Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  What could possibly go wrong?

  When the modern video game industry first started emerging in the early 1980s, film moguls stared over with a mixture of envy and consternation. How were these game makers, with their immature stories and wildly inconsistent product cycles, making millions of dollars off this strange, interactive new media? And how could Hollywood get a piece of this? Some movie studios licensed out their franchises or worked with game publishers to crank out cheap tie-in games like the infamous E.T., best known for helping crash the video game industry.* Others decided not to bother. In future years, respected directors like Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg would dabble in game development, but in the 1980s only one filmmaking giant had the foresight to build an entire company around video games: George Lucas.

  In 1982, five years after the release of his smash hit film Star Wars, Lucas saw the potential of video games and decided to get involved. He spun up a subsidiary of his production company, Lucasfilm, calling the new studio Lucasfilm Games, and hired a squad of talented young designers like Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and Tim Schafer. In the coming years, Lucasfilm Games found success not with movie tie-ins but with completely original “point and click” adventure games like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. A reorganization in 1990 turned Lucasfilm Games into LucasArts, and over the coming years their iconic logo—a gold man holding up a shining arc—would adorn the boxes of beloved games like Grim Fandango, Star Wars: TIE Fighter, Day of the Tentacle, Star Wars Jedi Knight, and many more. Throughout the 1990s, the name LucasArts was a badge of quality.

  A few years into the twenty-first century, something changed. As George Lucas and his company doubled down on the much-derided Star Wars prequel films, LucasArts became entrenched in office politics and unstable leadership. The studio became best known for publishing other developers’ games, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare) and Star Wars: Battlefront (Pandemic), rather than making its own. Over ten years, LucasArts went through four different presidents: Simon Jeffery in 2000, Jim Ward in 2004, Darrell Rodriguez in 2008, and Paul Meegan in 2010. Each time a new president took over, there would be a staff-wide reorganization, which always meant two things: layoffs and cancellations. (After one particularly massive layoff in 2004, LucasArts essentially shut down and then spun back up again, which was surreal for those who remained. One former employee recalled rollerskating around half of the building, which he had all to himself.)

  As one former employee would later tell me, “The Bay Area is filled with people who have had their hearts broken by Lucasfilm or LucasArts—that sad legacy of multiple presidents, multiple layoffs. There’s a lot of people out there who’ve been treated badly by the company.”

  Despite this, there were many at LucasArts who believed they could restore the studio to its former glory. LucasArts paid well and had no trouble attracting talented developers who had grown up on Star Wars and wanted to make games in that universe. In early 2009, under president Darrell Rodriguez, LucasArts began developing a Star Wars project with the code name Underworld. They envisioned it as a video game tie-in to the live-action TV series of the same name, which George Lucas had been developing for years. The Underworld show was meant to be an HBO-style take on Star Wars, set on the planet Coruscant, which was sort of like a cross between New York City and Gomorrah. The show would take place between the two Star Wars film trilogies, and there would be no CGI puppets or hammy child actors this time around. Instead, Underworld would feature crime, violence, and brutal conflicts between mafia families. Both the game and TV show were meant for adult Star Wars fans.

  In meetings throughout 2009, a small group of LucasArts developers quietly began conceptualizing Star Wars Underworld, batting around ideas for what the game might look like. For some time they saw it as a role-playing game. Then they expanded their focus, knowing that George Lucas was fascinated by Grand Theft Auto (GTA). (His kids were into the games.) How cool would it be, the developers thought, if they could make a GTA-style open-world game within the scummy underworld of Coruscant? You, perhaps playing as a bounty hunter or some other sort of criminal, could traipse around the world, going on missions as a contractor for different crime families as you worked your way up through the ranks.

  That idea fizzled fast. After a few weeks of research based on conversations with colleagues at GTA’s developer, Rockstar, and Assassin’s Creed’s publisher, Ubisoft, the Underworld team put together a proposal of how many people they’d need (hundreds) and how much money it’d cost (tens of millions) to make an open-world game of that nature. Lucasfilm’s executives weren’t interested. “Of course there was no appetite to make that kind of investment,” said one person involved with the game. “That idea came and went literally within the span of two months.”

  It was a running theme at LucasArts. To get anything done, the studio’s management would need to go up the ladder to their bosses at Lucasfilm, who, for the most part, were old-school filmmakers with little interest in video games. Sometimes, frustrated LucasArts managers would give elaborate presentations to Lucasfilm executives simply to explain to them how games were made. Those Lucasfilm executives also served as gatekeepers to George Lucas, often giving LucasArts developers guidelines for how to talk to the legendary auteur. (One common directive: never say no.) Lucas, who owned 100 percent of the company, was still interested in video games, but seemed, to those who worked closely with him, to feel let down by LucasArts’ recent history. Couldn’t they be doing so much better?

