but with no other players in the world.
It was planned as an 8v8 shooter for PSN and Xbox Live Arcade. This wasn’t going to be the highly anticipated Battlefront 3, but it was going to be a smaller version to test the waters and gather player feedback — much like Battlefield 1943 did as a small scale, and cheap, reimagining of classic Battlefield on PSN and XBLA.
Unlike the others, Star Wars Episode VII: Shadows of the Sith wasn’t actually in development. It was in the conceptual phase with several others and revealed by Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts published in 2008.
Other possibilities include Star Wars: Scum and Villainy — that sounds interesting — Rebel Jedi, Rebel Warrior and Star Wars: Smuggler. They are all just concepts, ideas that didn’t get much further than that, but the idea of an Episode VII game in the mid-00s is intriguing.
The book was published four years before Disney acquired LucasFilm, so the idea was around before that — was that when an Episode VII film was under serious consideration, or was there a thought to continuing the main story through games?
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