Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Word also came down that LucasArts couldn’t talk about Boba Fett at E3, which meant that for the next two months, the Star Wars 1313 staff had to build a demo around a character that they knew wouldn’t be in the final game. On one hand, this made for a good opportunity to test out their new technological pipeline, which used ILM’s film rendering techniques to create flashy smoke and fire effects, allowing for some of the most photorealistic spaceship crashes one could find in this galaxy. They could also experiment with facial motion capture, one of their most impressive (and most challenging) pieces of tech. “Human faces are the one thing that we as human beings are very tuned to know when something’s right and something’s wrong,” said Steve Chen. “Getting that right took a lot of work. A lot of work. In terms of skin tone and lighting and surface texture and expression itself. Any tiny little thing where the face doesn’t quite move in the right way or the eyes don’t look quite right will set your mind off.”

  On the other hand, this E3 demo would take months of their lives; long days and late nights, all dedicated to characters and encounters that might never actually appear in their game. (Robilliard told the team they would try to salvage as much of the demo as possible, though they knew the story would be gone.) Maybe it’d be worth the stress, though. The Star Wars 1313 team knew they needed to impress people. Even within LucasArts, there was a concern that the hammer might come down at any time—that the studio’s parent company, Lucasfilm, would cancel the game; that they’d suffer more layoffs; that Paul Meegan might be another casualty of the cursed title “LucasArts president.”

  To Fred Markus, Dominic Robilliard, and the rest of the team, simply announcing 1313 at E3 wouldn’t be enough. They had to be the best thing there.

  If you walked around downtown Los Angeles during early June 2012, you’d probably hear people talking about two games: Watch Dogs and Star Wars 1313. Both looked incredible. Both were planned for next-gen consoles that hadn’t been announced yet. (Neither Sony nor Microsoft were pleased with Ubisoft and LucasArts for showing their hands so early.) And both games had stolen the show. Days of showing Star Wars 1313’s impressive bounty hunter demo had resulted in exactly the type of buzz that LucasArts needed that summer.

  Critics wondered if, like many of the sizzling demos that game publishers brought to shows like E3, Star Wars 1313 was all smoke and mirrors. Was this a “target render,” demonstrating the type of graphics that the development team wanted to achieve rather than what they could actually make? Or would the game really look like that? “It was playable—I played it, and it was not the kind of thing where if you did one thing slightly incorrectly, the whole thing fell apart,” said Evan Skolnick, the lead narrative designer. “All those mechanics you see are things that were working in the game.”

  After years of reboots and endless preproduction, the Star Wars 1313 team had momentum. The press was excited, the public was hyped, and Star Wars 1313 seemed real—even if nobody outside the studio knew that the main character was actually going to be Boba Fett. Some on the team still found it strange that Lucasfilm had barred the 1313 team from talking about Boba at E3, but seeing Star Wars 1313 win E3 awards and leap to the top of press outlets’ “Most Anticipated Games” lists was thrilling for them, especially those who had been at LucasArts for the past decade and watched the revolving door of presidents in action. Finally, it felt like they’d reached stability.

  Once they’d flown back to San Francisco, the Star Wars 1313 team gathered and started sketching plans for entering production. In the films, one of Boba Fett’s most iconic accessories was his jetpack, which the development team knew they’d have to add to their game in some way. But they didn’t know how to approach that. Would it be more of a jump pack, propelling the player forward large distances, or a hover pack, allowing you to hold down a button and gain altitude? Or something else entirely? “Just a simple decision like that can completely change what sort of levels you’re going to build, what sort of enemies you’re going to design, what it looks like on-screen, how it controls,” said Steve Chen, who left the Star Wars 1313 team after E3. “Something as simple as that has huge ramifications.”

  Either way, with Boba Fett in the starring role, the designers would have to reimagine all the encounters they’d planned. Enemies would need to be aware of the player’s jetpack so they could take cover from attacks that came from above them, which, as one member of the 1313 team told me, was “a major pain in the ass.”

