Gameplay video of canceled Boba Fett game surfaces after a decade

A never-before-seen gameplay video of the canceled Boba Fett-focused third person shooter, Star Wars: 1313, recently made its way online recently courtesy of the Vault, a fan community primarily focused on collecting information about developer Free Radical's canceled Battlefront 3 project.

It used to be that the bulk of our Boba Fett cultural digest came from alarmingly thick paperbacks and homemade storytelling with Hasbro figurines. We were happy just to get the bounty hunter as a mid-game boss in Shadows of the Empire or Dark Forces. 

These days, we have more Boba Fett content than you can shake a gaffi stick at, with Temura Morrison taking up the titular role in the Book of Boba Fett Disney+ show. It's too bad the supposed Boba Fett third-person shooter didn't survive long enough to join the party.

LucasArts first demonstrated Star Wars: 1313 way back at E3 2012. It was going to focus on an up-and-coming bounty hunter making his way in the undercity of Coruscant, the most famous of Star Wars' many ecologically dubious city-planets. The project promised something a little more mature, more on the Mos Eisley Cantina side of things, but seems to have been quietly discontinued by Disney following its purchase of Lucasfilm. While the main character in the official trailer was decidedly not Fett, later rumors suggested the game's focus had shifted to feature him as its protagonist.

The gameplay shown off by the Vault seems to be the source of a 1313 screenshot we reported on back in 2020. In the video, we see a Mandalorian-armored protagonist, presumably Fett, making his way through a classically seedy Star Wars cantina before giving chase to his Trandoshan target. What follows is some distinctly Uncharted-style cinematic clambering and hopping, with a couple clever camera angles and some views of a stunning Coruscant cityscape in the distance.

There's still not enough for me to say whether 1313 was a would-be classic denied its chance to shine or just another AAA third-person shooter/platformer from the early 2010s, but in the fullness of time 1313 seems like it's been spiritually vindicated by the path Star Wars has taken. Its developers were way ahead of the curve on big-budget, gritty, non-Skywalker Star Wars stories taking the world by storm—the Mandalorian, the Book of Boba Fett, and Jedi: Fallen Order all echo 1313.

That being said, even as we grow spoiled for Fett content in the 2020s, we've still yet to see a true exploration of George Lucas' original vision of Boba unmasked: