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A fully playable Wii build of the third installment in the original Star Wars: Battlefront series recently surfaced online, providing us with the most complete version of the game we’ve seen since it was canceled 16 years ago.
Reportedly found on a Wii test kit discovered at an e-waste recycling center and lovingly restored by fan group Free Radical Archive, the Star Wars: Battlefront 3 build is dated just a week before work on the game came to a halt. As such, it’s more than eight months further along in the development timeline than an Xbox 360 prototype that got leaked in 2016.
Star Wars: Battlefront 3 was an open secret in the video game industry for years. After the success of the first two games in the series, both of which were handled by Pandemic Studios, reports from 2006 indicated LucasArts had shifted development of a third game to Free Radical Design, the studio perhaps best-known at the time for the TimeSplittersseries.
Work on the project continued for several years and looked promising enough that LucasArts even signed Free Radical to develop a fourth Battlefront. Unfortunately, the relationship souredbetween the two after leadership changes at LucasArts, leading to Star Wars: Battlefront 3’s cancellation in 2008.
“It was pretty much done, it was in final [quality assurance testing],” Free Radical founder and former studio director Steve Ellis told GamesIndustry.biz in 2012. “It had been in final QA for half of 2008, it was just being fixed for release. LucasArts’ opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing, and they’re right. But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished.”
The build of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 that appeared online this month is compatible with a custom version of the Wii emulator Dolphin. It’s not perfect and requires some controller finagling to properly replicate the Wii’s motion controls, but what’s there definitely aligns with Ellis’ statements on how far along the game was in the development process. And it only stands to get better as more fans get their hands on the code and provide the polish it didn’t receive over a decade ago.
