BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is one of the most beloved video games in the long-running sci-fi series. As a licensed game, though, developer BioWare encountered a number of back-and-forth arguments with Lucasfilm over the game’s contents.
Mark Darrah, who admittedly didn’t work on the Star Wars RPG, but was active at BioWare at the time and would later work on the MMO The Old Republic, explained that one of the issues the studio faced at the time focused on its use of rather tame language.
“The story that I remember—because I remember having this conversation—is that one of the writers on KOTOR spent an entire day scrubbing through the movies, pulling out every instance of a character saying ‘damn’ because the note back from Lucas was that ‘characters in Star Wars don’t say damn’. And it’s like, ‘oh yeah? Here are the 19 times it happens in your movies’” Darrah told us on the latest episode of the FRVR Podcast.
Darrah, who worked on a number of licensed games under BioWare, explained that these kind of issues were common during game development. “Every time I’ve worked with a license holder, it’s actually felt quite similar,” he said. “In a perfect world, they have one person who’s in charge of this relationship, SEGA didn’t and that made it much worse… but they have one person and they’re king of the universe, they get to decide. You can fight with them, you can go over their head potentially, but regardless of the size of the IP that we were dealing with, the relationship felt quite similar.”
The BioWare veteran admits that using the license for The Old Republic, the still ongoing MMO, was simpler. “It seemed like it was less, ‘I’m just a guy in an office and I’m a king and I’ll just say yes or not on a whim.’ It seemed like it was more of a codification.”
In the Star Wars universe now, the word damn is less used, especially when it comes to the ongoing Filoni-led content. Now, the media tends towards the term “dank farrik” which is used in lieu of damn or other curse words.
While a Filoni and Faverau creation for the modern Star Wars media, it seemed that Lucas was trying to tame the language of the universe way back in the early 2000s. Not only was BioWare chastised for its use of “damn”, but Lucas’ own films started creating their own kid-safe swear words such as “poodoo” in The Phantom Menace.
Darrah believes, at one point, they were trying to “retcon” a number of swears out of the IP with KOTOR being the “thin edge of that wedge”. While KOTOR “scrubbed” at least the vast majority of its damns from the game—as Darrah notes, “the rights holder always wins”—there’s never been any confirmation of what Lucas’ plans were for swearing in Star Wars or if the complaint even originated from the creator of Star Wars.
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting part of Star Wars history and a reminder that a game’s faithfulness to an IP is often dependant on those in charge of the relationship, not necessarily the developers and fans that might know better.
Right now, the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is currently being remade by Saber Interactive. Following early development at Aspyr Media, the game is currently being remade without a known release date. Nevertheless, it’ll be very exciting to see how the game makes its mark on modern gamers decades after its official release.
