For a hot minute, the Blizzard game that morphed into StarCraft was a Star Wars RTS concept that went nowhere

In a rare peek at alternate history, a new book details how Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft sort-of-kind-of started life as a Star Wars RTS.

Speaking to IGN about his upcoming book Play Nice, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier slightly delved into an odd situation that occurred in the 1990s where Blizzard employees were apparently “really excited” to work on a Star Wars game that hadn’t been greenlit by LucasArts.  

“No, nobody’s ever talked about it before publicly, and that’s because it was never really real,” Schreier starts. “So what happened was, Blizzard was working on this game called Shattered Nations, and it was canceled for various reasons, even after being announced. It was announced publicly and then it was quietly canceled.”

Blizzard Entertainment co-founder and president at the time, Allen Adham, then supposedly told the company that it would start hammering away at a potential Star Wars RTS in collaboration with Lucasfilm. Things get weird when Schreier says he spoke to LucasArts’ former president, Jack Sorensen, who apparently “didn’t remember anything like that.”

Schreier notes that development on the project didn’t last long – “It couldn’t have been more than a couple months” – since, you know, Blizzard seems to have began concept work without actually locking down the Star Wars license. But art work of AT-ATs in Blizzard’s classic isometric form apparently exists somewhere.

“Then of course it would eventually turn into StarCraft,” Schreier explains. The company was already working on a sci-fi strategy game, so the thought process was to simply continue without the all the recognizably Star Wars decorations that Blizzard definitely doesn’t own. It’s a fun peek into what could’ve been, but it all worked out well in the end since StarCraft is now beloved and it might even be coming back as an FPS (again).

And for any Star Wars heads out there, an RTS set in the galaxy far, far away did eventually come to fruition as well, in the form of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and Star Wars: Empire At War. So, I think we’re living in the ideal StarWarCraft timeline.

For now, check out the best Star Wars games that actually got past the finish line.