Haden Blackman: We really worked in parallel with it. We had a small design team working on a number of different concepts, and every concept had to have what the story hooks were, what the gameplay hooks were, simultaneously.

Gradually, over time, there were several gameplay hooks that we kept coming back to, and story hooks. One path was coming up with The Force Unleashed, and all the gameplay hooks for that, and the other path was coming up with the storyline, and the character. I think chronologically it just sorted out. We had the Force Unleashed notion before we really decided on the story. The setting, between the two trilogies, between episodes III and IV was really defined early on. So it was a little bit of both.

SFBG: Were you turning to other Star Wars properties or other previous games as templates, or sources of inspiration?

HB: We looked at all the other Star Wars games to see what they did well, to see what could have used improvement, but really we wanted to make our own game, to put our own stamp on Star Wars.

We’re all big fans of Knights of the Old Republic, for example, or Dark Forces or Jedi Knight, but we wanted to make a different type of game, and a third-person action game is very different than a deep roleplaying game like Knights of the Old Republic. But we looked at what types of stories those games told and what was successful, and then we also looked at what had not been re-imagined or re-envisioned about Star Wars, because we wanted to have a new take on it, and that’s where the idea of The Force Unleashed came from.

SFBG: Were there concerns within the genre of third-person 3D action that you were interested in addressing, or a goal correcting the wrongs of other games? I think particularly of the camera, which is often a problem in a hyperkinetic 3D environment like the one you created. Were there things that you saw and said, “We can do this better, we can do this differently?”

HB: I think for us, it was really about doing new stuff. But first of all, we wanted to make the game as accessible as possible, and as broad as possible, so we went out and we tested it a lot with various consumer groups, and with fans, to make sure that they could get the controls and they could grasp and easily manipulate things using “Force Grip” and so on. That was a really big focus for us, and some games have done it well in the past, but some games haven’t, so that was an area that we put a lot of emphasis on.

And then really doing new stuff - how can we interact with the environment in new ways and how can we amp up the force and really blow it out of proportion? And we really encourage people to explore; the people who are going to have the most fun with the game are the people that explore the environments and explore different tactics. You can defeat almost any enemy in the game with a couple different tactics.

SFBG: A big part of the selling point for this game is new physics technology. You have Havoc physics, Digital Molecular Matter, things that have made the game world much more realistic, much more destructible, and much more interactive.

Do you think there’s a downside to deploying that much technology in a 3D gameworld? Some reviews have mentioned the difficulty of targeting the right things. You have a world in which all these different objects and parts of objects that have been destroyed can be interacted with. Does it become too much to handle, almost?

HB: I actually don’t think so. I think we erred on the side of the casual gamer. When we went out and focus tested, targeting wasn’t an issue for a lot of the casual gamers. We wanted to make sure that they could grasp the coolest object nearby, and really focused on things like that, rather than precise, precision targeting, which tends to be a little bit more hardcore. The big danger is letting the technology overshadow the gameplay, or the story, and think we avoided that.

I think the technology is a big part of the game, but it’s in service of what we want to try and do, which is to have this Jedi that plays like he’s a superhero in these destructible and interactive environments.

SFBG: People have said that the game is relatively on the short side, does this mean that we have a sequel in the works?

HB: I think that The Force Unleashed concept could be taken in a lot of different directions, and we could tell a lot of stories in that framework, so I certainly hope there’ll be something in the future. In terms of the length, again, that was a conscious decision, so that people could play through and get a feel for the story without devoting 40 hours to it.

What we're seeing is people saying that they’re playing the game on multiple difficulty levels, or trying to find everything. My favorite thing to do is to go back to previous levels with new powers unlocked and see how much destruction and chaos I can cause.

SFBG: I would ask you about multiplayer, but it seems like it would have been such a lucrative bit of leverage that the fact it’s not included means you guys tried it and it didn’t work. Is there a thought of introducing a multiplayer component in the future?

HB: I certainly think if we do a sequel we’ll look at all the features and the areas where there’s things that we wanna add. The multiplayer choice was again a conscious choice and we wanted to put it on the platforms where it made the most sense, giving each of the platforms something unique, so the Wii version, for example has a duel mode that allows you to go head-to-head on the couch with a friend. The PSP and the DS have a multiplayer mode as well. Really, at the end of the day, it’s thought of as a single player, epic story that we want to immerse you in.

SFBG: Is there a score-keeping mechanic, or anything like online Leaderboards or something like that?

HB: Potentially. We’re definitely keeping score, and you’re trying to beat your score on certain levels, by pulling off combos, by exploring the environment - all those points are used to make you more powerful as you go along.

SFBG: I’ve got one more question, from maybe more of a Star Wars fan perspective than a game journalist perspective. The Force Unleashed features characters, environments, planets, and story arcs that we might not have seen before. Is that run by central command, in terms of how it affects the canon? You seem like you’re operating very much under the aegis of George Lucas, considering he just showed up on stage.

HB: The way it worked was early on, we met with him to talk about story ideas, different characters, and to get a good idea of what the time period was like, in his mind, so he gave us a really good history lesson about that time period between episode III and IV. Then he let us go off and make the game.

We did work very closely with Lucasfilm Licensing, which is a division of Lucasfilm that’s responsible for approving everything, so every script, every story idea goes through them for approval. But really, since so little had been told in this time period, a lot of it was them taking information so they had it for other people. We had a ton of freedom, because of the time period and because we talked with Lucas early on. He told us everything from what kind of master Darth Vader would be to what Princess Leia would be doing.