Trivia / Maul

• Author Appeal: Since Aayla Secura was also originally from Legends, George Lucas seems to like bringing in scantily-clad Force-sensitive Twi'lek women into his works. However, this seemingly benign quirk ended up being one of the project's most crippling setbacks. Since Lucas's words regarding how a story should go were corporately mandated to be treated as gospel, his suggestion to incorporate Darth Talon into the story as an ally of Maul's threw a massive spanner into Red Fly's previous plans for the game. In order to incorporate Talon, the game's setting suddenly had to be shifted to the lesser-known Legacy era (which is set nearly 200 years in the future of the Prequel era) forcing Red Fly to abandon almost all of their previous plans. This did allow Red Fly to get creative and wacky with the storyline, but by the time they had something decent figured out, the game was unceremoniously canned.
• Development Hell: To sum it up, none of the developers and producers were sure of what they were doing due to lack of information. Lucas never told Red Fly any details beyond telling them to make a game about Darth Maul, and didn't tell them about his revival in The Clone Wars until it aired. As further evidence of Red Fly's struggle with coming up with a story, Lucas never even had any idea on how to bring back Maul according to a The Clone Wars interview with Dave Filoni, and he had left it to Filoni and the other show writers to come up with an explanation.
• Dueling Works: Puns aside, Lucasfilm's primary focus on The Clone Wars animated series was one of the major snags in the Darth Maul project's development, especially since Red Fly were purposefully kept in the dark about the future direction of the TV show's storyline so as to prevent leaks. Due to poor communication between the two companies, Red Fly's meticulous plans for the game had to be scrapped and reworked constantly to fit Lucasarts' goalposts, culminating in a total setting shift because of George Lucas's unprecedented insistence on including Darth Talon in the story.
• Executive Meddling: George Lucas' interference with development along with the mandate mentioned above in Dueling Works contributed to the game's cancellation, but George's uses of creative control are the most well known for their absurdity. For one, insisting that the story feature both Maul and Darth Talon, a character from an entirely different century, caused writing issues that could only be solved by a suggested "the player character is a clone of Maul" idea. His idea that she could be Maul's Morality Pet teaching him social skills just showed that he had no idea how any of the characters in the Extended Universe worked.
• Refitted for Sequel: It's unclear whether this version of Lucas's treatment of the Sequel Trilogy came before or after the production of this game, but this passage from The Star Wars Archives: I-III 1999-2005 reveals that one part in it had Maul serve as the grander villain (like Palpatine in the original films and the prequels) while Talon was his apprentice and served as the recurring Big Bad (like Vader).
• Working Title: The game's internal codename is Damage, but its working title is Maul. The project is also known alternatively as Darth Maul: Battle of the Sith Lords.