With all the success of the new Star Wars movie people have been wondering about a new Star Wars game. Well we got one, for a little bit at least. Yes, much like Ben Kenobi at the end of Darth Vader’s lightsaber in A New Hope, it was gone in an instant. Left only to taunt us with its pale blue ghost and leave us to wonder why in the hell it didn’t tell us about our sister before things got weird.
Devin Tripp had a novel and lofty goal of creating an open world Star Wars “that will completely blow people away; like Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3 did” and with a $200,000 price point to hit, the Kickstarter went live. Obviously people were incredulous, NeoGAF and the GameDev Subreddit lit up to voice their hope and trepidation about the project. Their fears weren’t unfounded, after all Devin Tripp isn’t from big studio like Bioware or Disney, he’s just Devin, a guy in his twenties working at a convenience store in Dallas, according to an interview Gameinformer’s Mike Futter had with Mr. Tripp.
Sadly, like the title of this article stated, this project was not meant to be, and was cancelled by Devin after only a week. You might be thinking that it was Disney and their team of lawyers who put the kibosh to the game because Tripp didn’t have the rights, but you’d be wrong. According to Tripp himself in his farewell post to the project’s page, “Disney has not contacted me to tell me to shut it down for those of you who think you own Disney.” Further clarifying that he has taken down the Kickstarter himself because he respects Disney and didn’t want the game to get that big. However the biggest reason for the project’s cancellation was the fans themselves. As stated in the post, he found it disturbing that people seemed to be tattling on him to Disney. Here’s what he said,
I find it very disturbing that you want to report me to them. As if they didn’t already know. You truly want to see some be in debt for the (rest) of their life because they had a dream for a video game that they never created. Very selfish, and very ironic. Disney was created because Walt Disney had a dream, was it not? I find it ironic because on a lot of the news and the forums there was a quote from something I said. It read, ” I have talked to Disney, and they have informed me to contact Lucas arts”. I believe most of you said quote, ” that’s like a father telling the kid to go ask their mother because they do not want to deal with them.” Yet I (received) emails from random people basically telling their dad to send me to timeout because they don’t like me.
In the end, Devin’s Kickstarter raised $18,325 of his $200,000 goal and left us with these parting words.
…all you need is the force and you will do ok in life. I wrote the entire thing on my phone while in Childress, Texas with a JUAN bar. So I did not care for spelling mistakes, because of that and I really didn’t think I’d actually be doing this. As many of you pointed out I am highly unqualified. The point of this whole Kickstarter is to not let your dreams be dreams. Don’t say tomorrow just do it.
-Devin Tripp
Thanks for all the backers. It made this whole thing extra funny
What do you all think about this, should Devon have left the project up and went on with the game for as long as he could? What would be your ideal next Star Wars game, or is Battlefront enough for now? Let us know in the comments.