It’s a big week for Star Wars fans, as the first episode of the (very good) The Mandalorian dropped on Disney+ and we’re about to see the release of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Respawn’s new single-player action game set after Episode III. Star Wars games have had a rocky history as of late, with license-holder EA making some questionable choices with their products. But that’s nothing new for the franchise – there have been more Star Wars games that burned out before release than we can count. Let’s open up the Carbonite and spotlight 11 cancelled Star Wars games we wish we had a chance to play.
Star Wars 1313
Boba Fett was one of the first “breakthrough characters” in modern pop culture history, a masked bounty hunter who was intended to play a small role in the big picture but ended up grabbing the attention of the fanbase to outsized ends. Although you can play as him in the Battlefront series, Fett has never had his own video game. Well, he almost did. Star Wars 1313 was in development at LucasArts in 2012, and it was to star Boba Fett as he hunted down the masterminds of a criminal conspiracy in one of Coruscant’s corrupt underground districts. After the Disney purchase, LucasArts shut down all internal game development projects, and this one might have been the biggest loss.
Project Ragtag
One of the most painful recent Star Wars cancellations was the untitled “Project Ragtag,” being worked on at Visceral Games with Uncharted‘s Amy Hennig helming the story. The single-player title was built from the bones of a pirate game the studio was hashing out, turning it into a third-person shooter with an ensemble feel that followed a group of characters from all over the galaxy coming together to pull off a massive heist. The concept was extremely ambitious, and internal rumblings cast doubt on Visceral’s ability to pull it off, but it sounded – and looked – so cool. Sadly, the success of Star Wars: Battlefront taught EA that multiplayer was the way to go and they slowly bled resources away from “Ragtag” until it died.
The New Emperor
Set in the time period immediately after the original trilogy, an internally-produced LucasArts game from the late 1990s didn’t make it very far in the development process but had a can’t-miss concept. With the death of Sheev Palpatine, the Empire needs to appoint… a new Emperor. Obviously the Rebel Alliance doesn’t want that to go off without a hitch, so they send everybody’s favorite protocol droid C-3PO in as a spy to extract information. The project was intended to combine CGI and live action on bluescreens, which seems like a strange choice but could have been cool.
Dark Squadron
The Rogue Squadron series developed by Factor 5 are unanimously known as the pinnacle of arcade-style dogfighting action in the Star Wars universe, letting players pilot iconic craft from the Rebel Alliance across multiple missions. The game spawned two sequels, each of which expanded on the theme and mechanics in rewarding ways. The second game featured two levels in which you could fly Empire ships, and Lucasfilm commissioned Factor 5 to create a whole game around that idea, tentatively titled Dark Squadron. Alas, the project got canned. The studio tried to bring it back several times before going bankrupt in 2008.
Vernost
Here’s a Star Wars project about which very little is known, but what we do know – mostly from a 1993 Popular Science article – is incredibly tantalizing. Developed for the Mirage VR system developed by Hughes Electronics, Vernost was an original dogfighting game set on the titular volcanic planet in the Star Wars universe. The system could network as many as 64 players into one instance of Vernost, letting them control either Rebel or Empire ships as they contended for territory on the planet’s surface. The system obviously didn’t take off and Vernost was lost to the ages.
Knights of the Old Republic 3
Remember when BioWare was the industry’s can’t-miss game for Western-style RPGs? We sure as hell do, and KOTOR was one of their crown jewels. The studio handed the second game over to Obsidian in 2004, and although the sequel didn’t live up to the first game (in part due to shipping too early with huge amounts of content cut) the franchise still had a lot of life in it. A third game was in development at Obsidian, with the studio eager to show what they could do given enough time. Writer Chris Avellone revealed that a story was written, as the series was originally intended as a trilogy, that would have the player following Darth Revan’s trail of destruction through the galaxy and meeting ancient, unspeakably powerful Sith lords.
Star Wars: Attack Squadrons
Unlike the majority of these games, Star Wars: Attack Squadrons actually made it to at least some players, as LucasArts floated a beta of this 16-player browser-based dogfighting game. Developed by Seattle-based Area 52, the action game was set to introduce new fighters and pilots every month and let gamers defend bases or play quick skirmishes. The game’s beta seemed to go pretty decently for a browser game, with the players who got in complimenting how smooth the experience was for a browser-based Unity title, but Disney announced in May of 2014 that they wouldn’t be proceeding with further development.
Battle of the Sith Lords
If you were around for the prequels, you remember how much Darth Maul got hyped up in the marketing for Episode I, only to get his ass beat by Obi-Wan and never return to the big screen (well, until Solo almost 20 years later). The character remained popular despite all this, and in 2010 Wii and PS2 licensed game specialists Red Fly were working on a Battle of the Sith Lords project that would let players control the dual-bladed lightsaber wielder in a combat-centered adventure that would bring him into conflict with numerous characters from the Expanded Universe. The project was shuttered after Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm.
Untitled Chewbacca Game
The massive Wookiee is one of the series’ most beloved – and long-lived – characters, so it’s unsurprising that plans were in place to give Chewbacca his own video game in the early 2000s. Developed in-house at LucasArts, the title was to take place in the gap between the prequels and the original trilogy, following the hairy hero on his home planet of Kashyyyk and his introduction to Han Solo. Allegedly this one was canned due to a directive from the top – George Lucas himself didn’t want to see a game with Chewie in the lead. The team who was working on it went on to produce The Force Unleashed.
Star Wars: Outpost
For a while, the hot trend in casual games was clones of Farmville, letting players engage in simplified SimCity-esque management of farms, villages, et cetera. Before the shutdown of LucasArts, their Singapore studio had allegedly nearly completed Star Wars: Outpost for iOS. Information leaked from studio employees indicated that it would have been significantly more strategy-heavy than its casual counterparts, with dozens of different structures and the ability to make and break alliances with fellow players. The leaker referenced EVE Online as a comparison point, which is a pretty ambitious thing for a mobile game.
Project Orca
Orca was an ambitious open-world Star Wars experience from EA’s Vancouver studio – the team that brought you a metric ton of EA Sports games as well as the much-missed SSX series and Def Jam: Fight for NY. Stepping outside of their comfort zone, “Orca” was built on the bones of the shuttered “Ragtag” game, but where that title was a linear, story-driven experience, “Orca” was intended to be a sprawling open-world (or open-universe) AAA title that would cast players as a bounty hunter who could ally with multiple different factions and take missions across the galaxy. EA wasn’t comfortable with the proposed development time, believing they needed something quicker and cheaper to hit the market, so the game was cancelled.
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