One Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic dev spent an entire day scrubbing through the films in search of a specific word that Lucasfilm said the RPG team wasn't allowed to use.
In an interview with FRVR, BioWare's Mark Darrah - who didn't work on KOTOR but was active at the studio and eventually helped make MMO The Old Republic - said that Lucasfilm had a specific problem with the RPG's language. Specifically, they didn't like the use of the word 'damn', which they claimed wasn't something that a Star Wars character would say.
To prove Lucasfilm wrong, Darrah says that "one of the writers on KOTOR spent an entire day scrubbing through the moves, pulling out every instance of a character saying 'damn'." While Darrah's suggestion - that there were nearly 20 uses - is inaccurate, avid fans have determined that by the time KOTOR was released in 2003, the word 'damn' had appeared thrice - once in A New Hope, once in The Empire Strikes Back, and once in 2002's Attack of the Clones.
Unfortunately, even with that proof, BioWare's victory was only partial. Darrah says that most of the 'damns' were removed from the script because "the rights holder always wins." He suggests that KOTOR was an early casualty of Lucasfilm's attempts to cleanse real-world bad language from the Star Wars universe - something that we've seen over the years since then with the arrival of fake swear words like 'kriff' and 'poodoo'.
It wasn't a total defeat, however - KOTOR's ESRB rating is T(een), with much of that given over to its depictions of violence rather than its very mild bad language. A few real-world cusses made their way into the final script, even if Lucasfilm was able to remove the majority of them from BioWare's work.
