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The creator of an ill-fated 2010 video game showcasing enigmatic Star Wars baddie Darth Maul says he's trying to resurrect the project, but admits he has a tall hill to climb: Namely, that Electronic Arts is the exclusive publisher of any Star Wars game for the foreseeable future.
Dan Borth, of Red Fly Studio, held an AMA with Reddit yesterday, kicking off the discussion by saying his team was "working on resurrecting [the Darth Maul game]." Further down he said the Texas-based studio was "working on a full next-gen demo of all things Maul to show to the powers that be."
Electronic Arts and Disney announced an exclusive agreement in 2013 giving EA the publishing rights to Star Wars video games. It's a multi-year pact whose expiration date is unknown.
Red Fly landed the untitled Darth Maul project in 2010 after it acquitted itself with the Wii port of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. According to an interview with Game Informer last year, Red Fly did everything it could to make a go of the project, but it was ultimately canceled after eight months of work and some absolutely birdbrained direction from LucasArts, which was the norm for that publisher in its death throes. (Ask Free Radical and Battlefront 3.)
Darth Maul was one of the very, very few intriguing characters from the Star Wars prequels, sort of a Boba Fett-esque muscle character of few words (66, to be exact). He and his lightsaber staff were bisected by Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1999's The Phantom Menace.
If EA and/or Disney are done with Darth Maul altogether, Borth is holding out hope that EA would still "see the value in us reskinning our combat mechanic to be more in line with what they are thinking for Star Wars."
EA, of course, is locked on for the Nov. 17 launch of Star Wars Battlefront, and the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens a month later will probably wash out the memory of or affinity for the prequels. But who knows.
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