  By the end of 2009, the Underworld project had morphed into what the team snarkily referred to as Gears of Star Wars, a cooperative game focused on running, shooting, and taking cover, not unlike Epic Games’ seminal Gears of War series. By this point, Underworld was much less of a secret. Over the next few months, the project expanded significantly, recruiting staff from elsewhere at LucasArts as they built prototypes and got online multiplayer functionality up and running. It was an interesting, albeit “much more conservative, less adventurous” version of Underworld, by one account.

  In the summer of 2010, the wheel of LucasArts presidents spun yet again. Out went Darrell Rodriguez. In came a tough, ambitious new president named Paul Meegan. With this change in leadership came, as usual, big layoffs and project cancellations, including a massive technology shift: Meegan, who had previously worked at Epic Games, wanted LucasArts to switch from its own proprietary technology to Epic’s popular Unreal Engine.

  Meegan also thought Underworld was too conservative. He had a big plan for the future of Star Wars video games—a plan that included the gradual revival of the beloved Battlefront shooter series—and he wanted to see LucasArts make a big splash. By then, Meegan would tell people, it was too late to salvage the studio’s output on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But for next-generation consoles, which were expected within the next two years, LucasArts could do something consequential. “LucasArts is a company with tremendous potential,” Meegan later said in an interview.* “And yet, in recent years, LucasArts hasn’t always done a good job of making games. We should be making games that define our medium, that are competitive with the best of our industry, but we’re not. That has to change.”

  Shortly after taking over, Meegan sat down with Dominic Robilliard, the game’s creative director, and the other LucasArts leads to talk about a new vision for Underworld. George Lucas’s TV series was stuck in development hell, but Meegan and Robilliard still loved the idea of a Star Wars game set in the criminal underworld of Coruscant. They also loved Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, which blended the feel of an action-adventure game with the spectacle of a blockbuster movie. Making Gears of Star Wars wasn’t all that appealing, but Star Wars Uncharted? Working under Lucasfilm had its challenges, sure, but LucasArts benefited from sharing a campus with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the legendary visual effects house that had produced special effects and graphics for the original Star Wars. For years, Lucasfilm and LucasArts had wanted to fin
d ways to blend film technology with video games. What better way than with an Uncharted-style Star Wars game?

  Out of these conversations came design documents and concept art, and by the end of 2010, LucasArts had come up with Star Wars 1313, named after the 1,313th level of Coruscant’s underworld. The goal, as LucasArts’ designers described it, was to evoke the fantasy of being a bounty hunter. Using a wide array of skills and gadgets, the player would hunt down targets for unsavory criminal families. “Nobody had quite nailed that in Star Wars games,” said one person who worked on 1313. “We wanted to do something—and this actually came from George—that didn’t rely on the Force, or Jedi.”

  Part of this process meant pointing the entire team in a single direction, a somewhat vague but crucial goal. “When I started on the game, my goal was really to find out what everybody was thinking,” said the lead designer, Steve Chen, a veteran LucasArts employee who moved to Star Wars 1313 in late 2010. “Because I had seen it as an open-world game; I’d seen it as a buddy game; I’d seen it as more of a shooter. I’d seen it as many, many different things. It was all over the map.”

  When Chen started, he spent a few weeks sitting down with everyone on the team and asking what stood out to them about Star Wars 1313. What did they care about most? What did they want the game to be? “What I was trying to do was find the core, and get rid of the stuff that didn’t feel like it was important,” Chen said. “Here’s an incredibly talented group of people with a lot of great ideas and a lot of skill but not a lot of focus.”

  One of Meegan’s next big moves was to hire a new studio manager: Fred Markus, a grizzled developer who had been working in games since 1990. Markus was a loyal acolyte of what he’d refer to as the “Nintendo” approach to game design: keep fine-tuning your gameplay until it’s perfect. “[Markus] joined the company and really made a huge change to the creative culture at LucasArts—a creative change much for the better,” said Chen. “He was really quite a force to be reckoned with in the studio, and he made big changes from a culture standpoint from day one.”

  Markus, who had spent years at Ubisoft helping shape franchises like Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, would preach about adding structure to the chaos of game development by identifying every worst-case scenario as early as possible. For example, if they were making a game in the subterranean levels of Coruscant, they’d need to think about verticality. The player, while hunting for bounties, would have to ascend and descend different levels of the city. But moving upward tended to be less fun than moving downward, and chasing a mark up a flight of stairs could feel sluggish. As a solution, maybe they’d add high-speed elevators. Maybe they’d use grappling hooks. Whatever the answer, Markus wanted his team to solve the problem before they even entered production.

