Two scrapped Star Wars titles revealed

Former Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht has lifted the lid on a couple of games in the Star Wars universe that never saw release. The titles, which would have been in the Rogue Squadron strand of the franchise, were confirmed in a recent interview with IGN.

The first was the Rogue Squadron Trilogy, a compilation that would have included Rogue Squadron, Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, and Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike, and was initially intended for release on the original Xbox, before development was halted due to financial issues.

This led the studio to work on the second title that was cancelled, Rogue Squadron: X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, which was in development for Xbox 360 and was planned a multiplayer game where players would take part in huge space battles for either the Rebels or Imperials.

That game was cancelled in 2005 (Lucasarts were apparently "dubious" about making a launch title and killed the project), although Sony had the chance to bring it to PlayStation 3, but Shuhei Yoshida declined the opportunity.

Instead the studio went on to make Lair on PS3, which Eggebrecht called "a pretty big mistake". Once their exclusivity deal with Sony had expired, the studio went back to some unfinished business.

Development was therefore resurrected on the Rogue Squadron Trilogy, with a view to bringing the project to Wii, but Eggebrecht said the unstable environment at Lucasarts and the financial climate of 2008 eventually led to its cancellation, despite the game having been finished.

"There is an artistic loss of that game, which I think everybody on the team agrees is the best work they've ever done," Eggebrecht said. "But there's also the human toll, and everything could have been easily resolved by just getting this game out. So, it was a huge bummer."

These two games join the likes of Star Wars 1313, a promising title that also suffered a similar fate, and more recently Disney, the new franchise overlords, have started withdrawing games that have already been released.