Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 2
4/17/2009 5:16 PM | 10 Comments | Page 7 of 9
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Blackman: Maybe it is generational thing. Sam was really excited to be in the game. We didn't have to sell Sam on the opportunity to be in a game. He understood that it was just as cool to be in a game as it is to be in an animated feature, or a movie or TV show.
Kahn: Don't underestimate the fanboy nature of Sam. He would just stop by the office, just to hang out.
Nathalie Cox
He'd stop by randomly and we'd say, Are we doing voice recording today? Nah, I'm just here to hang out. Nathalie [Juno Eclipse], I wouldn't say is a huge fan girl. But there were a couple of moments where she had a feeling about the line. I think she says, "May the Force be with you." She's the only one who says it in the game.
Kahn: She also says the line about jumping to lightspeed.
Blackman: She got all the geeky fan lines. And I'll tell you the other best moment in all of
The Force Unleashed. We got Jimmy Smits to play Bail Organa. And we actually had a lot of cast members in the studio together. Sam, of course, was there for every recording session that anybody did, even if he wasn't in the scene. So Sam was there when Jimmy Smits was there. And when Bail Organa/Jimmy Smits has to read the line about forming the Rebel Alliance, Sam is standing right next to me, and he grabs my shoulder, like, "Oh my god." Hairs are going up on the backs of both of our necks. It was amazing.
[Laughs]
Lucas: Do have you have a favorite environment from
The Force Unleashed?
Blackman: I love the Death Star. One of the early ideas we had was to let players be able to go to the Death Star and Force Push guys into the Death Star laser, like it was a big subway train coming. And you can do that in the game. It's not required, but you can do it.
Lucas: Killing all the Wookies on the first level. As a Chewbacca fan, did that break your heart?
Blackman: We were actually worried about that. We had people on the team saying, "You can't kill Wookies." So we tried to make [the Wookies] as bad-ass as possible. We gave them these cool weapons. I was worried that people would instantly get turned off by killing Wookies. Thankfully, that didn't happen. But what I kept saying was, we're not making the Wookies any less bad-ass; we're making them even more bad-ass. Which makes Vader even more bad-ass.
Narcisse: There always has to be somebody more bad-ass.
Lucas: So where do we go from here? This game doesn't end with a cliffhanger
à la "Empire." Where do we go?
Blackman: Well, there you go. Decision made. I'm going to go work on Full Throttle or something.
[Laughs] Let me ask you: Where would you guys go? Would you want to stay in the same time period and look at it from a different point of view?
Lucas: I want the Apprentice, only he's not the Apprentice anymore; he's Starkiller now.
