My Ebola is in Mourning
Disney Shuts Down LucasArts, Cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault
Disney has laid off the staff of LucasArts and cancelled all current projects.
Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio’s current projects—Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313—were cancelled. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.
Publicly, Disney is saying their current games could be licensed out to a different publisher or developer, but according to our source, that’s unlikely. Our source says Lucas has pursued the option for “one or both games,” but nothing happened. “With the teams now basically being dispersed I think both games are effectively dead forever,” our source said.
A second source also told Kotaku this afternoon that the chances of Lucas licensing out 1313 are very slim. The odds are “effectively zero,” the source said.
And there is a black, black cloud over Tucson as he attempts to absorb this.
Sheesh. I can hardly believe it myself. Lucas Arts has been almost as much a part of our lives as the Brat has. In the early 90’s, when he was a young lad and world famous Jedi, breaking into the online games to design starships, make custom skins for people and DOS bombing miscreants who cheated (not to mention win copious amounts of tournaments), the folks at Lucas Arts liked what his evil, creative, self-taught little brain could do, going so far as to offer him a spot at Skywalker Ranch for his freshman summer of college, if he [insert DUM DUM DUMMMM music] “kept his grades up”. If only he’d been a senior in high school instead of going into his sophmore year. So much for that carrot with his “oooh, something shiney/did-that-on-to-the-next-thing” personality, and any hopes we had of living off of our kid like any self-respecting Lohan or Jackson parent went ‘poof’.
My only consolation is that Ebola ~ never one to mince words ~ would have been canned the second he heard about JarJar Binks anyway, so it’s not like it would have been a long term thing.
But, still…
Biz, Life, Planet Ebola | tree hugging sister | 
April 3, 2013 4:59 pm
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They had not done real well in a while with games. Personslly I love Republic Commandos but it neverveent beyond pc and the orig Xbox. Folks have been wanting a new Battlefront but all we got wss the PSP versions. So much potential but they could not find their groove the last 5 years or so.
What CrCrusader said. That said, they did some great things back in the day. And I wish they’d come back and do it again. But maybe their skills were confined to old-style games. Sigh.
Too bad they didn’t hire Ebola – seems like they needed some new blood. 🙁