Play on young padawan: Star Wars Battlefront is the game fans of the franchise have been looking for
Developers expect the forthcoming console creation, a sandbox set on planets including Tatooine and Endor, to be one of the biggest-selling titles of all time
When ambitious young filmmaker George Lucas, hot on the heels of the success of his 1950s throwback smash American Graffiti, was negotiating the deal for his next project, a space opera inspired by the sci-fi serials of his youth, he did something unprecedented. Lucas agreed to forego his US$500,000 directing fee in exchange for all the film’s licensing and merchandising rights.
That film was Star Wars and the rest, as they say, is history – more than US$20 billion worth of TV shows, books, clothes, toys, gadgets, rides and, of course, video games.
And the scope of the games – more than 100 official games across every imaginable console, computer and device – has been incredible, from standard stories that follow the films’ original plotlines to universe-expanding quests that span thousands of years and innumerable planets. Space fighters, first-person shooters, third-person actioners, futuristic racers, massive RPGs, Lego spinoffs – the franchise has tapped nearly every possible genre.
Then everything changed: the Walt Disney Company bought out Lucas’ studio for a much-publicised US$4 billion in 2012, its first act being to shut down the entire gaming division of LucasArts. The move killed off a number of near-complete games, console rights were passed over to rival developer Electronic Arts (EA), and rumours emerged that Disney would shift the focus of gaming to the less-ambitious worlds of social media and mobile.
