Who killed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II’s 'Restored Content DLC' for Switch? Disney lawyers.

EXCLUSIVE: How a studio's multi-year effort to give Switch (and mobile) gamers official access to KOTOR II’s infamously cut content collapsed. The emails. The timeline. Plans B and C. The inside story

Key art for the Restored Content Mod for Mac. Image: Aspyr

On a Friday afternoon in the summer of 2022, Michael Blair, an executive at Texas-based video game company Aspyr, sent an email to two people he typically referred to as Zbyl and Hassat Hunter, or HH for short.

“It was not a fun e-mail,” Blair would say nearly three years later, while he was being deposed for an unusual lawsuit that had somehow resulted from the matters of 2022.

Zbyl and HH were two of the lead creators of The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification ( TSLRCM for short, or even just RCM). The mod filled in gaps and provided an alternate ending to the classic Obsidian-developed Star Wars role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords, which had launched on Xbox in 2004 and soon afterward for PC.

Players had really enjoyed KOTOR II but had some inexplicable character moments and an ending that felt rushed. The game gained a rep as exceptional but unfinished. In the years right after KOTOR II’s PC release, enterprising gamers who searched the game’s code found voice-acted lines of dialogue that weren’t used, character moments that had been skipped, and a whole side adventure for beloved killer droid HK-47. A volunteer group of modders, including HH and Zbyl put it together and in 2009 released an initial version of the ambitious restoration.

Some players believed that this content constituted KOTOR II as it was meant to be PC Gamer has called it “essential” and dubbed the unpaid modders “community heroes.”

KOTOR games remained popular, so in May 2022, Aspyr announced their latest port of a classic Star Wars game to a new platform: KOTOR II for Switch.

The end of KOTOR II’s Switch reveal trailer. Image via GameSpot’s YouTube channel.

The Switch port’s debut trailer ended with a three-second shocker: “Coming soon: Restored Content DLC.” Aspyr didn’t spell it out, but enough fans understood: for the first time, an official version of KOTOR II would receive an official console-compatible downloadable content version of the RCM—and on the heretofore mod-free Nintendo Switch, of all platforms.

KOTOR II launched for Switch on June 8, 2022. The restored content DLC didn’t come out “soon.” It never came out at all.

And back on that summer afternoon in 2022, six weeks after the game came out, Blair was emailing Zbyl and HH to tell them that things were going wrong.

“In our efforts to credit everyone who contributed to the mod,” Blair wrote, “We have spooked Disney legal and now they have put a new blocker in place.”

The new blocker was a prohibition on releasing the Restored Content DLC for Switch without further clearances around who actually made the mod. The blocker proved insurmountable. That’s despite extensive and at times experimental efforts by Aspyr throughout the rest of 2022 and early 2023 to find a way to please Disney and its subsidiary Lucasfilm Games, their long-time partners in Star Wars game development.

Finally, in June 2023, after a year of silence about the DLC and amid rising fan frustration, Aspyr announced on Twitter/X that the DLC regrettably would “not be moving forward.” Aspyr offered codes for KOTOR II on PC or other Star Wars games on Switch to compensate..

Within a month, one of those frustrated gamers, Malachi Mickelonis, sued Aspyr for false advertising. The suit got some attention that fall, first for the novelty of suing over cancelled DLC. Later, in November 2023, I reported that Aspyr’s legal reply alluded to how a “third party objected” to the DLC’s release, killing it.

So… what happened?

Earlier this year both sides of the lawsuit began filing voluminous records to the publicly viewable court record that explain in detail what happened with the restored content DLC.

The filings, which have not been reported on until now, constitute some of the most detailed and comprehensive records I’ve ever seen about the development–and cancellation–of any feature in a game.

They involve dozens of internal emails between Aspyr and the modders and between Aspyr and Lucasfilm games. They include over 1,000 pages of depositions with Aspyr and Lucasfilm Games officials. The contain Slack messages, entries in the planning software Jira, a marketing plan for KOTOR II on Switch, sales projections and sales results (down to the single digit.. with some per-state breakdowns: 5,551 copies sold in Ohio as of June 2, 2023), even a contract for the game’s now-delisted trailer (a mid-five-figure fee for a 60-second spot).

In some of the filings, names or whole passages are redacted; many documents were sealed. In others, fascinating facts from inside the game industry are discussed freely. KOTOR II on Steam sold at 75% of the rate of KOTOR I, according to Aspyr’s records, for example. And a mystery project codenamed Juliet is described as a full, modern remake of KOTOR II, that is/was in development alongside the previously reported remake of KOTOR I, at least as recently as March.

I’ve read through an eye-blearying amount of these documents, in an attempt to go beyond solving Aspyr’s “third-party” mystery (It was Disney/Lucas lawyers who did it in, Aspyr and Lucasfilm Games execs say). I wanted to piece together the story and better understand this small piece of gaming history.

What I found looks like an earnest group of people operating in good faith for years–not the presumed months–to find a way to make KOTOR II’s Restored Content Mod easily accessible for non-PC players. Whether that effort turned into false advertising is something I can’t judge and that a jury won’t have to determine. Last month, lawyers representing the gamers, Aspyr and Lucasfilm Games all said they’d agreed to settle the lawsuit(s)... a second had spawned. They confirmed the settlements just two weeks before a jury trial was set to begin.

The timeline that follows is my reconstruction of the events: How the idea of the TSLRCM being added to a modern version of KOTOR II became a thing and how efforts to do so fell apart. It goes back further than I’d expected.