Star Wars’ last great video game character almost made it into the mainstream story

Star Wars Rebels, wrapping up its fourth and final season, almost crossed over with the franchise’s video game canon, says the guy who voiced Starkiller, the protagonist of the last two Star Wars games LucasArts published before Disney bought the property.

Starkiller, familiar to those who played Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (2008) and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 (2010) on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was considered for a crossover into Rebels, as an inquisitor, one Vader’s Force-sensitive agents of who hunt down Jedi, one-by-one of course. That's according to Sam Witwer, who voiced Starkiller in the two video games games. He revealed the what-could-have-been detail in a Twitch stream broadcast earlier this week.

Starkiller's namesake harkens to the earliest drafts of George Lucas' story for Star Wars (my God, even going back to the Journal of the Whills!) But canonically, he posed two problems: One, he was just too overpowered; in The Force Unleashed, the player takes Starkiller on a galactic tour cutting down Jedi masters, before resolving to destroy Darth Vader and Palpatine. In this story, Starkiller survives a Vader stab-wound and being hurled into the vacuum of space before pulling a Star Destroyer to the ground with his Force mojo.

There are two outcomes in the first game. The “good” choice ends with Starkiller as a martyr who helps create the Rebellion. The “bad” one kills Darth Vader and replaces him with Starkiller as Palpatine’s new cyborg assassin, absent the “Noooooooo.” That fed into the Ultimate Sith Edition package, where Starkiller chops down name-brand Star Wars characters in a set of reimagined DLC missions.

I don't know that I'll ever hear a sadder or more haunting line of video game dialogue than the twisted, tortured Starkiller — looking very much like Kylo Ren, mind you — softly saying "Thank you, Proxy," when he finds his desiccated droid in the Jawas' scavenger facility in the Tatooine mission of the Ultimate Sith DLC. Proxy, as ever, is there to serve, even if his torso has been separated from his legs. Starkiller knows, though, just how wrong everything has gone, and you can hear it in his voice.

Anyway, you understand why Starkiller couldn't fit, even into the canon that survived Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm. Starkiller is simply too powerful in a timeline that deploys Force-sensitive chosen-ones every three episodes. Anakin, Luke, Rey, there's no room for this video game interloper, even as a guest star. Too bad. He would be a wonderful cameo in Star Wars Battlefront 2.