I was watching a presentation at Star Wars Celebration VI about the new Star Wars game, Star Wars 1313. It was a pretty impressive tech demo. The game is rendering the world in real time, so that, during the demo where the ship is falling towards the lower levels of Coruscant, they could pause the game and zoom in to the freckles on a character’s face in amazing detail. The game renders, at least on the PC hardware they were running it on (which they wouldn’t reveal) at least as good as most CG in movies today.
The presenters also showed a video about how this game came about as a collaboration between ILM and LucasArts — the idea being that movie animators could create a method to render a movie scene in a video game. No complicated animation that needed to be rendered out overnight via a small city of servers. Just create your objects and let the engine (in this case a highly modified version of the Unreal 3 engine) churn out the action.
That’s when it hit me. This is the holy grail, right? This is the economy of scale that George Lucas is looking for to produce the live-action Star Wars series we’ve all been waiting for.
Then, with that clarity you have when all the edge pieces of a puzzle have been filled in, I began to see the similarities to the rumored Underworld TV series. Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: Underworld started to sound astoundingly similar. They even mentioned on the panel that the player character in the demo was a placeholder for the main character who they weren’t ready to reveal yet.
My credits are on this game being some incarnation of the TV series, and the TV series being the same story line.
GapPage 