Star Wars 1313

~ the obituary ~

Nobody played Star Wars 1313. It was shown at E3 in June 2012, it was canceled ten months later, and the only people who ever held a controller with it running on the other end were inside LucasArts. Everything anyone knows about it comes from one demo and from a leak that turned up on YouTube nine years after the studio that made it had been emptied out.

The premise was that you went down. Coruscant is the planet that is entirely one city, and the number in the title is a level of it, far under the surface, where the people who do not appear in the films live. No Jedi. No lightsaber. You were a bounty hunter with equipment, and the fighting was supposed to turn on what you carried rather than on what you were born able to do. That was a deliberate move away from the only Star Wars fantasy games had been selling for twenty years.

George Lucas was in the building for this one, reading the story and changing it, and at some point he decided the nameless bounty hunter should be Boba Fett as a young man. A note like that rewrites a project, and the team took it. Development ran on Unreal Engine 3 with people from Industrial Light and Magic working on the look, which is most of the reason the demo landed the way it did.

Then Disney bought Lucasfilm on 30 October 2012, and on 3 April 2013 it announced that LucasArts would stop making games and start licensing the name to people who did. TechCrunch counted the gap at 154 days. About 150 people lost their jobs, fewer than ten stayed to run the licensing desk, and 1313 stopped existing on a Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco.

~ the case file ~

~ the demo ~

The demo aired on Spike TV on 4 June 2012 and the reaction to it was not really about Star Wars. It was about the fidelity. This was the tail end of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, when everybody had learned exactly what those machines could do and what they could not, and the 1313 footage sat visibly on the wrong side of that line. Faces moved correctly and lighting behaved, and the animation had the weight of something captured off a performer rather than assembled by hand.

That was a real advantage rather than a trick, because ILM had tools for that problem and ILM was down the hall. The game was retargeted to PC and the incoming console generation while it was still in development, which is the usual fate of a project that outgrows the hardware it was scoped for. It never got to prove the demo was representative, so the demo stayed the whole of its reputation.

~ 154 days ~

The Lucasfilm statement is a small masterpiece of saying nothing. After evaluating our position in the games market, it said, we have decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. Two games died in that sentence. Star Wars: First Assault, an unannounced multiplayer shooter, was reportedly close to done.

Disney then declined to renew the 1313 trademark, and in early 2014 the United States Patent and Trademark Office marked it abandoned. A studio founded in 1982 had been reduced to a name on a license agreement, and the license went to Electronic Arts, whose Star Wars output over the following decade included some good games and nothing remotely like this one.

~ the leak, nine years later ~

In December 2015 Kathleen Kennedy said the 1313 concept art was gold and that Lucasfilm was spending a lot of time looking at it. Nothing came of that either. In 2022 footage from a later build surfaced on YouTube, showing Boba Fett moving through the underworld, and it circulated for a few days among people who had been waiting a decade for confirmation that the thing had been real.

What is actually gone is not one game. It is the version of Star Wars that 1313 was reaching for, street-level and uninterested in the Force, which the films themselves eventually got around to after the game that would have done it first had been shelved for eight years.

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