Saving Tobey Maguire
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Tobey Maguire’s KotOR save?
Today’s story begins in December of 2004. The place: San Rafael, California.
The weather’s cool, cloudy, gray—some rain, but nothing like the flooding and windstorms that are gonna hit later on in the month. On the radio, they’re playing Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway,” Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved,” Seether’s “Broken” (featuring Amy Lee), The Killers’ “Somebody Told Me,” and Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” The highest-grossing films of the year have been the second Shrek and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2.
Picture a big real-estate development with apartment complexes and office buildings. This is Los Gamos, on Los Gamos Drive, which flows onto Lucas Valley Road—15 minutes southeast of Skywalker Ranch.
The phone rings. LucasArts’ recently appointed Vice President of Product Development answers. Four months ago, 31 people had been laid off as part of a dramatic restructuring of the company, and after a period of hellish crunch, Obsidian Entertainment’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II—The Sith Lords has just launched on the Xbox. It’s due out on PC in two months’ time, and production is, to quote my source, “flying off the rails.”
The producer of that game, burnt to a crisp after months of lost sleep—and doing his damnedest to help guide the highly anticipated sequel to market in time for the holidays—has clocked out for a much-needed, well-deserved vacation. He’ll be gone for a month.
Maybe he’ll fly out to Illinois, see his family for Christmas…
My name’s Alex James Kane, and this is the first installment of KotOR Declassified. In this new series, we’ll be goin’ behind the scenes of the Old Republic, a sub-brand of video games, comic books, novels, and toys within the larger Star Wars universe.
I’m the author of the Boss Fight Books volume on BioWare’s 2003 RPG, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Over the last decade, I’ve flown to BioWare’s Edmonton headquarters to profile the studio; I’ve written columns, cover stories, documentaries, preview features, reviews, and more for Fangoria magazine, IGN, PC Gamer, Polygon, StarWars.com, Rolling Stone, Variety. So it’s been my good fortune to interview no end of Sith Lords, Jedi Masters, artists, game designers, and computer nerds.
Not far from the LucasArts office at Los Gamos, a second phone rings. Unhappily, the producer of the first two Knights of the Old Republic games answers. So much for that 30-day vacation.
It’s the VP of Product Development, a friend of Steven Spielberg’s who once worked on a video-game adaptation of The Lost World and helped to launch the Medal of Honor franchise. “I just got off the phone with Tobey Maguire’s agent,” says the VP. “And you’re going to be getting a call next.”
The story is that Tobey loves KotOR. He’s one of the biggest actors in Hollywood; Roger Ebert declared Spider-Man 2 “the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with Superman,” and there’s a third one coming. In 2003, the year KotOR released, Maguire had starred in Seabiscuit, which went on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, among all kinds of other accolades.
This is a busy guy. He doesn’t have a lot of time to sit around playing video games, but the man’s a gamer. He’s carved out time for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, he’s really been enjoying himself, and—with the sequel out—Tobey’s excited to find the Star Forge, confront the Sith Lord Darth Malak, and save the galaxy. Or maybe conquer it.
There’s just one problem. “He was playing KotOR, and somehow—maybe his nephew or something—his save game got deleted,” the VP tells the producer. “We need to come up with a solution and make it work.” After all, who’s gonna say no to Spider-Man? Even if what Maguire’s asking for is technically impossible.
A typical BioWare RPG takes somewhere between 20 and 70 hours to complete, depending on the sort of player we’re talking about. If Tobey had been going at a leisurely pace, it’s entirely possible he was 30 or more hours deep. One day, he realizes the sequel’s about to come out, decides it’s time to finish his playthrough of the original, and discovers, to his horror, that his save data, his character, his progress, and all his decisions… are gone.
The original Xbox was a closed system like any other video-game console of its era, but it also had some unique quirks. Save files were measured in “blocks,” which amounted to about 16 kilobytes each. The machine itself could hold up to roughly 340,000 blocks of user data, but a portable memory card only held 8 or 16 megabytes total—500 blocks, usually. Just one save file for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic amounted to 1,600 blocks. Long story short, you couldn’t move your character and progress from one console to another in those days.
All 1,600 blocks of Tobey Maguire’s KotOR save are history, and through his Hollywood connections, he’s gotten in touch with a Vice President at LucasArts in hopes of conjuring a miracle. The VP’s saying, “We gotta fix this for him.”
“The best option is, we could rebuild the save file,” the producer tells him. But there’s no save-game editor or any magic tool like that lying around; they’ll have to do it all manually. “If we want to make it as close to what he had done as possible,” says the producer, “we’re gonna need to get on a call and ask him about what he did—what choices he’d made in the game.”
Next thing the producer knows, he’s on a three-way conference call: him, a QA tester at Lucas who worked on the first Knights of the Old Republic, and Tobey “Pizza Time” Maguire. The guy from QA had gone above and beyond, mapping out a branching list, or flow chart, of every significant player choice or forking path in the game.
Because every video game is really just a symphony of player inputs colliding with the game’s design—a core structure or shape that flows outward into all these branches, limbs, and if-then statements, each offering a moment of expression or interactivity. Certain choices might lead you one way or another, while other avenues get closed off altogether. And RPGs tend to deliver a lot of this kind of complexity; when they don’t, players are quick to notice. But there’s the experience or narrative the developers intended, there’s the player’s behavior in response to that design, and everything happens within that tug-of-war. In a BioWare game, a player makes a lot of decisions.
So now the QA tester interviews Tobey, jotting down everything the actor can recall about his lost playthrough: “Did you pay full price for the droid on Taris?” “Which planets have you been to so far?” “Did you side with Master Uthar at the Sith Academy, or Yuthura?” That kind of thing—all the way on down the list—until Maguire has told them everything he can possibly remember about his journey through the game thus far.
Here’s where the QA tester emerges as the hero of our story. Unable to program a custom save file using some hypothetical editor, and without the ability to store a KotOR save on an original Xbox memory card, he volunteers to play through most of the game from the beginning using only Tobey Maguire’s prescribed choices. He’s already played through it dozens of times pre-launch anyway.
Someone from Tobey’s management team goes out, buys a brand-new stock Xbox off the shelf somewhere, and ships it to him. The tester plays right up to the point where Maguire left off in the game, packs the console back up in a box, and mails it to our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man with this new, “rebuilt” save.
Tobey was clearly grateful for all the effort the Lucas folks had gone to. The producer and the tester each received a rare 2001 signed poster of Spidey and New York’s Twin Towers. Maguire also sent them a basket of more than a dozen frosted cookies made to look like Xbox controllers, Game Boys, computers, CDs, et cetera.
“By the way,” one source later confessed, “those cookies were terribad.”
And that… is the true story of how LucasArts saved Tobey Maguire.
But there’s so much left to tell. I’ve got another nine episodes mapped out for this season of KotOR Declassified, mostly focusing on the first of the three Old Republic games, and I think you’re gonna love ’em. So be sure to subscribe if you want more fun stories like this one. Next time, we’ll be talking about the inception of the KotOR games—in many ways, a moment of rebirth for both BioWare and LucasArts, two beloved institutions in the history of video games.
See ya then.