Mobilesyrup looks back at 20 years of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic:
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Thanks Couchpotato!Celebrating 20 years of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with the iconic RPG's Canadian creators
How a group of Canadians helped change both gaming and Star Wars forever
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Canada
To say Star Wars is a media giant is an understatement.
Over the course of nine mainline films and three spin-offs, four live-action series, and, give or take, a dozen animated TV projects, not to mention well over 100 games and countless books and comics, Star Wars has dominated pop culture for well over 40 years. It's the quintessential Hollywood success story, with the series creator, George Lucas, starting off with experimental independent films before making some of the biggest and most influential blockbusters to date.
Clearly, Star Wars has an almost mind-blowingly large legacy, but something many people don't fully appreciate is the role Canadians played in that. In the late '90s to early 2000s, BioWare, a well-respected but relatively lesser-known studio in Edmonton, released a string of successful games based on the Dungeons & Dragon tabletop franchise. It's that RPG experience that attracted Star Wars games publisher LucasArts to BioWare, giving the now EA-owned studio -- which started as a medical software project from doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip -- the keys to pretty much the biggest kingdom imaginable.
Enter Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the first-ever -- and, to this day, a still-rare -- Star Wars RPG video game. In the early 2000s, the prospect of creating your own soldier, training to become a Jedi, and assembling your own ragtag party of Force users, Republic soldiers, droids, and scoundrels to fight the evil Darth Malak -- or become your own Sith Lord -- was novel. Even now, the fact that it's set 4,000 years before the Skywalker Saga that continues to dominate so much of Star Wars media feels practically revolutionary. KOTOR was big, bold, and fresh, perfectly capturing that magical feeling of going on a grand adventure with Luke Skywalker and friends in the Millennium Falcon, except this time, you were in the pilot seat.
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"Really, Knights of the Old Republic was just this sweet bunch of Canadian nerds getting their hands on the Star Wars IP." -- Steve Gilmour
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