  LucasArts still had momentum, though. In the weeks after E3, as part of a planned hiring ramp-up, the studio recruited a dozen veteran developers from across the industry. The 1313 team was still relatively small—around 60 people, with hopes of expanding to 100 or even 150—but they had a great deal of experience. “Usually on a team there’s a mixture of senior people, midlevel people, and juniors that would be learning the ropes and learning from the seniors who are mentoring them,” said Evan Skolnick. “This team . . . it seemed like everyone was just senior level. Everyone knew their stuff really well, and were basically all-stars, so it was really amazing to be working with that caliber of talent across the board on that team.”

  Around September 2012, two strange things happened. First, Lucasfilm told LucasArts not to announce the other game they’d been developing, a shooter called Star Wars: First Assault that the studio had planned to reveal that month. Second was a studio-wide hiring freeze. Lucasfilm executives said it was temporary—LucasArts’ president, Paul Meegan, had just quit, and the polarizing Lucasfilm president Micheline Chau was on her way out—but either way, it put the brakes on the Star Wars 1313 team’s plans. They needed more staff to enter full production.

  To LucasArts, these moves made no sense. They were all feeling motivated after a spectacular E3 showing, and they had fans on their side, with video game news outlets everywhere publishing articles about how LucasArts might finally be “back.” It was, as one LucasArts employee said, “a weird disconnect.” Game development was so often about this sort of momentum, and LucasArts had struggled so much to get their projects revving over the past decade. Why wouldn’t their parent company want to help them out? Why wouldn’t they want to keep riding the 1313 train while it was at full speed?

  The answer to all those questions was “roughly four billion dollars.” On October 30, 2012, in a shocking, blockbuster move, Disney announced that it was purchasing Lucasfilm—and with that, LucasArts—for $4 billion. All the weird changes suddenly made sense. Lucasfilm wasn’t going to make big announcements or hire dozens of new game developers when it knew Disney might have other plans in motion. And Disney’s main interest was, as the company made clear when it revealed the deal, to produce more Star Wars movies. In the press release Disney sent out to announce its purchase, the word “LucasArts” appeared once. “Video games” did not appear.

  To say that LucasArts’ employees were stunned by this news would be like saying Alderaan was a little bit shaken up. For close to a decade, rumors had been floating that George Lucas might retire—he’d admitted to feeling traumatized by the fan backlash to his prequel films—but few people thought he’d follow through, even as he made his intentions clear. “I’m retiring,” Lucas had told New York Times Magazine in January 2012. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.” He had made comments like that in the past, though, so to see the legendary director sell his company was surreal for everyone who worked for him. “We just didn’t know quite what to expect,” said Evan Skolnick. “We were hopeful that it would mean good things for us, but . . . I think we were well aware that it might not mean good things.”

  To video game reporters, Lucasfilm representatives said the acquisition wouldn’t affect Star Wars 1313. “For the time being all projects are business as usual,” the company said in a statement, mirroring comments that Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, made internally to LucasArts’ staff. Business as usual, he told them all in a meeting. But there was one giant, glaring red flag. Immedi
ately after news of the acquisition broke, Iger said on a conference call that the company would look to license Star Wars to other video game companies rather than publish its own games, and that Disney was “likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console.”

  It was a “wait, what?” moment for LucasArts staff. They had two games currently in development, and both were on consoles. If Disney was going to make games for a more casual audience, where did that leave LucasArts? Some Star Wars 1313 leads read the tea leaves and decided to call it quits, including Fred Markus, who resigned shortly after the acquisition. And the hiring freeze continued, which meant not only that the Star Wars 1313 team couldn’t expand, but that it couldn’t replace the people who were leaving. LucasArts couldn’t stop the bleeding.

  Dominic Robilliard and those who were left on the Star Wars 1313 team continued to work. They were optimistic that they still had the right combination of pieces to make something great: a good video game hook, a talented core staff, and top-notch technology. Plus, they figured their Boba Fett game would fit nicely with Disney’s announced plans to make a new trilogy of Star Wars films. Star Wars 1313 was set between the first two trilogies, so it wouldn’t interfere with the newly planned episodes VII through IX.

  In the weeks after the Disney purchase, Star Wars 1313’s developers put together a demo that they could show to their new corporate overlords, which Disney assessed with some interest. “They were interested in learning everything about the company they had just purchased, so they wanted to know about every project,” said Evan Skolnick. “They were looking at the company holistically, as you would of a company you had just purchased for several billion dollars. So I think that 1313 was, along with every other in-progress project and planned project at the company as a whole, subject to evaluation, investigation, questioning, and eventually a decision based on every one of those analyses.”

  Disney stayed quiet, though, and as 2012 ended and the new year came around, LucasArts’ employees still didn’t know where they stood. Several people left for new jobs, and others started sending out applications, knowing that the studio wasn’t making any progress. It felt like they were in purgatory, or maybe frozen in carbonite, as everyone at LucasArts waited to hear what Disney was going to do. Some thought Bob Iger might ax Star Wars 1313 and First Assault in favor of a new slate of games, maybe tied to the movies. Others guessed that Disney would overhaul LucasArts, transforming it into a developer of casual and mobile games. All of them crossed their fingers that Disney would just let them keep doing what they were doing, and that it really would be, as Iger had promised, business as usual.

  The next red flag came in late January 2013, when Disney announced that it had shut down Junction Point, the Austin-based studio behind the artsy platformer Epic Mickey. “These changes are part of our ongoing effort to address the fast-evolving gaming platforms and marketplace and to align resources against our key priorities,” Disney said in a statement. In noncorporate speak, what that meant was that Epic Mickey: The Power of Two, the sequel to Epic Mickey that Junction Point had released in November 2012, had bombed.

  Disney didn’t offer sales numbers, but reports pegged The Power of Two’s first-month sales at around a quarter of what the first game’s had been, which was especially atrocious considering that the first Epic Mickey had been a Wii exclusive while Epic Mickey: The Power of Two was on several platforms. As Iger had hinted, console games just hadn’t worked out very well for Disney, which was inauspicious for LucasArts.

  By February 2013, the whispers had grown louder. Both in and out of the studio, rumors flew that Disney was planning to shut down LucasArts. Employees would exchange knowing glances in the halls and sometimes even openly muse about the company’s future. Still, there was a lingering sense at LucasArts that Star Wars 1313 was untouchable. Surely, with all the fans talking about how exciting the game looked, Disney would have to finish making it. In the worst-case scenario, the developers thought, maybe Disney would sell 1313 to another big publisher. “I think there may have been a feeling that because we had built up so much anticipation for the game, and we had just done so well at E3 in 2012, having won and been nominated for so many awards, and really got the press and the fanbase excited, that we felt it might be enough to save the project,” said Evan Skolnick. “That 1313 couldn’t be canceled now, because there was so much anticipation.”

  What became clear to LucasArts’ staff later, some said, was that Disney had given them a grace period. For several months, Disney allowed LucasArts to operate as if things were normal while it sought deals with other publishers for the future of both the studio and Star Wars video games. Of all the interested parties, there was one publisher that showed the most excitement: Electronic Arts. Throughout the early months of 2013, EA negotiated extensively with Disney, talking about all sorts of possible options for the future of LucasArts. Rumors began to float around the studio that hey, maybe LucasArts would be fine. Maybe EA wanted to buy them. All winter, LucasArts’ management would proclaim that things were going to be OK, even telling employees not to bother handing out their résumés at the annual Game Developers Conference in March.

  The biggest rumor, as conveyed by several LucasArts employees, was that EA had a deal in place to buy LucasArts and finish production on Star Wars 1313 and First Assault. But then, the rumor alleged, the new SimCity turned out to be a debacle, which led to EA and its CEO, John Riccitiello, “mutually agreeing” to part ways, which caused the LucasArts deal to fall apart. Riccitiello, however, told me that these negotiations weren’t as close as LucasArts’ employees had believed. “Virtually everything gets discussed on some deal with somebody,” he said. “Most of it is fantasy.”

