The next day, Red Fly finally met with George Lucas, but not before being told how to talk to him. Our source says they were told to never say "No" to him, or to say, "Yeah, that will be easy." They were also told not to mention Force Unleashed's protagonist, Starkiller. If he's referred to by George, it will be "that guy." The most important rule, much like not feeding a Mogwai after midnight, was "Don't tell George how the Force works."
Red Fly's representatives arrived at the meeting point early the next day, only to find LucasArts employees rushing Force Unleashed artwork out of the conference room, and replacing it with other Star Wars artworks, including the placement of Sideshow Collectibles statues of Darth Maul and Darth Talon to the table.
A friendly George Lucas entered the room and was eager to hear the pitch from Red Fly's creatives. "Before they could finish their spiel, Lucas cut them off, stood up, walked over to the statues, rotated them to be facing the same direction, pushed them together, and said 'They're friends!'" adds the source. "He wanted these characters to be friends, and to play off of each other. He talked about the show Burn Notice as a reference point. He likened Darth Maul to Sonny from The Godfather, and he likened Darth Talon to Lauren Bacall. He actually did an impersonation of her. It was supposedly the weirdest impersonation of a '40s actress going, 'Don't you know how to whistle? Put your lips together and blow.'"
The problem with the idea of Maul and Talon teaming up for a buddy cop-like experience was that they were separated by over 170 years of Star Wars fiction – as ridiculous of an idea as Frédéric Chopin forming a band with Dave Grohl. When this vast time divide was brought up to Lucas' attention, he brushed off the notion of it not working, and said that it could instead be a descendant of Darth Maul or a clone of him.
An ex-Red Fly employee says Lucas focused heavily on the player dictating the narrative. "He wanted the kind of experience where the player could tell the game what type of story they wanted," he said. "It wasn't so much choose-your-own-adventure; it was more of a player being able to act as director, letting the game still respond and react to the player's wishes and surprising the player with new experiences that maybe they didn't expect. Clearly this was not the forward stealth game for Darth Maul anymore."
The Red Fly team left the meeting, which ran for roughly three hours, dumbfounded by the new direction. They spent a few more days at LucasArts' campus working closely with its team to determine how to get this new idea to work.
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