Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was one of the first video games I ever played. I didn’t have a Game Boy growing up, or a PSP, or a GameCube, but I did somehow finagle my way into getting my parents to buy my brother and me an Xbox, which we placed in the basement. At about age ten, I made friends with a slightly older neighbour who found out I had been playing exclusively SoulCalibur 2, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and for some reason, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, the last of which I’m sure gave me some complexes I had to deal with later. He ran straight home and came back with his copy of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, putting it in my hands. “We are playing this right now,” he told me, and so we did.
In my lifetime, I’ve played KOTOR probably six times, maybe more. At least two of those times were in the last few years, fuelled by pure nostalgia. Because I always pick the female character, I end up flirting with Carth Onasi a little, which is fine. But every time I meet Juhani, I remember playing the game for the first time. My neighbour was standing over my shoulder, scolding me for making the wrong choices and making me reload saved games so I could get the “best possible ending”, whatever that means in the context of KOTOR to him. Towards the end, when Juhani confessed her feelings for me, he turned pale. “Wait,” he said, leaning towards my television for a better look. “I can’t do that. Why can you do that?”
Because Juhani is canonically a lesbian! I’m not sure I had any idea what a lesbian was at age ten, so I didn’t realise how big a deal this was. I also didn’t know that she would be one of the only lesbian characters I would see in a video game for a long, long time. Most mainstream games didn’t have queer characters, let alone complex, interesting, and romanceable ones. KOTOR, and Juhani in particular, is widely considered to be medium-defining when it comes to representing queer characters in a positive, nuanced light, where their sexuality is far from the defining thing about their character.
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I’ve been dying to see how the KOTOR remake would approach the characters in the present day, now that the political environment is drastically different and LGBTQ characters are no longer a rarity. After all, what’s the point of a remake if you don’t update it? (Make bisexual Bastilla canon immediately, I beg). I’m also sick of playing the game over with the existing graphics because good lord, they did not hold up well to the test of time. I fear I will never see the game at all. Rumours, spurred by the game’s move to the hands of a different studio – albeit one that had already been working on the game – say KOTOR might be in development hell, never to see the light of day.
Selfishly, I am praying this is not true, if only because I want to be able to hit on Bastilla with better graphics and a revamped combat system. Everything I think the game could be is purely speculation – there has been nothing from the developers apart from a single trailer. I do fear that the remake in my head is better than any real life remake could ever be, though it would be hard to mess it up given the source material is already there. I thought maybe Star Wars Eclipse would be an alternative, but it looks to be failing as well. I guess if it comes down to it, I can just play the original KOTOR for the seventh time.