Star Wars 1313‘s E3 2012 trailer included a placeholder main character that LucasArts planned to replace before the game was released. With this week’s closure of LucasArts, we may never see the game on store shelves, but Kotaku has learned that the main character of 1313 would have been… wait for it… Boba Fett. I’ll give you a minute to catch your breath as this is clearly a development that no one was expecting.
The reason for the placeholder character was due to the fact that Boba Fett wasn’t added to 1313 until just before last year’s E3 Expo. Until that point, the game officially didn’t have a main character and was basically a blank slate being used to tell stories in the Star Wars underworld.
While internal development has ceased at LucasArts, there’s still hope that 1313 (and Star Wars: First Assault) will be completed by a third party. According to Kotaku’s tipster, this scenario is unlikely:
“[LucasArts] ended up with movie tech that wouldn’t fit in a game, and game tech that wouldn’t fit in a movie. 1313 was always in danger of not being made.”
If Star Wars 1313 is truly dead, we should probably start thinking of it as a game frozen in carbonite, forever taunting us with the dream of a “mature” take on the Star Wars saga. Though I’m not sure a game starring a character with as much baggage as Boba Fett could have done it.