Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 2
4/17/2009 5:16 PM | 10 Comments | Page 8 of 9
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Narcisse: I want Han Solo.
Lucas: Yeah, if we're not getting our Indiana Jones, then I want Han Solo, too.
Blackman: As we talk about what might be next for the team, the problem is that we killed off Starkiller at the end of the game.
Lucas: So Starkiller's dead.
Blackman: Well, he's not dead in the non-canon Evil Ending, right?
Lucas: He's dead in the ending I got.
Blackman: In the canon ending, you go in to save Kota and you fight the Emperor. And in that ending he seemingly dies, allowing the Rebel Alliance to escape. In the other ending, you kill Vader, and betray the Emperor. And the Emperor tells you, "Now you're my new apprentice." And you betray him, and then he pulls down the Rogue Shadow, and crushes you
[laughs a little] with the Rogue Shadow. And he kills Juno, Bail, Proxy, Kota; you're still alive, but you wind up as this crazy cyborg assassin.
Narcisse: You know what your end-around is to bring Starkiller back?
Lucas: It was all a dream?
[Laughs]
Narcisse: Force Ghost. Enter somebody else's body.
Jones: What would you be doing if you weren't doing this?
Blackman: I'd probably be writing full-time. I love to write. Comic books or screenplays. I'm a huge movie fan, and one of the things that's a little depressing about working in the games industry is that the platforms change so quickly. You can go back and play the old games again on the new consoles, but you still don't get that excitement of flipping channels and going, "Oh, 'Gremlins' is on; I'm going to watch 'Gremlins' again!" So, you know, if I wasn't doing this, I'd love to make movies.
Lucas: Did you write a movie script for
The Force Unleashed?
Blackman: The Force Unleashed's cinematic script was written in Final Draft; it was written like a movie. The original draft, I'm embarrassed to say, was 120 pages long. We had to cull it, because we couldn't make 120 minutes of cinematics.
Jones: Was there a sex scene that got edited out?
Blackman: No. We had the kiss scene. That's it.
Lucas: If someone said, "OK, Haden, we're pulling you off games; we want you to write the
Force Unleashed trilogy."
Blackman: That depends. What are they paying?
[Laughs] Everybody's got a price. I've got two kids and a mortgage. OK, my guilty confession here is, I'm a Star Wars fan, but until I started working at LucasArts, I'd seen the movies, but that was it. I was not a hardcore Star Wars fan. So Star Wars is exciting to me still. But the thing that keeps me at LucasArts is the team. Like, all the people who made the game so great -- if somebody said, You could leave the games industry and leave that team to go sit in your office alone for three months and write a screenplay, I don't know if I'd do that or not. The team is such a big part of why I stay.
Lucas: Are you itching to birth another creative baby like this again?
Blackman: I am, or else I would have left.
The Force Unleashed was different, and special, in the sense that everything we did -- I talked about this at GDC last year, right? New tech, new engine, new tools, new platforms, new team, new concept, all that stuff. It was like having octuplets or something. Yes, I'd like to have another baby -- maybe not octuplets. Because every game is really hard. Which is what sucks about getting bad reviews or releasing a game that doesn't do well. No game is easy to make. Bad games aren't bad games because people took months off, or ... maybe they had too tight of a development schedule and didn't have the right concept. I don't think it's because the people in the industry don't work really hard.
