Games industry head honchos have all gotten into the same hobby recently: Refusing to say anything about the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake that got revealed at a PlayStation showcase all the way back in September 2021. It just seems that no one at any of the corporations supposedly involved—Sony, Disney, and Embracer Group—wants to talk about it ever since trouble cropped up at the remake’s original developer Aspyr.
Earlier this year, Sony started scrubbing KOTOR remake stuff from its social media channels. Just last month, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors told reporters that he wouldn’t comment on the game because “Anything I say to this becomes a headline” (which we then turned into a headline), and now Disney’s gaming boss is saying similar stuff. But wait, is that a slight cause for hope I detect?
In a chat with Axios’ Stephen Totilo, Disney head of gaming Sean Shoptaw was asked about the status of the KOTOR remake, to which he responded that there’s “Not a lot I can say on that point for some hopefully obvious reasons,” but went on to say that KOTOR is “obviously an incredibly popular game, one that we are incredibly proud of and think that there’s still a lot of demand for. I’ll leave it there.”
Now, let’s not get confused. This is rather standard corpo-speak that offers no definitive conclusions either way as to whether the KOTOR remake will ever see the light of day, but the fact Shoptaw is willing to acknowledge “a lot of demand” for it makes me think that it’s not completely dead yet. It is, at least, more than Wingefors’ blanket refusal to comment on the remake in any capacity at all.
It’d make some sense, too. Videogame newshound Jason Schreier was recently out and about telling people that—according to his sources—the game is still being worked on at Aspyr parent company Saber Interactive.
So perhaps Disney still wants to do something with KOTOR, even if it’s hard to tell just what that might actually be at this point. After all, with the game apparently yanked away from Aspyr, with Embracer in the grip of an ongoing financial calamity, and with Sony seemingly memory-holing all mention of its own involvement, I can’t imagine that the project, or what’s left of it, is anywhere near as lavish in scope as it was back in 2021.
Honestly? Suits me. People will tell you KOTOR feels dated these days, and they’re probably right, but I’ve been playing it recently and I still think it’s a great game. I’ve always been curious as to what Beamdog’s pitched “Reforged Collection” remasters of KOTOR 1 and 2 would look like. I suspect if the KOTOR remake project does eventually produce anything we can actually play, it’ll probably bear more similarity to that remaster idea than it does to the original notion of an all-singing, all-dancing modern remake.
Or perhaps it’ll just die quietly. We’ll find out more as time goes on, but I hope we get some kind of KOTOR thing out of all this. Partly because KOTOR is great, but mostly because I want to write “Somehow, KOTOR returned” in a future headline.
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