The dead Star Wars: 1313 game ‘may’ get new life with Disney

We’ve had dozens of Star Wars games over the years, but it seems like fans will never forget about one game that never actually came out.

Star Wars: 1313, an action-adventure game about the dingy underworld of the central urban planet of Coruscant that publisher LucasArts was developing in 2012, may still get its chance to wow fans, Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy said in an interview with Slashfilm. When asked about unused scripts for a proposed live-action Star Wars cable show, Kennedy explained that her and her team are still going through all of that material, which includes the ideas for Star Wars: 1313.

“That’s an area we’ve spent a lot of time reading through the material that [Star Wars creator George Lucas] developed,” she said. “[That] is something we very much would like to explore. And there was 1313 the game. …”

When Slashfilm writer Peter Sciretta excitedly interjected about how cool 1313 looked at the time, Kennedy fully agreed.

“[It is] unbelievable,” she said. “So our attitude is we don’t want to through any of that stuff away. It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”

Now, it’s important to keep in mind that Kennedy did not say Lucasfilm is thinking about finishing 1313. She’s simply saying that the characters, story, and concepts that Lucas, his crew, and the developers at LucasArts came up with could serve as the backbone of something else in the future. That may mean an Electronic Arts-published video game — or it could mean a comic book, television show, or tabletop role-playing game. The point is that Kennedy’s team wants to build on top of everything that Lucasfilm has in its vaults, which includes 1313.

It isn’t too surprising that the legend of 1313 continues to hang around this franchise even as we prepare for a new entry in the film series. LucasArts wowed gamers when it debuted early footage of 1313 running on an advanced version of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 during the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show. If we were to get reductive about it, the LucasArts production looks like an Uncharted clone with amazing art design and cutting-edge visuals for the time.

Check out some of the early trailers, which LucasArts released in conjunction with Epic to hype up the future of the Unreal engine:

But in 2013, LucasArts — by then a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company — confirmed that it had cancelled 1313.