Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

Markus believed the best way to make a video game was to spend as much time as possible in preproduction, which meant lots of talking, prototyping, and answering questions both big and small.

In theory, the developers of Star Wars 1313 were thrilled about getting to use more of Lucas’s canonical Star Wars universe, but in practice, it was incredibly frustrating.

But in Lucas’s preferred craft, filmmaking, everything existed to serve the story, while in game development—at least on the type of game that Markus and Robilliard wanted to make—everything existed to serve gameplay.

The most drastic of these changes arrived in the spring of 2012. Earlier that year, they’d decided to announce Star Wars 1313 at E3, and the entire team was crunching on the flashy demo that would showcase their two bounty hunters.

Two months before E3, George Lucas approached LucasArts’ leadership with a new mandate: Star Wars 1313 should star the bounty hunter Boba Fett.

Fuuuuuuuu

The answer to those questions was no, and word soon came down from Lucasfilm’s management that the decision was final. Star Wars 1313 was now a game about Boba Fett.

Both were planned for next-gen consoles that hadn’t been announced yet. (Neither Sony nor Microsoft were pleased with Ubisoft and LucasArts for showing their hands so early.) And both games had stolen the show.

Either way, with Boba Fett in the starring role, the designers would have to reimagine all the encounters they’d planned. Enemies would need to be aware of the player’s jetpack so they could take cover from attacks that came from above them, which, as one member of the 1313 team told me, was “a major pain in the ass.”

Around September 2012, two strange things happened. First, Lucasfilm told LucasArts not to announce the other game they’d been developing, a shooter called Star Wars: First Assault that the studio had planned to reveal that month. Second was a studio-wide hiring freeze.

On October 30, 2012, in a shocking, blockbuster move, Disney announced that it was purchasing Lucasfilm—and with that, LucasArts—for $4 billion. All the weird changes suddenly made sense.

And Disney’s main interest was, as the company made clear when it revealed the deal, to produce more Star Wars movies. In the press release Disney sent out to announce its purchase, the word “LucasArts” appeared once. “Video games” did not appear.

To video game reporters, Lucasfilm representatives said the acquisition wouldn’t affect Star Wars 1313.

David Bryne voice: Lies! Lies! Lies lies lies lies lies! :horn hook:

there was one giant, glaring red flag. Immediately after news of the acquisition broke, Iger said on a conference call that the company would look to license Star Wars to other video game companies rather than publish its own games, and that Disney was “likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console.”

The next red flag came in late January 2013, when Disney announced that it had shut down Junction Point, the Austin-based studio behind the artsy platformer Epic Mickey.

All winter, LucasArts’ management would proclaim that things were going to be OK, even telling employees not to bother handing out their résumés at the annual Game Developers Conference in March.

Oh jesus

Others stayed back and ransacked the place, using flash drives to grab half-finished trailers and demos off the LucasArts servers before they all disappeared. A few former employees even stole console development kits. After all, the employees figured, Disney didn’t need them.

Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice? Is it possible to develop a game without putting in endless hours? Will there ever be a reliable formula for making games that allows for more predictable schedules? For many industry observers, the answers to those questions are: no, no, and probably not.