Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: The Force Unleashed opens with a small child wrenching Darth Vader's lightsaber from his grip. Vader kills the boy's father and takes him as a secret apprentice. Released in North America on the 16th of September 2008, the game sold over a million copies in its debut month. It eventually surpassed seven million, becoming LucasArts' fastest-selling title.

  The story it told filled the largely unexplored years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. A team that began with a handful of people and no fixed direction eventually produced one of the fastest-selling games in Star Wars history. Years later, the game would be told it had never officially happened.

• 2. Clean Slate

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  Game planning began in summer 2004, when roughly six engineers, artists, and designers sat down with what they called a clean slate. More than a hundred initial concepts were generated and then discarded. Possible directions included making the game the third entry in the Knights of the Old Republic series. Others placed the player as a Wookiee superhero, as Darth Maul, as a bounty hunter, a smuggler, or a mercenary. One concept imagined the player as the last surviving member of the Skywalker family, five hundred years after Return of the Jedi.

  Consumer feedback helped the team narrow those ideas to seven viable directions. Elements from each of those seven fed into what became the game's core concept. Settling on that era of Star Wars history gave the small team a sharp creative purpose.

  An off-hand comment about the Force being powerful enough to pull a Star Destroyer out of the sky proved pivotal. Senior concept artist Amy Beth Christenson rendered that remark as an image. The image became a fixture of early pitches and eventually a set-piece moment in the finished game. A one-minute previsualization video followed, built around the idea of overwhelming Force power used in spectacular ways. George Lucas saw it and told the team to go make that game. By the time the concept was solidified, the development team had grown from ten to twenty people.

  In April 2005, the creative team received Lucas's formal encouragement to build the story around Darth Vader's secret apprentice. LucasArts spent six months shaping the narrative from that point. Lucas participated directly, spending hours discussing with developers the relationship between Vader and Emperor Palpatine. Focus group testing showed that while hunting Jedi under Vader's orders would be satisfying to play, audiences expected the protagonist to seek redemption. The story team built that expectation into the script. The creative team also explored bringing Darth Plagueis into the story before setting that idea aside.

• 3. The Technology

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  Until late 2006, the production team was still working out how many polygons, lights, and characters the next-generation consoles could support. Full production began in early 2007. LucasArts built the game on its own proprietary Ronin engine, while also integrating three significant third-party systems.

  Havok handled rigid body physics. Pixelux Entertainment's Digital Molecular Matter, abbreviated as DMM, governed dynamically destructible objects and environments. NaturalMotion's Euphoria drove the behavior of non-player characters, producing artificial intelligence intended to feel reactive rather than scripted. Getting those three systems to communicate required programmers to overcome substantial technical hurdles. The developers also had to balance physics that was realistic against physics that was entertaining to play.

  Development of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, a title in production for at least two years, was set aside until The Force Unleashed was complete. LucasArts initially decided against a PC version of the game. The studio argued that doing the game properly would be too processor-intensive for typical home computers, and that scaling the procedural physics down would fundamentally change what the game was. LucasArts later reversed that decision. A Windows and Mac version, developed with Aspyr Media, was announced for Fall 2009. Making the game run on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was, in the production team's words, a monumental task. Lucas described having the two studios working in the same building as "a great collaboration."

• 4. The Voice Cast

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  Senior Manager of Voice and Audio Darragh O'Farrell spent four months casting the game. ILM's face- and motion-capture technology, called CloneCam, changed how the work was done. For the first time at LucasArts, actors were required to match their characters in age and gender. They performed their scenes together rather than recording in isolation. Written dialogue was pared back as characters' captured expressions took on more of the storytelling work. CloneCam had been used previously in the production of the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

  Sam Witwer was cast as Galen Marek, called Starkiller throughout most of the game. Audio director David Collins noticed a resemblance between the Starkiller concept art and his friend Witwer, and put in a request for a headshot and an audition reel. A few weeks later, Witwer sat for a 45-minute audition. He secured the role by demonstrating a deep understanding of who the character was. Witwer brought new ideas about Starkiller's inner life and gave him what the developers described as a sense of humanity. Witwer also voiced Emperor Palpatine. The character's name carried its own history: Starkiller was an homage to Anakin Starkiller, the original name for the character who eventually became Luke Skywalker.

