Luke Skywalker. Lea Organa. Han Solo. For fans across generations these names carry weight, they were the original core characters of the Star Wars franchise, which has gone on in the 47 years since the first movie's release to become the 3rd largest movie franchise of all time.
To get the film made, director George Lucas reduced his salary on the film, but maintained complete control of the merchandising rights. That move has made Lucas billions of dollars due to licensing books, toys and yes, video games.
While Kenner's Star Wars Electronic Battle Command Game, released in 1979 was the first electronic game based on the franchise, it's the 1982 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back that's considered the first true video game based on the series.
In the years that followed the launch of the Star Wars franchise a number of tie in games were released, some to fairly high praise, such as the TIE Fighter game released in 1994 for computers. While reviewing the game for Game Bytes Magazine, Phil Sandler is quoted as saying "At the highest detail level, the graphics are simply astonishing," and "I can only give this game my very highest recommendation."
The next few years saw several other well received Star Wars games released, including Dark Forces in 1995, Rogue Squadron in 1998 and Jedi Outcast in 2002. Then just a year later, in 2003, a Star Wars video game would be released that would set the bar for future games in the franchise: Knights of the Old Republic.
Game developer BioWare, best known at the time for the Baldur's Gate games and MDK, had decided to move onto making a Star Wars game, but their deal with LucasArts had specific restrictions that would shape their next game.
“LucasArts came to us and said that we could do an Episode II game,” BioWare CEO Raymond Muzyka said in a 2002 interview. “Or LucasArts said we could go 4,000 years back, which is a period that’s hardly been covered before.”
So Bioware decided to set their upcoming game roughly 4,000 years prior to the established movies, a move that gave them more creative freedom and would ultimately help establish the game as something "New" to the Star Wars franchise.
With the setting decided the team at BioWare began working on Knights of the Old Republic, which would be the first RPG Star Wars game. The team ultimately decided to utilize the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG as the foundation for the game, because the rules were fairly similar to their work on Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate.
"The option was there to use the Wizards of the Coast ruleset or make our own," said Muzyka. "We explored doing our own stuff, but then we picked up the Wizards RPG and thought, “This is pretty fun.”
Knights of the Old Republic launched on July 5th, 2003, to an overwhelmingly positive critical response. The game would go on to win numerous awards including the Game Developers Choice Awards' game of the year, BAFTA Games Awards' best Xbox game of the year and Interactive Achievement Awards for best console & computer RPG.
Even though the first game received massive accolades, BioWare would ultimately wind up not making the sequel. BioWare instead suggested that Obsidian should get the Knights of the Old Republic license due to their familiarity with Obsidian's past work & positive relations between the two studios.
Despite a tight timeline to make the game, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords launched to generally favorable reviews, with many praising the game's more ambiguous moral choices and the story. However, there was also criticism of the game for its graphics and what many viewed as a rushed ending.
Unfortunately, there would never be a third Knights of the Old Republic, although years later BioWare would revive the franchise with their online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Launched December 13, 2011, the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), heralded a new era for the franchise with BioWare back at the helm, once again receiving generally positive reviews with many praising the story, voice acting and music.
While the MMO continues to operate to this day, BioWare is handing the reins of the game over to Broadsword Online Games so that they can focus on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.
Even without any new entries into the Old Republic games, the Star Wars franchise has had several high-profile games released in the years since.
The Force Unleashed, a third person action game was released in 2008, with a sequel being released in 2010. In 2019 a new Star Wars game franchise was launched with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order and its sequel Jedi: Survivor in 2023.
But fans of the Old Republic series, which hadn't had a new entry since 2011, got exciting news in 2021 at the PlayStation Showcase 2021, the official announcement of a Knights of the Old Republic Remake.
Despite initial excitement, some concerns began manifesting around the upcoming project. While the remake was announced as being worked on by Aspyr, a Bloomberg report revealed significant problems with the project's development.
Eventually Aspyr's parent company Saber Interactive, who had been acquired by Embracer Group in 2020, took over the project. Further concerns arose when the announcement trailer for the game was taken down from PlayStation’s official YouTube channel.
Eventually rumors began to swirl that the Remake had been outright cancelled, speculation that was hyper fueled by the fact Embracer cancelled 29 games and closed seven studios within six months in 2023 according to GamesRadar.
But as fans of the franchise began to contemplate the Remake would never see the light of day, they received unexpectedly positive news for the project. It was reported that Saber Interactive, in a $500 Million deal, would be sold to a group of private investors and become a privately owned company, and they plan to continue developing the Knights of the Old Republic Remake.
47 years after the launch of Star Wars: A New Hope and 21 years after the initial launch of Knights of the Old Republic, there is hope again for fans of the franchise that they will one day get an updated release of the beloved classic.
