This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" by Jason Schreier. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What happened to the video game Star Wars 1313? How did Boba Fett’s legacy live on beyond the lost game?
In Star Wars 1313, Boba Fett was meant to be the playable character that let players live out their wildest bounty hunter dreams. However, Boba Fett was never meant to be the main character in the game, and creative conflicts ultimately led to its cancellation.
Learn more about why developers decided to cancel one of the most anticipated Star Wars games.
The Case of Star Wars 1313
Schreier ends Blood, Sweat, and Pixels with the story of the unreleased Star Wars 1313, a Boba Fett-centered game as he tried to make a living in the slums of the planet Coruscant. The developers, working for the company LucasArts, overcame numerous developmental and creative challenges only to see their studio bought out and shut down by Disney.
The first major hurdle that LucasArts’s developers faced was from outside the game studio. Star Wars creator George Lucas (who is, by his own admission, not a gamer) kept demanding creative changes. He thought those changes would be relatively minor, but in reality, they required the development team to redo weeks or months of work.
For example, Schreier says that with development already well underway, Lucas wanted the game’s main character to be Boba Fett—a popular character from the Star Wars movies—instead of the original character the design team had created. Lucas thought this would be a simple matter of changing the character’s appearance, but the developers had to completely rework the game’s controls and redesign the in-game architecture to account for the new movement options provided by Fett’s signature jetpack.
(Shortform note: George Lucas’s approach to Star Wars 1313 may have frustrated developers due to the extensive work his requests resulted in, but it isn’t unusual behavior for him. As Bob Iger explains in The Ride of a Lifetime, Lucas is notably possessive of Star Wars, and he sought to inject his own ideas into Star Wars products even after selling the rights to the franchise. For instance, Lucas was reportedly disappointed that filmmakers didn’t use his ideas in The Force Awakens, a Star Wars movie that he wasn’t supposed to contribute to.)
Despite these creative difficulties, a Star Wars 1313 demo was one of the biggest hits at a major gaming convention. Gamers and reviewers alike praised the demo and said they were excited for the full release. However, Schreier reports that before the game was finished, Disney bought out LucasArts and shut down the company. Years of work on Star Wars 1313 had to be thrown away, while developers and fans alike realized that this promising game would never see the light of day.
The Legacy of Star Wars 1313 and LucasArts
Although Star Wars 1313 was eventually canceled, its popularity arguably lives on: Some of its ideas and designs seem to have been repurposed for television. For example, Grant Parker (one of the developers working on 1313) said that he spotted some of the set pieces he’d designed for the game in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.
It’s also not entirely accurate to say that Disney shut down LucasArts. Rather, Disney shut down the production aspects of LucasArts and shifted the company’s focus to licensing. In other words, rather than making Star Wars games in-house, LucasArts would now sell the rights to make those games to other studios. For a while, there was even hope that Star Wars 1313 would be completed by another developer—however, that hasn’t yet come to pass.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Jason Schreier's "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Blood, Sweat, and Pixels summary:
- A rare look into the harsh inner workings of the video game industry
- The four main challenges that video game developers face
- Why Star Wars 1313 never made it to the shelves
