Cancelled Star Wars game would have let you play as Luke Skywalker's son
And threatening the galaxy… an evil Solo offspring
A long time ago, when Revenge of the Sith smashed box offices back in 2005, George Lucas vowed that it would be the last Star Wars film ever made. The brand was only supposed to live on in video games, comics and boardgames. That was until Disney bought Lucasfilm off Fox for a lot of money in 2012 (and made even more money off The Force Awakens in 2015).
Now former LucasArts creative director Haden Blackman (who sounds like he could be a character himself) has revealed some of the ideas he and his team came up with for different Jedi-based video games. Star Wars Episode VII: Shadows of the Sith was just one of these ideas, and would have allowed the player to be Luke’s adult son Ben Skywalker, who was previously created for the Expanded Universe Star Wars novels set after the Rebel triumph in 1983 movie Return of the Jedi.
In the game, Ben was “walking the line between the light and dark sides of the Force, unleashing new Force powers never-before-seen in games or movies as he investigated a new threat to the galaxy," Blackman told Cinelinx.
And you’ll never have guessed the threat… that’s right, it was a Solo child, probably Han and Leia's son Jacen from the EU. And if that conflict's sounding familiar to what we saw in The Force Awakens, that's probably because Jacen's path to the Dark Side in the books is thought to have directly inspired the character of Kylo Ren (aka Ben Solo) in the sci-fi sequel. We'll just have to wait and see if the EU's battle between Jacen and his twin sister Jaina will also cross over into the movies...
Still, even though the proposed games were scrapped, the idea of a Jedi struggling between the two sides of the Force was picked up in the 2008 game series The Force Unleashed.
Blackman says there were plenty of ideas being pitched, but nothing really took off. “The only one that had more traction – dozens of design documents, concept art, and even a few prototypes and pre-vis videos – was Scum and Villany, a bounty hunter game.”
And who knows, we may be seeing a Skywalker child child on the big screen sooner than we think when Star Wars: Episode VIII comes out in December 2017. He probably won't be called Ben though – that'd just be confusing.
