A sad day for Adventure gamers. Lucasarts gets layed off

Easily one of the seminal gaming developers of the 1990s along with ID, Capcom, Eidos and 3DR. For me, Lucasarts gave me my appreciation of adventure games. Namely Day Of The Tentacle, Sam and Max and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were the staples of my gaming days back then. Their flight simulators were pretty neat along with their Doom inspired, Dark Forces. Sadly, their days of innovation ended at the beginning of the 2000s when they began abandoning the likes of Full Throttle, Sam and Max, and Grim Fandango. Even their treatment of the Indiana Jones suffered because they settled for a second rate Tomb Raider type of approach where gameplay and story telling took a backseat to what made their games in the 1990s great.

As sad as I am to see them go, their product over the previous decade has been mediocre at best and was getting to a point where it undid their legacy as good developers in the 1990s because they were getting further and further away from what made me admire them so much. If anything, it's arguably a fitting end to a company that went on to care less and less about innovative game design. So, the memories will always be there.

It is quite a loss. I enjoyed playing Full Throttle and Grim Fandango had such wonderful characters. They don't make it like that any more.

Thank you Lucas Arts for teaching me the art of insult sword fighting. You will be missed.

You know which LucasArts game gets mentioned the least?

No, it's not The Dig, although it's a contender.

I hereby submit Outlaws as the least talked about LucasArts game.

-Fred

Really? I thought it was a toss up between Rescue on Fractalus! and Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion.

Rescue on Fractalus looked like it was from the future when it came out.

Since 2004, LucasArts has had a serious crisis of leadership. They went through like 5 presidents in the last 7 years. There was no clarity of vision for the company, and they were losing money.

Disney knows that the licensing is all profit, no risk. As much as I hate to say it, game development is kind of a sucker's bet now, as far as investments go, so I don't really blame them, there.

My hope is that Disney is going to be more amenable to selling/licensing some of those old LA IPs than Lucas was. They wouldn't license under any circumstances, unless they were also producing/publishing, which again is an investment.

I yield.

-Fred

The creative genius in Lucasarts is gone sadly - they made awesome games but that spark has gone.

Disney are a worry too though - aside from their Pixar movies, all their kids/cartoon movies have been relatively rubbish. They can't seem to get it right on marketing and I wonder if buying Star Wars and LucasArts etc is all about trying to turn that around.

Will have to keep an eye out for some of the old LucasArts developers to put a game out there on the KickStarter website. A lot of other 90s adventure games company creators/employees have done so already, Tex included. :^)

If I'm not mistaken, the majority of people involved with LucasArts' glory days in the adventure game genre are with either Telltale or Double Fine these days.

-Fred

Fred Buer wrote:If I'm not mistaken, the majority of people involved with LucasArts' glory days in the adventure game genre are with either Telltale or Double Fine these days.

-Fred

Not many at Double Fine, actually, aside from Tim and (for a time) Ron. Couple minor artists, maybe.

Some of them are indeed at Telltale (Mike Stemmle, Dave Grossman, etc). Bill Tiller, Will Eakin and some of the art staff are at Autumn Moon, Larry Ahern and Mike Levine are at Crackpot, Steve Purcell is at Pixar... A lot of them are freelance (Peter Chan, Peter McConnell, Michael Land)

Really, they're kind of all over the place, which is a shame. In any event, I don't think any of them have been at LucasArts in years.

I hope Ron Tim and Steve get togheter and colaborate on getting the Monkey island licence to make the secuel that they had thought out.

Hopefuly wel see a boom in adventure games after this with licenses being rented or sold out to companies that has experience and knowlege of the games.

Would be cool to see if Dubblefine buys up DOTT or Full Throttel.. i would love to see them again.

Good luck getting anything out of the hands of Disney. I remember a Don Rosa story where Scrooge had gotten his hands on a substance that could dissolve anything, and one of the things he tested it on was Disney Contracts.

Rockefeller knows what I'm talking about.

-Fred

Fred Buer wrote:Good luck getting anything out of the hands of Disney. I remember a Don Rosa story where Scrooge had gotten his hands on a substance that could dissolve anything, and one of the things he tested it on was Disney Contracts.

Rockefeller knows what I'm talking about.

-Fred

Disney just licensed Duck Tales back to Capcom. They're much friendlier to third-party licensing than Lucas was. Lucas wouldn't do it unless they were also publishing.

Now getting them to SELL IPs outright might be just as impossible as it was with Lucas, but that doesn't mean it isn't still an improvement over the status quo.

So much for my hopes for a Force Unleashed 3.