Avalanche Studios was in negotiations for a 'massive Star Wars open-world game' (update)

Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios was at one point close to signing a deal to develop a "massive Star Wars open-world game," according to current and former officials at the company.

EA and Disney announced yesterday that they had signed an exclusive licensing agreement for Star Wars games, and said that Avalanche's fellow Stockholm-based studio DICE would be making one. Oskar Burman, general manager of Rovio Entertainment's Stockholm office, congratulated DICE on Twitter upon seeing the announcement.

Burman spent four years at Avalanche from April 2005 to May 2009, most recently serving as studio manager, and he added that the company had negotiated with LucasArts to make a Star Wars game.

"Actually, wanting to work with [Star Wars] goes deep in [Sweden]," said Burman. "Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we almost got that deal when I was at Avalanche."

Christofer Sundberg, co-founder and chief creative officer at Avalanche, corroborated Burman's tweet in a response and implied Avalanche's title had the potential to make LucasArts profitable.

"If they had given us the deal back then LucasArts would be alive today," he replied. "A massive [Star Wars] open-world game! We would have rocked it."

Burman provided a few more details on the nature of Avalanche's plans in a follow-up tweet, saying to Sundberg that "you'd [have] done wonders with the [Star Wars] license." According to Burman, Avalanche's game would have been a single-player open-world title that let the user do missions while traveling through the galaxy.

We've reached out to Avalanche for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.

Update: Sundberg told Swedish publication FZ: "We had plans to make it more rough, make it more like Gears of War meets Star Wars meets Just Cause 2."