Way back in 2010, a developer called Red Fly Studio was contracted by LucasArts to create a game starring Darth Maul. The game floundered for a while, because LucasArts couldn't decide on what they wanted the story to be about. (Red Fly wanted to do an origin story; George Lucas wanted to add a female Sith counterpart named Darth Talon — who lived about 200 years later. But you know, technicality.) You can see some pre-alpha footage of it in the video embedded below.
When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2013, all outstanding LucasArts games were canceled, including Red Fly's Darth Maul title. All video game rights were given to EA Games as part of a multi-year, multi-title agreement. Red Fly's cancelation order was never about quality or lack thereof, it was a matter of a new owner wanting to start over with a clean slate. Several other titles fell victim to this same fate, most notably Star Wars 1313.
Red Fly's Dan Borth held a Reddit AMA yesterday, during which he publicly announced his company's efforts to resurrect his passion project. Originally built using the Unreal 3 engine, Borth said that everything has now been upgraded to use Unreal 4, and that work on a playable demo continues in the studio personnel's off hours. Once they have a demo that shows off the full scope of Borth's vision, they hope to get an audience with EA Games.
Borth won over Reddit with his game concept, largely by speaking plain and honest (and sometimes brutally honest) about what happened in 2013 and what he hopes for now.
His greatest ambition is to tell the origin of Darth Maul, with gamers playing Maul's journey from being selected as a child to become Palpatine's apprentice, all the way up to achieving the full rank of Sith Lord. Borth's desire was to publish an M-rated game, featuring realistic lightsaber mechanics such as the severing of heads and other body parts. Much of the gameplay was inspired by the Batman: Arkham titles, but Red Fly had intended to bring plenty of new ideas to the table as well.
It sounds like a game unlike any Star Wars title ever made, and that was enough to get Reddit users very excited. But Red Fly's hurdles are many. The biggest, aside from getting EA Games on board and willing to finance it, is the fact that it deals with the origins of a character that came from the prequel trilogy — a time period Disney is trying its hardest to diminish fans' memories of.
But Borth mentioned in the AMA that he's willing to reskin the character as a different Sith Lord if Disney and EA would prefer to focus on later time periods. Or another possibility would be to make a game about an older Darth Maul; in The Clone Wars, which is 100 percent canon, the character was revealed to have survived being sliced in half and was fitted with mechanical legs and a number of grudges that made him even deadlier than before.
Maul's ultimate fate remains unknown, so there's plenty of room for more stories to be told.
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