A LONG TIME AGO
How KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC stayed true to the Star Wars ‘used universe’.
What makes a movie, comic book, or video game feel like Star Wars? This is the question every creator has to wrestle with when they’re approached to work on a story set in that universe.
When George Lucas began working on the original Star Wars in the 1970s, his aim was to make a film that looked timeless – never mind the endless budgetary and technical limitations he had to contend with. Production designer John Barry and set decorator Roger Christian proposed the notion of a “used universe”, a term that’s come to be associated with Lucas and the success of the classic trilogy over the years. The idea was to avoid the polished chrome and utopian vistas of earlier science fiction movies in favour of something a bit more tangible: the grimy, kitbashed, lived-in aesthetic of the Mos Eisley cantina or the Millennium Falcon. Props and sets could be assembled from existing parts, and in turn the whole production would be less expensive.
BioWare insisted on following these same design principles during the making of Knights of the Old Republic. One look at the game’s cover is all it takes to spot the similarities – the rusty flying-saucer pirate ship, the hero brandishing her laser sword, the R2-D2 and C-3PO analogues, the Universal-monster-movie villain.
“The reason I draw pictures, what galvanised me as a ten-year-old boy, was Star Wars on the big screen,” says John Gallagher, who designed most of the game’s characters and costumes. “It changed my life.”
Gallagher worked in broadcasting, writing and producing television commercials, prior to joining BioWare. Like most of his peers, he was a neophyte in the games world. “But I’ve drawn my entire life,” he says. “Anybody who knows me knows that, from the time I could hold a crayon, that’s really what I was doing. It was kind of in my DNA.” He spent a total of nine years with the company, witnessing its humblest beginnings and staying on until 2004, two years into development on Dragon Age: Origins.
KotOR is a particularly cherished memory for Gallagher because it gave him the chance to meet his hero – Star Wars production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie.
JEDI COUNCIL
In 2001, following months of preparation, work on the game began
This is an extract from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, published by Boss Fight Books and written by Alex Kane. Boss Fight Books publish nonfiction works about classic games, including Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur’s Gate II, World of Warcraft and more. For more, visit bossfightbooks.com.
in earnest. “Once the post-orgasm glow [of getting the Star Wars licence] was diminishing,” Gallagher says, “we had to get down to business.” All of the team leaders on the project at BioWare flew down to the San Francisco Bay Area to spend a day with the Lucas camp. For the art team – Gallagher, lead animator Steve Gilmour, and art director Derek Watts – that meant a trip “across the pond” to Berkeley, where McQuarrie and his wife lived. There, the BioWare folks were treated like visiting dignitaries. They got to hold the Oscar that McQuarrie had won for Best Visual Effects with Cocoon. McQuarrie showed them his original work, offered advice, and shared stories about “George and the old days”.
“That was life-changing,” Gallagher says. “I got to sit at the feet of the master and spend a few hours with him. He was an extraordinary human being, and just a natural pleasure to spend time chatting with. And you feel like the circle’s complete. If Ralph gives you a thumbs-up, then you feel like ‘Okay, now I can go do this’. And he’d entertained diplomats and kings. I was just another asshole who drew pictures.”
Most artists struggle with some degree of impostor syndrome – the fear that, no matter what they accomplish in their chosen creative field, sooner or later they’ll be exposed as frauds. Even if your name is Ralph McQuarrie. Even if many credit you with envisioning the singular look of the entire Star Wars universe.
McQuarrie told Gallagher about a stroll he took one night in 1977. He liked to go for walks in abandoned spaces – at the docks, in industrial zones, in warehouse districts. On this particular night, though, McQuarrie happened to be on Hollywood Boulevard.
“He was walking along, a little bit of a breeze blowing,” Gallagher says. “Nobody else around. And this paper packet rolls by him – a little wrapper. He looks down and it’s a Star Wars wrapper, for the collectible cards, with a blue-andyellow Darth Vader on the front. Fifteen cents. It hits him in the shoe, he bends over and picks it up. Says, ‘Huh. Guess I’m gonna do okay at this’.”
For Gallagher, working on Knights of the Old Republic wasn’t just another job, it was a chance to contribute to the galactic sandbox his hero had helped dream up decades earlier. There was an enormous amount of pressure to get it right. Fortunately McQuarrie had some words of wisdom for the artists at BioWare.
“He didn’t really have to tell me this, but he said, ‘Always push back. Be of service, but let them understand that they need you more than you need them’,” Gallagher remembers. “And he wasn’t being confrontational or gnarly. It was just, ‘Hey, man, you’re an essential voice here, and your contribution means a phenomenal amount to the process’. That was his bit of advice for me, anyway – be your own boss, don’t take their shit, and you’ll be fine.” McQuarrie also told them, “Enjoy the process itself.”
Luckily, Gallagher wasn’t left alone to create in a bubble. Every step of the process was a collaboration between
McQuarrie hadsome words ofwisdom for the artists
BioWare’s art, design, and writing teams. No single person was responsible for a given character.
“James [Ohlen] and I had a creative shorthand,” Gallagher says, “and we’d finish each other’s sentences when it came to design. James would usually just say, ‘Well, make somethin’ cool’.”
