20 Years Later, A Star Wars Writer Tells Us What Would Happen If Darth Vader Ruled The Galaxy

Development for the video game adaptation of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was a logistical nightmare for everyone involved. The game began under an entirely different team before being totally scrapped and restarted from the ground up with a new developer, The Collective, less than a year before its scheduled release. Jeremy Barlow, an Eisner Award-nominated comic book veteran who’s worked on Mass Effect, Alien Vs. Predator, and Star Wars comics, joined the team just six months before launch as one of the game’s lead writers.

“Back then, before a big movie came out, marketing had this big push where they would release a video game, the novelization, and the comic adaptation a week before the movie came out because that was the peak time for people to be interested in it,” Barlow told Inverse.

Despite the game’s troubled production, it turned out pretty well. It’s an experience that players remember as fondly as Barlow does, largely because of its wild alternate ending. While you can experience the ending all Star Wars fans are familiar with, where Obi-Wan incapacitates Anakin and sets the stage for the rest of the saga, completionists can also unlock a bizarro version where Anakin dispatches of Obi-Wan, then Palpatine, presumably so he can rule the galaxy himself.

The ending has stuck with players because of its many implications for Star Wars lore, and it’s stuck with Barlow for the same reasons.

“What has been so rewarding about it is that 20 years later, it’s still in people’s minds and hearts,” Barlow said. “It’s just awesome. And it’s not a reflection on me, but a reflection on just how powerful that idea was and what Star Wars means to people.”

In 2004, Barlow was an editor at Dark Horse Comics, which published Star Wars comics before Disney acquired the franchise in 2012. Barlow was already deep into drafting Sith’s comic book adaptation, so he didn’t need to spend time getting up to speed on key events for the game. He wrote game dialogue, background interactions, and enemy barks, as well as mission briefings and cutscenes that recounted the film. But even with his prior knowledge, he wasn’t ready for the complexity of making a video game.

Barlow said The Collective was constantly creating and tweaking character models, mechanics, and levels based on a film still in production. With the game dependent on what was in the final film, it was common for developers to build an entire level based on scenes they’d been shown, only to get word that the sequence had been cut from the movie.

This meant constantly scrapping and restarting levels, while trying to minimize the amount of work and money put into creating new assets and animations.

“It was an adjustment coming from comics, where you can do anything,” Barlow said. “There’s no budget restraints in comics the way there is in games. Sometimes I’d write a cutscene for the game, and The Collective would come back and say, ‘We do not have the assets to have that many tanks in this scene.’ It made me appreciate comics a little more in the flexibility and freedom that you can do with the visuals.”

As intense as the process was, working on the game gave Barlow ample opportunity to have some fun in ways he couldn’t in comics. In the game’s unlockable versus mode, for example, Mace Windu will exclaim, “I will strike you down with great vengeance,” quoting Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

“That was me,” he said. “I was slipping in dialogue from other movies that the actors were in in the background.”

Those splashes of creativity paled in comparison to the game’s legendary alternate ending. Barlow said the idea for the ending actually came from the game’s publisher, LucasArts. During development, The Collective had briefly considered including two campaigns, one starring Obi-Wan and one starring Anakin. With such limited time and resources, the team ultimately decided on a single campaign with alternating protagonists, but that didn’t mean having to scrap what would’ve been the ending of Anakin’s campaign.

So Barlow pitched the specifics. Coming up with what happens if Anakin won his duel against Obi-Wan, he explained, was a matter of connecting the dots. Eliminating Obi-Wan would affirm his status as the most powerful force user in the galaxy. It would also let him process Obi-Wan’s words about Palpatine playing him like a fiddle.

“It just made sense to me,” Barlow said. “Let's have him just go back and kill Darth Sidious and say, ‘Now I'm going to take over the galaxy.’ It totally fit in with the whole Sith ideal of the apprentice growing and killing the master. It just seemed like a no-brainer, and we all went nuts for it.”

“We only had like a minute and a half cutscene, and we had to get to the point across as fast as possible and as seamlessly as possible,” he said. “But geesh, I would’ve written a whole continuation of that. I mean, the potential is incredible. Can you imagine Padme and Anakin going back to Coruscant? We thought about it all the time internally [at Dark Horse].”

If given a chance to tell more of that story, Barlow says he’d focus on the dynamic of this new galactic leadership, and what a resistance movement would look like under an Emperor Anakin.

“I would start with life on the ground under this rule of the Skywalker family and go from there,” he said. “What does Padme’s influence on the kids do? What’s it like being raised by these parents who have a public face together, but behind closed doors are obviously opposed?”

Barlow closes by making one thing clear.

“The galaxy would be so much worse off with Anakin running it than with Sidious, because I think at least Sidious followed the rules in a weird way.”