Factor 5 president details cancelled Star Wars projects
Ex-Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht has revealed in a recent IGN podcast that the developer had worked on a number of Star Wars games for various consoles. However, the projects were all cancelled by LucasArts or couldn’t be released due to financial problems. Central among them was a compilation trilogy of their previous Rogue Squadron games and a new project based on the titles they had previously created. The trilogy re-release on the Xbox was ultimately cancelled and the team started work on the new game, called Rogue Squadron: W-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, for the Xbox 360 and then later for the Nintendo Wii.
“[Rogue Squadron: X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter] was much more about groups, because it’s always Rogue Squadron, right? So, you would be Red 5, together with the Reds essentially attacking, and there would be the Imperial side. And that would be the two factions duking it out in essentially the movie battles, and then in additional battles.”
As well as the cancelled Star Wars projects, Eggebrecht confirmed that the developer had been working on a number of other titles. These included an open world Superman game for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii along with a “Wii Fly” type game that would be a modern interpretation of Pilotwings. The Superman project was cancelled after the publisher went into financial difficulty and this led to the shelving of their other game too. With LucasArts unwilling to foot the bill to keep Factor 5 running the studio eventually went bankrupt, leaving several games finished but unreleased.
Factor 5 had a particularly strong relationship with LucasArts in the 1990’s and early 2000s, going so far as to establish an US studio in California. During that time they released a number of games based on LucasArts properties primarily on Nintendo consoles, including the popular Rogue Squadron series as well as other Star Wars and Indiana Jones titles. Their last Rogue Squadron game that released was the 2003 game Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike, which featured traditional space combat along with the ability to control a character outside of a spaceship on the ground.