Growing up, Ohlen had served as Dungeon Master for his friends in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and the West End Games Star Wars RPG was a favourite pastime. “I took characters from the campaign I ran, their names and personalities and stuff, and those inspired some of the characters in Knights of the Old Republic – Carth, Bastila, Zaalbar, and Mission,” he says. “That was a quick source of inspiration. I’d done that with the Baldur’s Gate series, too, because it takes a long time to create characters sometimes. I would go back to characters that had been developed over years of playing in a role-playing game.”
“Naming characters is always one of the hardest things to do,” says project director Casey Hudson. “But [the selfexiled Jedi] Jolee Bindo [got his name from] an imaginary friend that I had when I was three years old, that I invented. And I have no idea where that name came from, but it’s just one of those that – you know, when you’re searching for stuff, you just draw from your background.”
The Twi’lek rogue Mission Vao “was originally supposed
to be a young male, maybe a teenager or in his early 20s, based on some of the concepts that we had” according to art director Derek Watts. “But we decided to make her female.” Even after settling on the character’s gender, the team at BioWare continued to push for a design “more like a cute teen and less like the kid from Terminator 2” as Watts told Electronic Gaming Monthly. “Everyone was fine with the new look except for one of the writers, who thought she was painted up too much. We reminded him that he wrote a line for Mission that said, ‘If you don’t watch out, you’ll have to deal with my furry friend’.”
Ideas usually began with BioWare’s core leadership, including Hudson and Ohlen, but developers would often find other ways to incorporate pieces of themselves into the game. One example of this is Pazaak, an inStar universe minigame based on blackjack.
“We wanted to have a card game, and I am a frequent visitor to Vegas,” says writer Drew Karpyshyn. “So I was the one who actually designed the basics of how Pazaak would work, the rules system, and then worked with one of the programmers to implement it into the game.” But cardplaying wasn’t the only hobby of Karpyshyn’s that made its way into the project.
“I used to play on a billiards team,” he says. “Four of the people on it were named Harrison – several brothers or various relatives. And we were gonna call ourselves the HK41s – four Harrisons and one Karpyshyn. We said, ‘Well, it sounds more like the AK-47 if we call ourselves the HK-47s’. So that was the name of my billiards team when I played in the league. And when they found out I was working on a Wars game, [my teammates] were like, ‘Oh, you have to make a robot called HK-47’.”
DESIGN DIFFICULTIES
KotOR players encounter the murderous protocol droid HK47 in a junk shop on Tatooine. He’s remembered fondly as a source of comic relief, as written by designer David Gaider, and also for his menacing, alien design.
For Gallagher, HK-47 was a far less personal affair. “It was a very short conversation,” Gallagher says. “James just said ‘I need a badass C-3PO’. So all I did was essentially use a bilaterally symmetrical protocol-droid physique, with a little bit of enhancement and a snake head, which is really the inspiration for the broader, flatter face. And it was a
copperhead, as I recall.
“So that’s really the inspiration, he was a copperhead C-3PO. And, of course, his personality is what really carries the day, but his physical personality has to reflect his disposition.” The similarities to C-3PO didn’t stop at the physical. In a nod to the more famous droid’s origin story – that he’d been built by young Anakin Skywalker long before he became Darth Vader – HK-47 is revealed to have been owned by none other than Darth Revan himself.
Of course, the artists and designers working on the game didn’t always agree with one another, and they weren’t afraid to say so.
One especially contentious character was Darth Malak, the Sith Lord hunting the player throughout the game. At some point, Malak suffered a lightsaber blow to the face
– his most striking feature is a metal prosthesis where his lower jaw used to be.
“I gave James shit about [the Malak design],” Gallagher admits. “Because I thought it looked like Mort from Bazooka Joe and His Gang. I was like, ‘What the hell is that? You should just have a turtleneck [covering his mouth]. He got his mandible cut off?’. I was like, ‘For fuck’s sake, James. Really?’.”
“I was outvoted, obviously,” Gallagher remembers. “And I didn’t go away and sulk or anything. I said ‘I’m not gonna design Malak because I think it’s a terrible idea’. I was designing other elements for the game, and there was a shit-ton of stuff to do, so I was just like ‘Derek probably has a good handle on this’. And we ended up with the Malak concept. It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t insult me. I just don’t think it’s a very well-realised design.”
Malak aside, Gallagher’s fingerprints are all over the art design in the game. He designed the vast majority of the characters – as well as many costumes, props, and vehicles.
“I probably did 20 iterations of each character, essentially, if you did a head count,” Gallagher says. “As I recall, we were creating by chapter, so the people we meet first in a meaningful way, in terms of story, are the first ones you take a crack at.
“And once you break the neck on the core design, and you’re honouring the Star Wars aesthetic while trying to add your own flourishes in there, then you move forward and cut your teeth on Revan and the Sith. Because it was Star Wars, and we were following the Star Wars methodology, where you offer a multitude of variants on each [character design]. And it’s subtle permutations, where you go ‘Okay, that’s the one’. Or ‘That head combined with those legs, and that works’.
“I was drawing it all up with marker at that point. I wasn’t working digitally, it was too slow. I was just grinding out analog art.”
I probably did 20 iterations of each character, essentially.