Tonight on the Spike TV program GameTrailers TV, host Geoff Keighley revealed the next major Star Wars game from LucasArts: Star Wars 1313. Keighley went to Lucasfilm's Presidio campus in San Francisco, CA, to meet with LucasArts employees who were working on the game.


Star Wars 1313 takes place on the planet Coruscant, but it sounds like the game will focus on a particular area of the planet, because the number 1313 seems to refer to a location, not a person. (Time to give up on that Boba Fett theory, perhaps?) One LucasArts interviewee told Keighley, "It's about being a bounty hunter in the most dangerous place in the galaxy: 1313." As for who the main character will be: "We're not ready to talk about who you're going to be playing and the story itself."


Another LucasArts employee described Star Wars 1313 similarly to the live-action series. "It's the worst of the worst of the Star Wars galaxy brought together in one place," he explained. The game will highlight "all of these more mature themes that we haven't really explored."


Star Wars 1313, which will be played from the third-person perspective, involved significant collaboration between LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic. ILM employees showed off a few generic-looking character models and some of the game's facial recognition/motion-capture technology. This is the same "real-time digital human rendering" that ILM used to turn actor Mark Ruffalo into The Hulk in The Avengers.


As part of a digital lighting demo for Keighley, another ILM employee showed off a still image of a character rappelling down a line onto a ship as it descended a canyon. The canyon reminded me of a Coruscant underworld scene in The Clone Wars Season 2 finale, Lethal Trackdown. Given that they both take place on Coruscant, I wouldn't be surprised if that ship was descending into the very same underworld.


At the end of the short preview, Keighley promised that the LucasArts team would return to GameTrailers TV with the first ever gameplay demo of Star Wars 1313. That gameplay premiere will take place next Monday, June 4th at 10pm ET on Spike.

Earlier this evening, word leaked out that the new LucasArts game would be the mysterious "Star Wars 1313" project. Gaming blog Joystiq reported at 8:55pm ET that a video on the GameTrailers TV website carried a description reading "E3 begins on GTTV with the Star Wars 1313 announcement..." That video, which appeared to be tonight's full GTTV episode, was posted prematurely and quickly disappeared.

Star Wars fandom was rife with speculation that the number "1313" signaled a Boba Fett project as soon as news broke of the domain name registrations. Prior to this game announcement, the only occurrence of "1313" in the Star Wars franchise was in a Fett-focused young reader novel: the bounty hunter adopted the alias "CT-1313" in Boba Fett: Maze of Deception.

The website http://www.starwars1313.com now redirects to a new LucasArts landing page. A press release from LucasArts announcing the project can be found here. Star Wars 1313 also has an official Facebook page.

Here's a description of the game's premise from the press release:

Named for Level 1313, a ruthless criminal underground deep below the surface of the planet of Coruscant, the game puts players in control of a deadly bounty hunter as he uses an arsenal of exotic weaponry to hunt down his marks and uncover the truth surrounding a criminal conspiracy. Star Wars 1313 emphasizes epic set pieces and fast-paced combat with a hero who uses human skills and gadgets, rather than supernatural Force powers, to make his way through this dangerous world.

You can watch the entire GTTV episode right here. The reveal of Star Wars 1313 starts at 1:12 in the video.

Stay tuned to TFN as we bring you the latest news about Star Wars 1313!