Hennig's cancelled Star Wars "the game you would've expected"

Experienced writer, designer, and director Amy Hennig received a well-deserved Honor Award at Gamelab 2018 this month, and at the event we got to sit down with her and talk about the changes in the field, her own career, and what she's doing now, having left her previous role at EA.

One question we asked had to do with the Star Wars project she was working on at EA, to which she said:

"There's a lot of things I can't talk about, and I'm no longer with EA, but I have good relationships with all those folks. It was a very challenging game, very expensive type of game to make in a time where the industry is... publishers are looking for different kind of bets right now than linear, finite story games, so it was always a tough sell, and I could talk about the stuff that we already talked about publicly, which is, in the same way Uncharted was a deconstruction and a love letter to classic pulp adventure cinema, when I started at EA my first task - working with LucasFilm as well - was to deconstruct Star Wars and say 'well, what are the component parts and how would you reconstruct that as a game'."

"And one of the biggest differences from say Indiana Jones or an Uncharted game is that the Star Wars stories in the films and in the game are fundamentally ensemble stories, that the other characters are co-protagonists and that you only achieve your goals and you only escape your misfortunes and things like that by working together, because you're always outnumbered and outgunned. And so one of our guiding principles was actually the Death Star escape from A New Hope, so the only way they could escape the Death Star was by working together in parallel, and so it very much has the DNA of a caper film [...] the fact that you've got this sort of ragtag crew of characters that, by working together [...] taking all of those verbs and saying 'well how do you tell a Star Wars story in interactive terms' and that's very much what we were doing."

"It was set in a scoundrel world and it was coming along very well. Unfortunately it's one of those things that's kind of heartbreaking, because... obviously we were distracted by some other things over the years, but over three years on it and working very closely with LucasFilm, who I'm still working with as a contractor and have a great relationship with, it's just sad not to be able to share it with people and I think it's the game you would've expected I was making and it was really coming together, but maybe in another life; we'll see what happens."

Who knows what the future holds for Hennig, but it's very interesting to hear that she's still working with LucasFilm as a contractor, and that her ties to Star Wars aren't completely severed. We also know via another report that she's started her own independent studio, so it'll be interesting to see what the future holds for her.

Were you looking forward to her project with EA?