Bite-Sized Game History: The Final Footage of Star Wars 1313, Sony Acquires Bungie, and Ninendo Announces End of 3DS/Wii U eShop

Get a bunch of video game fans in a room, and they’ll gladly talk your ear off about all the ones that got away. Games that hooked us right from the first announcement and then just withered away in development hell. I know it’ll never happen, but I still hold out hope that Capcom will revive Maximo 3 someday. I mean the first two were so fun…

Anyway, for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s talk about a few games, developers, and online storefronts that got away…

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

While LucasArts was never fully dissolved, Disney formally reestablished the publishing label (under the original Lucasfilm Games name) in January 2021. Since then, they’ve announced more than a half-dozen new Star Wars games and a new Indiana Jones game in partnership with Bethesda.

Unfortunately, none of those games are Star Wars 1313, which fans have been clamoring for since it was canceled in 2013. Star Wars 1313 was an action-adventure game that would have featured Boba Fett as the main character. With the finale of The Book of Boba Fett shining a spotlight on the bounty hunter once again, Shinobi602 recently shared some very impressive prototype footage from the game provided by The Vault Project. Created just before LucasArts was shut down, it’ll continue to make fans wonder what could have been:

Bungie operated as Microsoft’s premier first party studio from 2000-2007, but they broke away from the consolemaker after the launch of Halo 3, and completely walked away from the Halo franchise after 2010’s Halo: Reach. Since then, the developer has been hard at work building one of the most popular live service franchises with Destiny and Destiny 2.

For Microsoft, Bungie was definitely the one that got away. But that parting became even more pronounced on January 31, when Bungie announced they were joining Sony’s stable of studios:

Nintendo’s past is littered with games that got away, and that includes more than a few that were released but remain locked on older hardware. Last month, they delivered another blow to game preservation efforts when they announced that the Wii U eShop and 3DS eShop would close in March 2023. Hundreds of games that never received a physical release can be found on both storefronts, and they will be lost forever after that date.

In light of this news, the Video Game History Foundation issued a statement asking Nintendo to rethink this announcement:

Thanks to Shinobi602, Bungie, and the Video Game History Foundation for providing these bite-sized bits of video game history on Twitter. And if you like, you can follow me on Twitter for more stories of the ones that got away.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.