HK-41s—four Harrisons and one Karpyshyn. We said,
‘Well, it sounds more like the AK-47 if we call ourselves
the HK-47s’. So that was the name of my billiards team
when I played in the league. And when they found out I
was working on a Star Wars game, [my teammates] were
like, ‘Oh, you have to make a robot called HK-47’.”DESIGN DIFFICULTIES
KotOR players encounter the murderous protocol droid
HK-47 in a junk shop on Tatooine. He’s remembered
fondly as a source of comic relief, as written by designer
David Gaider, and also for his menacing, alien design.
For Gallagher, HK-47 was a far less personal affair. “It
was a very short conversation,” Gallagher says. “James just
said ‘I need a badass C-3PO’. So all I did was essentially
use a bilaterally symmetrical protocol-droid physique,
with a little bit of enhancement and a snake head, which
is really the inspiration for the broader, flatter face. And it
was a copperhead, as I recall.too, because it takes a long time to create characters
sometimes. I would go back to characters that had been
developed over years of playing in a role-playing game.”
“Naming characters is always one of the hardest things
to do,” says project director Casey Hudson. “But [the
self-exiled Jedi] Jolee Bindo [got his name from] an
imaginary friend that I had when I was three years old,
that I invented. And I have no idea where that name came
from, but it’s just one of those that—you know, when
you’re searching for stuff, you just draw from your
background.”
Twi’lek rogue Mission Vao “was originally supposed to
be a young male, maybe a teenager or in his early 20s,
based on some of the concepts that we had” according to
art director Derek Watts. “But we decided to make her
female.” Even after settling on the character’s gender, the
team at BioWare continued to push for a design “more
like a cute teen and less like the kid from Terminator 2” as
Watts told Electronic Gaming Monthly. “Everyone was
fine with the new look except for one of the writers, who
thought she was painted up too much. We reminded him
that he wrote a line for Mission that said, ‘If you don’t
watch out, you’ll have to deal with my furry friend’.”
Ideas usually began with BioWare’s core leadership,
including Hudson and Ohlen, but developers would often
find other ways to incorporate pieces of themselves into
the game. One example of this is Pazaak, an in-universe
minigame based on blackjack.
“We wanted to have a card game, and I am a frequent
visitor to Vegas,” says writer Drew Karpyshyn. “So I was
the one who actually designed the basics of how Pazaak
would work, the rules system, and then worked with one
of the programmers to implement it into the game.” But
cardplaying wasn’t the only hobby of Karpyshyn’s that
made its way into the project.
“I used to play on a billiards team,” he says. “Four of
the people on it were named Harrison—several brothers
or various relatives. And we were gonna call ourselves the
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