  Then, everything collapsed.

  On April 3, 2013, Disney shut down LucasArts, laying off nearly 150 employees and canceling all the studio’s projects, including Star Wars 1313. It was the final act to a long period of turbulence at LucasArts, and the end of an era for one of the most treasured studios in gaming.

  To those who remained at the studio, this felt both shocking and inevitable. Some left the building to go drink at a nearby sports bar (called, oddly enough, Final Final) and bemoan what might have been. Others stayed back and ransacked the place, using flash drives to grab half-finished trailers and demos off the LucasArts servers before they all disappeared. A few former employees even stole console development kits. After all, the employees figured, Disney didn’t need them.

  But there was still one sliver of hope. During the final hours of LucasArts, a top EA executive, Frank Gibeau, set up one last-ditch meeting to try to save Star Wars 1313. Gibeau told LucasArts to put together a strike team for a salvage mission at EA’s headquarters. Dominic Robilliard gathered a small team of leads to meet at EA’s sprawling campus in Redwood City, California. There they would give a pitch to Visceral, the EA-owned developer of Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline. If all went well, Gibeau said, Visceral would hire the core staff of Star Wars 1313 and continue working on the project there.

  Standing in front of a packed room of Visceral employees, Robilliard and his leads gave a lengthy presentation on Star Wars 1313. They talked about the story, describing in detail how you’d fight your way through the seedy hive of Coruscant, unraveling a spice trade conspiracy and watching your closest friends stab you in the back. They showed all the cool mechanics they’d prototyped, like the flamethrower and wrist-based rocket launcher. They walked everyone through the hours of levels they’d built in gray box, where there were detailed layouts of each stage (but no art). It was clear that (a) there was plenty of work left to be done and (b) Star Wars 1313 had a lot of potential.

  Then, as one person who was in the room recalled, nobody said anything. All heads turned to Steve Papoutsis, Visceral’s longtime studio manager and the man who would ultimately get to make the final call. For a few seconds, Papoutsis just sat there, looking at the desperate faces of the Star Wars 1313 team. Then he started to talk.
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br />   “He stood up in front of all the Lucas and Visceral people,” said one person who was in the room, “and just said, ‘Well, I don’t know exactly what you’ve been told, but I can tell you that what you think is going to happen right now is not what’s going to happen.’” Then, according to that person, Papoutsis said he had no interest in resuscitating Star Wars 1313. Instead, he and his studio would conduct interviews with all of 1313’s key staff. If Visceral liked them, he said, the studio would hire them for a brand-new project.

  The Star Wars 1313 leads were shocked. They’d come to EA’s campus in hopes of convincing Visceral to finish their game, not to get new jobs. Many of them had held on to the hope that even after everything they’d been through, they could still save Star Wars 1313. Even the most cynical of LucasArts’ staff—the ones who thought that Star Wars 1313’s cinematic technology would never work properly in a video game—believed that the game had too much potential to fail.

  Some leads left immediately. Others stayed and took interviews for what would eventually become a brand-new Star Wars action-adventure game directed by Amy Hennig, who joined Visceral in April 2014 after leaving Naughty Dog over Uncharted 4.

  Later, a dejected Dominic Robilliard sent out an e-mail to the entire Star Wars 1313 team. It opened:

  I had hoped that I could address you all face to face as usual, but it seems that we are already scattered to the winds and the chances of a well attended gong meeting are slim! It’s probably for the best as I’m not sure I could get through what I have to say to you all and keep it together.

  When I look back on the last couple of years making this game I cannot believe what we achieved under the circumstances we had to deal with. It really is astonishing. Re-directions, interference, unstable management and studio leadership; sometimes I just can’t believe you have stayed with me, and more importantly still deliver such an incredibly high quality of work. I cannot tell you how proud I am of every [single] game-maker on this team. I will be in your debt for the rest of my career.