FRVR spoke to former BioWare developer Mark Darrah on the latest episode of its podcast, and during the chat the producer shared an anecdote about a fight between the developers of Knights of the old Republic and movie studio Lucasfilm. The team wanted to use a particular curse word in the game, but were told it wasn’t appropriate language for the Star Wars universe. Prepare yourselves:
It was “damn.” BioWare wanted a character to say the word “damn.” But Lucasfilm sent a note back to the developers explaining “characters in Star Wars don’t say ‘damn’.”
In response, Darrah told the FRVR podcast, one of the game’s writers spent an entire day scrubbing through all the Star Wars movies and documenting every time a character did say the atrocious word. Darrah explained, “And it’s like, ‘Oh yeah?’ Here are the 19 times it happens in your movies.”
So that would have settled the matter, right? They say the characters don’t say it; they’re presented with evidence the characters do say it; everyone carries on. But nope, somehow Lucas got its way. Darrah, who didn’t directly work on the original KotOR but was around the team at the time, told FRVR that this was pretty typical when working on licensed products.
It seems that this was due to a newer ethos of Lucasfilm’s, which had already stopped using such profanities in the prequel trilogy, and has avoided even the mildest swears ever since. Of course, this remains something of an irony in a game that featured opportunities to leave the poorest people suffering without medicine, drive families to killing each other, and force a Wookiee to murder his best friend, a 14-year-old girl. Damn.
BioWare vet Mark Darrah worked on a huge number of the studio’s best-known projects, from the original 1998 Baldur’s Gate through to 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and clearly saw some things. “Every time I’ve worked with a license holder,” he told the podcast, “it’s actually felt quite similar. 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.”
And if you’re raising an eyebrow trying to remember the time BioWare worked with Sega, that would be the oft-forgotten Nintendo DS RPG game, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, an inclusion in the developer’s resume as surprising as its creating the sequel to Shiny’s MDK.
