Lucasarts had many intriguing Star Wars projects in the pipeline before Disney came waltzing in and casually changed everything. I’m not really complaining mind, The Force Awakens saw Star Wars returned to former glories, but it turns out that an Episode VII videogame was in the works years ago.
Star Wars Episode VII: Shadow of the Sith would have served as a sequel to the original trilogy. This was before Revenge of the Sith hit cinemas and closed out the prequel trilogy with one big shrug, and George Lucas (who still owned Star Wars at the time) was adamant there’d be no Episode VII on the big screen.
Cinelinx recently spoke to former LucasArts creative director Haden Blackman who shed a little more light on the project.
Apparently, Shadow of the Sith would have followed Luke’s son Ben Skywalker from the Expanded Universe books as he investigated a new threat to the galaxy – a Solo.
Of course, the Expanded Universe was wiped from canon when Disney came on board, so don’t expect to see Ben Skywalker anytime soon, although the idea of an evil Solo has been used in the new film to great effect.
Blackman says it was just one of many ideas that came from a short exercise:
Ultimately, it was a good motivation to generate a ton of different ideas in a short amount of time, but it really just validated what we already knew — the vast majority of gamers wanted to be a Jedi/Force wielder, and the setting, story, even the core features were secondary to that.
A lot of the ideas Blackman had for Shadow of the Sith eventually made their way into The Force Unleashed, which saw you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and use all kinds of awesome force powers and a lightsaber.
Oh Star Wars. Even when your games are nothing more than cancelled one paragraph pitches, they still sound amazing.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.