Year 1999. ‘Star Wars, Episode I – The Phantom Menace’ broke the 16-year drought without a film in the saga, and it did so with a prequel that introduced us to a handful of new characters like Qui-Gon Jinn, the hated Jar-Jar Binks or Darth Maul. This Sith, capable of using a double-bladed lightsaber, soon became an iconic figure. So much so that, years later, it was considered important enough to tell his origins… in a Wii video game.
Neither good nor bad
Red Fly Studio, developers of game versions for Wii and DS (meaning, with graphics lowered to a minimum and a rather questionable quality) such as ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II’ or ‘Thor’ wanted to prove their worth and for that, after a call from LucasArts, they considered a game about the origins of Darth Maul for Nintendo consoles. And it’s not what you expect: “We wanted people to see him as a child kidnapped by Emperor Palpatine and physically, mentally and emotionally tortured until becoming this powerful Sith.”
The idea was for the player to become Darth Maul and thus justify his actions: “You get angry, frustrated, and make the same mistakes as him. No one has seen the Sith training up close. No one has seen how a Sith is built from childhood to adulthood. We have only seen the change in five seconds: Anakin Skywalker cries a little and suddenly he is bad.” He is not wrong and the game, frankly, would be very interesting… but Red Fly couldn’t go any further.
On December 9, 2010, the development of ‘Maul’ officially began. The problem was that, at the same time, the saga was going to tell its story in Clone Wars and they didn’t share much of it with Red Fly. Little by little, as the days went by, the studio realized that they were never going to make their video game about the origin of Darth Maul. It was going to be, rather, a spin-off of ‘Clone Wars’. Lucasarts didn’t give them information about the series or the direction of the project, but they did give them a title: ‘Battle of the Sith Lords’.
In the absence of lore information, the studio simply started making a game. “The initial plan was to make an action-focused infiltration game,” in the style of ‘Arkham Asylum‘. The prototype kept growing, the character could already move, and the art direction was working hard on the first game to come out of their Wii and DS stronghold and go to PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.
And then entered George Lucas. Yes, the very George Lucas, in a meeting for which they were given three pieces of advice: never say “no” or “yes, it will be easy”, never mention Starkiller, the protagonist of ‘The force unleashed’ (and refer to him as “that guy”) and not try to explain how the Force works. The meeting did not go as expected: Lucas adored a new Sith called Darth Talon, and intended for her and Maul to be friends. In fact, it is said that he imitated her like a 40s actress saying “Don’t you know how to whistle? Put your lips together and blow”.
So, he wanted them to erase everything and make a Maul and Talon buddy movie. The problem? Both, in the saga’s canon, were separated by 170 years! But Lucas also had a solution: that the protagonist wouldn’t be Darth Maul but a descendant or a clone. Three hours later, the producers from Red Fly left the meeting feeling like they had been run over by a bus.
Finally, after two and a half weeks without communication, Lucasarts decided to cancel the game just as it was coming out of its prototype stage. It was June 24, 2011, and his dream was over. Red Fly had to lay off 70% of its workers but managed to survive. Meanwhile, ‘Star Wars‘ was sold to Disney for an absolutely insane amount of money. And Maul’s infiltration game could never be carried out. Rest in the Force.
