Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 1
4/16/2009 7:17 PM | 7 Comments | Page 7 of 8
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
[Aside: Blackman: "How'd I wind up with two butters?"]
Lucas: Talk a little more about the story and how it relates back to George.
Blackman: I think that the benefit we had with
The Force Unleashed was that we were setting it in a time period that had been previously off-limits. George was awesome in that he said, "You guys are the first to play in this area; go ahead." We had a series of meetings with him. We actually did a few pitches. I think we had six or seven pitches, one of which was set in that time period. Once we kind of all agreed that it was the best time period, he said, "OK, this has always been off-limits, and here's what's kind of going on in that time period, from a very high level." So he didn't tell us, "Darth Vader has a secret apprentice," or, "The Emperor is this or that."
It was more like: The Empire is rising to power; there's a lot of resistance, so the Rebellion isn't formed yet; there are still some Jedi out there, but most of them have been wiped out, but it's OK to have some Jedi running around, etcetera. He kind of just gave us the political landscape.
The one thing that stuck in my mind, the thing that I never forgot -- what he told us was that the Emperor fundamentally views Vader as broken. He recruited Anakin because he was awesome; he was going to be this really powerful agent of his, or right-hand man to him. When Anakin gets messed up on Mustafar, that basically makes him broken. Useless. Not useless, but ... "broken" was the word that [Lucas] kept coming back to. So we kind of wanted to play with that. So the Evil Ending kind of has Vader broken.
We wanted to have a guy with Force powers running around this time period. But a lot of the guys who'd worked on the Jedi games weren't sure we could pull it off the way we wanted to. So we tried to make it into a Jedi secret agent game, where you had these really cool weapons, and weapon-customization was a factor, and the storyline revolved around you being this Imperial who gets betrayed and all this stuff.
You have Force powers that nobody knows about, so it was all about combining weapons with Force powers. You'd have some crazy ice weapon that would freeze enemies, and then you'd pick up a rock (with the Force) and smash him or whatever. But Force powers were more of an afterthought [in this pitch]. The more we focus-tested, the more we talked to fans, the No. 1 fantasy of all Star Wars fans is obviously to be a Jedi; to have the lightsaber and the Force powers. So we said, screw it; let's embrace that and go totally nuts, and not only make you a Force-wielder like you see in the movies, but we're going to go beyond that and let you do things you've never seen before.