  Nathalie Cox was cast as Juno Eclipse, Starkiller's pilot and romantic counterpart. Juno Eclipse had not existed in early concept work. The original design placed the apprentice alongside a young Princess Leia, an idea George Lucas found uncomfortable. He encouraged the developers to create a separate love interest. Project lead Haden Blackman revived a name that had once been proposed for the character who became Asajj Ventress: Juno Eclipse. Blackman chose it for the mythic quality of the name Juno and the duality suggested by the word eclipse. Jimmy Smits reprised his prequel trilogy role as Bail Organa. Adrienne Wilkinson's performance as Maris Brood was strong enough that her role was expanded with additional dialogue.

• 5. The Score

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  Jesse Harlin, LucasArts music supervisor, set the score's mandate in precise terms. The music needed to begin in the prequel trilogy's sound world. As the game progressed, it would shift toward the feel of the original three films. Harlin composed the game's main theme. Mark Griskey composed the score, drawing on motifs from John Williams's film scores and weaving in Harlin's theme throughout.

  The 90-minute soundtrack was recorded by the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra. It was mixed at Skywalker Sound in Lucas Valley in September and October 2007. During gameplay, a proprietary system blended musical elements in real time based on the pace, plot, and environment active at any given moment. No two play-throughs produced quite the same musical experience.

  A promotional album was made available through Tracksounds.com in 2008. That site called the result "the most entertaining Star Wars score since Return of the Jedi." A reviewer at The Washington Times called Griskey's soundtrack "another star" of the overall game.

• 6. Beyond the Game

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  Sean Williams's novelization reached the United States on the 19th of August 2008, nearly a month before the game itself arrived in North America. Williams said he was drawn to the project partly by the description of the game as "Episode 3.5" of the Star Wars saga. The novel debuted at number one on both the Publishers Weekly and New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller lists. It held that position for one week before slipping to number seven and number nine, respectively. It also reached number fifteen on the USA Today list.

  Williams found writing the story a different experience from playing it. In the game, the player performs Starkiller's actions; the novel, he said, let readers experience what Starkiller was thinking during those same moments. Williams said he most enjoyed developing Juno Eclipse, finding aspects of the story that the game's format did not easily accommodate. He focused the novel on the dark side and its practitioners. Williams described it as "interesting" to portray the Jedi in an adversarial role.

  Dark Horse published a graphic novel adaptation on the 18th of August 2008. Hasbro had already shown seven action figures from its game-based line at Toy Fair 2007. Lego released a model of the Rogue Shadow, Starkiller's ship. Two downloadable expansion packs, later collected in the Ultimate Sith Edition, placed Starkiller in an alternate timeline as the Emperor's trusted assassin.

• 7. Bestseller, Then Legends

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  In the third quarter of 2008, The Force Unleashed sold 1.738 million units across all platforms. That total made it the third best-selling game in the world that quarter. In the United States, the Xbox 360 version sold 610,000 copies in September 2008, making it the top-selling game for that console that month. The PlayStation 3 version sold 325,000 copies in the same period, ranking fifth for its platform. The Wii version sold 223,000 copies in the United States in September 2008.

  The game won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Video Game Writing. At the 12th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences recognized it with Outstanding Achievement in Adapted Story. Time placed it seventh on its list of the best video games of 2008. Critical opinion was not uniform. Entertainment Weekly named it the second-worst game of 2008. GameTrailers called it the most disappointing game of the year.

  GameSpot called the game's story "more intimate and more powerful" than the prequel trilogy. Critics who praised the game also highlighted its voice acting, physics, art direction, and soundtrack. Those who found it wanting pointed to linear level design, inconsistent boss battles, load times, and camera problems that affected nearly every platform. The Star Destroyer sequence, which LucasArts had promoted heavily before launch, was cited by several reviewers as more frustrating than satisfying.

  Following The Walt Disney Company's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, the game was reclassified in 2014. It became part of the non-canonical Star Wars Legends continuity. The Rebel Alliance origin the game had established was replaced by other Star Wars media, including the television series Star Wars Rebels. A sequel, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, had already been released in October 2010. Aspyr released a remaster of the Wii version for the Nintendo Switch on the 20th of April 2022.