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Red Fly Studios was once making a Darth Maul game for PS3, 360 and Wii. Now it wants to bring the project back to life.
The developer’s Dan Borth took to Reddit yesterday to confirm that his team is working on resurrecting” the project and is currently working on a full next gen demo of all things Maul to show to the powers that be”.
Of course, there’s a big stumbling block to overcome – EA currently has the rights to the Star Wars IP.
What can you do to help us?” Borth stated. Please go to the Red Fly Studio Twitter feed and post your support! Post #WeWantMaul on EA and Disney’s twitter and social media outlets – let them hear you!” Which is sure to endear him to both parties.
Added Borth: "We need to approach EA with a demo that will impress them. I think we have that or are close to it. Still it is completely not up to us."
EA is currently preparing to release Star Wars: Battlefront on November 17th and is also working on Amy Hennig’s still mysterious Star Wars title. Jade Raymond also has a hand in that game’s development.
News of the Maul game first appeared in April 2014. The idea was to resurrect the Sith fighter, who was killed off in 1999 film The Phantom Menace, at the same time the character was to re-emerge in the animated Clone Wars series.
Red Fly worked on the Wii version of The Force Unleashed 2. Indeed, this new title was envisioned as a Nintendo exclusive, although LucasArts subsequently made it a multiplatform project. George Lucas himself had pitched the game as a "buddy cop-like experience" with Darth Maul and Darth Talon”, the latter of which being a character from the wider Star Wars universe.
Work on Maul began in October 2010 but the project was scrapped in June 2011. LucasArts, of course, was killed off in April 2013 following Disney’s acquisition of George Lucas’ empire.
Borth added on Reddit that he wanted the game to feature a young Maul aged between nine and 11, covering the events right up to Episode 1.
We wanted to show what he went through to become a Sith,” he explained. [To] showcase the torture the Emperor put him through [and] show how you as the player would have made the same mistakes and ended up a Sith.”
Here’s the gameplay footage that was unearthed last year:
