Lucasfilm Went After BioWare For Using The Tamest Swear In KOTOR
Lucasfilm Placed Ridiculous Restrictions On What KOTOR Characters Could Say
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is, to many, the best piece of Star Wars media around. And if you personally aren’t of that opinion, there’s a good chance you think it’s a close second - perhaps only sitting behind the also-adored sequel, KOTOR 2.
Much of this is thanks to how unique it is in the Star Wars setting, even more so when it came out in 2003. Right when the prequel trilogy was disappointing everyone, here we got an RPG that let us explore a slightly more mature version of the galaxy far, far away - and with a much better story.
However, developer BioWare was limited in what it could do, since it was playing around with someone else’s setting. One of the restrictions centred around what the characters could say, with strict rules against swearing, no matter how tame. In fact, the writers were forbidden from using the word “damn”, even though this word was actually used in the films beforehand.
KOTOR Characters Couldn't Say "Damn", Despite The Films Using The Word All The Time
This comes from BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who reflected on what it was like to work in licenced games on the FRVR podcast.
“[...] One of the writers on KOTOR spent an entire day scrubbing through the movies, pulling out every instance of a character saying ‘damn’ because the note back from Lucas was that ‘characters in Star Wars don’t say damn’,” Darrah recalls. “And it’s like, ‘oh yeah? Here are the 19 times it happens in your movies’”
Darrah doesn’t know if this came from George Lucas himself, but Lucasfilm got what it wanted, and BioWare removed as many “damns” as they could. If you wondered why we hear people say “poodoo” in KOTOR, I suppose that’s why.
It will be interesting to see if this changes with the KOTOR Remake. While the series has since doubled down on its fake, in-universe curse words, it did allow some actual swears to be used in Andor, given its more mature tone. Perhaps the rights holders take it on a case-by-case basis, and there’s now room for creatives to argue in favour of having the characters swear.
With that said, Disney will want to sell Revan toys to the younglings, no doubt, so I wouldn’t expect much swearing. Just war crimes.