  Not long after starting at LucasArts, Markus put the studio through what one former staffer described as “a boot camp” for controls, camerawork, and basic gameplay rhythms. 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. What exactly did it mean to live out the fantasy of being a Star Wars bounty hunter? How would the controls work? What kind of gadgets would you have? How would you traverse the underground of Coruscant? “He was really kind of a great influence on our team and on the studio in general,” said Steve Chen. “Not necessarily the easiest person to deal with, because he was tough . . . but his effects on the studio and on the project were in my opinion a huge positive. He was really forcing us to take a good hard look at what the core of the game was.”

  Another of their principles was to avoid taking control away from the player. “One of the things that Dom [Robilliard] the creative director felt strongly about was, whenever possible, you want the player to be doing something that was cool, not watching something that was cool,” said Evan Skolnick, the lead narrative designer.

  For a while, preproduction proceeded nicely. The Star Wars 1313 team started scoping for a fall 2013 or early 2014 release, with the hope of the game becoming a launch title for the still-unannounced PS4 and Xbox One. For months they played with prototypes and worked on the new story, which would revolve around their audacious bounty hunter. The engineers grew more familiar with the Unreal Engine, working closely with ILM to sort out how to make Star Wars 1313 look as “next-gen” as possible.

  As Fred Markus, Dominic Robilliard, and the rest of the team tried to sort out their vision for Star Wars 1313, George Lucas would sporadically check in and offer suggestions. “As I was going back and forth with him on story and gameplay details,” Robilliard said during a panel discussion at the DICE Summit in February 2017, “he would allow us to use more of the locations that he had come up with and more of his characters.” Occasionally, according to team members, he’d come in and say they could—and should—use new bits and pieces from the Star Wars: Underworld show.

  “At first we were in the same universe,” said one person on the team. “Then it was location. Then it was rewrite the story and start using more of the characters from the TV show.” 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. With every new character or setting, the team had to scrap and redesign large chunks of the game. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we probably developed thirty hours worth of focus-testable gray box content before we even started making the game that we ended up with,” said a person who worked on the game.

  It wasn’t that George Lucas was trying to be malicious. People who worked on the game say he loved how Star Wars 1313 was shaping up. 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. “One of the problems of working in a film company with somebody like George is that he’s used to being able to change his mind and iterate on things purely on a visual level,” said a person who worked on the game. “[He wasn’t used to] the idea that we were developing [gameplay] mechanics that go along with these concepts, levels, and scenarios.”

  Star Wars 1313’s leads theorized that as George Lucas saw more of the game, his trust in the developers grew, which made him feel more comfortable giving them more of his universe to play with. Besides, he could do whatever he wanted. It was his company. His name was in the title and he owned all the stock. As LucasArts employees liked to say: We serve at the pleasure of George Lucas.

  “I’ve had the pleasure of presenting to George [on different projects] once or twice, maybe a handful of times in my years at LucasArts, and the first thing George will always say is, ‘I’m not a gamer,’” said Steve Chen, who didn’t work with George Lucas directly on 1313, but had on previous games. “But he has really clear ideas about what story’s like and what the experience should be like . . . If he made a request or made a suggestion about something in terms of story or character or gameplay, you feel like he’s coming at it from his perspective, and you have to respect that as president of the company, and chief creative force for the company. The ripple effects, I don’t know if that was necessarily the top of his mind like, ‘Oh, is this decision I’m making going to change what the team does?’ Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t think that’s the highest priority for him. That was for us to worry about.”

  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. After all these years of development—and the poor recent output from LucasArts—the 1313 team felt big pressure to make a splash. Years of public layoffs, rushed games, and canceled projects had cost LucasArts whatever prestigious reputation it had in the 1990s. “We were at that point not super sure what the public’s or press’s impression of a LucasA
rts game was,” said Chen. “I would say candidly it was probably spotty at best. So putting something out at that point had a lot of gravitas attached to it.”

  Two months before E3, George Lucas approached LucasArts’ leadership with a new mandate: Star Wars 1313 should star the bounty hunter Boba Fett. Lucas wanted to explore the backstory of the enigmatic mercenary, who had first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back and was revealed in the prequels to be a clone of Jango Fett, progenitor of the Republic’s clone troopers. Instead of 1313’s current hero, Lucas said, they should use a younger, pre-Empire version of Boba.

  To the Star Wars 1313 development team, this was like being told that they had to reroute an oil tanker. They’d already designed a protagonist, who had his own story, personality, and background. They’d cast the actor Wilson Bethel to play their hero, and the team had already recorded dialogue and captured many of Bethel’s facial movements. Both Fred Markus and Dominic Robilliard pushed back, telling Lucas that changing the main character at this point would be a monumental undertaking. It would require the team to reboot everything, they explained. What if instead they added Boba as a nonplayable character, integrating him into the story without changing the hero they’d spent years developing? Couldn’t they find some other solution?

  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. “We had a whole story planned out,” said one person who worked on the game. “We were in full preproduction at that point. Every level for that version of the game had been planned and written. At that point we were on the fourth or fifth draft of the story. It was at the point where we were all super excited about it.”