According to legal documents unearthed by Game File regarding a lawsuit between Bit Reactor leadership, the company’s recently-launched Star Wars Zero Company didn’t actually started out life as a Star Wars game, but was pitched as a title set in the Titanfall universe.
Greg Foertsch, the game’s director, worked alongside studio co-founder Alison Kelley to work on pitches for a tactics idol game, which resulted in a meeting with Vince Zampella, co-founder of Respawn Entertainment. Zampella asked Foertsch to come up with a pitch based on an IP from Respawn, and as such the project would have been connected to Titanfall.
Game File adds that the pitch was directly linked to Apex Legends, which is a game set within the same universe as Titanfall, but it’s unclear if that series’ trademark mechs would have been featured or focussed more on the hero characters from Apex Legends.
However, the pitch for a Titanfall universe game was rejected by Zampella and he suggested instead that the team pitch another project, this time based on the Star Wars franchise. Respawn of course has a major hand in the iconic science-fiction, having worked on the Star Wars Jedi games and were behind a cancelled first-person shooter title based in the Star Wars universe. As for Bit Reactor, well, the end result was Star Wars Zero Company.
As previously reported, Game File also revealed that Bit Reactor had furloughed about 80% of its staff in the weeks prior to the release of Star Wars Zero Company.