Star Wars fans rejoice: the Uncharted-styled Star Wars 1313 may not be quite as dead as we once thought.
The news comes from Star Wars steward Kathleen Kennedy, who recently revealed that Disney didn't completely scrap everything after it scooped up the franchise. Technically speaking, 1313 is still dead — but Kennedy's mention of the game during a recent Force Awakens press event means that the game might return in some form or another.
Of course, fans wouldn't still be talking about the pain of 1313's cancellation had it not been for a long series of increasing unfortunate events — even two years later, it's still hard to believe that a game with such potential never made it into players' hands (especially considering how awful The Force Unleashed II was). That being said, it wasn't just Disney's acquisition of Star Wars that eventually killed 1313's chances at release — the game's downfall wasn't something that happened overnight, but over a long, painful period of time ...
An Amazing Debut
Take yourself back to 2012. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were on their last legs, and the gaming industry had fallen into something of a rut ... then, out of nowhere, games that couldn't possibly run on last-gen hardware started popping up. Star Wars 1313 fit the bill perfectly.
Star Wars 1313 looked like every fan's dream game: not only was it absolutely gorgeous, but it featured a new cast fighting off mercenaries with blasters while jumping from ship-to-ship. It was Uncharted, but with Star Wars — and considering how hot Uncharted 3 was at the time, it makes sense that fans everywhere lost their minds.
Sadly, the E3 2012 demo would end up being the last footage that fans ever saw ....
Identity Crisis
From what the fans saw, Star Wars 1313 had a huge debut and subsequently went silent. Back at LucasArts, however, things were much more convoluted.
Development started back in 2009, when 1313 was conceived as a tie-in to a live-action Star Wars TV show. Then, it supposedly became an open-world RPG, complete with incredibly dark storylines centering around prostitution and organized crime. After that, a more action-oriented take was considered, with Uncharted-style gameplay rounding everything out.
Finally, it was decided: in May of 2012, the game was to be re-worked to focus on a young Boba Fett and his upbringing as a bounty hunter.
While that sounds amazing on its own, there's no way a studio can go through that many different iterations of a game without running into trouble. LucasArts had already been suffering from a severe lack of leadership, and 1313's muddled development is a testament to that. Yes, what fans had seen looked amazing, and the idea of flying through Coruscant as a young Boba Fett would have been a dream come true — but that was only the end product of a messy multi-year development cycle.
Simply put, the game wasn't doing as well as most people hoped ... and it only got worse from there.
The Disney Acquisition
Disney's acquisition of the Star Wars license was the final nail in the coffin. While rumors stated that development on 1313 had continued in the months following, it's easy to assume that things weren't going well. When Disney shuttered LucasArts and cancelled all of the studio's projects in early 2013, that was the end of 1313. It was only after the game's cancellation that fans learned of Boba Fett's involvement in the game, but by then, it was too late — Star Wars 1313 was dead.
Not all hope is lost, however: a few months ago, voice actor Nolan North was asked about EA and Visceral Games' unannounced Star Wars title. North then claimed that, while Visceral Games' current project isn't exactly Star Wars 1313, there are more than a few similarities between the two projects.
Combine this with Kathleen Kennedy's statements, and it sounds like 1313 may actually live on through Visceral Games. It might not be the exact same project, but hey — at this point, any chance of seeing something like Star Wars 1313 make its way to store shelves is good enough for most fans.
