The game engine known as Ronin Engine was created by LucasArts specifically for the game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. From its inception, the engine carried this particular designation.
Despite the evaluation of existing technologies, including those from LucasArts and external sources, the decision was made to construct an entirely new engine. This was deemed necessary to fully realize the game's intended vision and to facilitate seamless teamwork with Industrial Light & Magic. The development of Ronin commenced in the latter part of 2004, undertaken by a newly assembled team of engineers starting from scratch, with contributions from numerous programmers. The team was led by experienced senior engineers Tim Ramsay, Eric Johnston, Nick Porcino, and Nick Pavis.
The Ronin engine was designed with the explicit purpose of operating on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 platforms. Its modular structure was implemented to enable concurrent development by teams from both LucasArts and ILM, as well as to incorporate the third-party middleware physics engines, Digital Molecular Matter and Euphoria.