LucasArts Shut Down

[Jick Magger]

'Twas a mercy killing. Know I'd just like to remember LucasArts the way they were in the golden days, before the decline hit them like a sack of bricks.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

I remember a time in which one of my objectives in life was own every lucasarts games... I still own the boxes and last week I was browsing my collection, as I showed them to my nieces, since I was introducing them to the first monkey island game.

The smell is still there inside the envelope with 8 floppy disks, 5"1/4 and 360K each, the EGA version. The table for indy and the last crusade, the adventure game, that contained codes to avoid piracy. It even came with grail diary. There were good star wars games from that time too, like the x-wing series, dark forces, Rebel assault...

I wonder if those 360k disks would still work.

Lucasarts reminds me of my first ventures on the internet, since the websites I mostly navigated at the time were mixnmojo.com and lucasarts.com.

For me, lucasarts death began in 1999, when they cancelled everygame and had other developers making games for them.

Next, bye bye, ILM.

 

[Zed]

what was the last good game with a lucasart logo slapped on the box? grim fandango?

 

[Random]

Disney has fairly decent quality control so all future licensed games will be held to a higher standard, if nothing else.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Disney has fairly decent quality control so all future licensed games will be held to a higher standard, if nothing else.

like tron: evolution?

 

[DeepOcean]

Disney don't have a massive, bureaucratic structure that depends of yearly game releases to make profit like EA and Activision, so, It doen't make sense for them to run the franchises they bought for billions, into the ground like EA does, there is potential for good news. The death of Lucas Arts in it's actual incarnation is good news, the problem is that outside of Obisidian doing a RPG(even if popamole) with a Star Wars licence, I don't see other interesting alternative. Disney isn't going to licence their franchises to developers to actually make good adventure games (I hate Tell Tale shit, so it doen't count), if they decide to make a Jedi Knight 3 (Dark Forces 1, 2 and Jedi Knight 2 are awesome) they are going to make a linear Bioshock Infinity/Call of Duty shooter instead of using the same level design style of the old games, they aren't going to resurrect the X-wing series either. So, or unsuspected news of incline appears (like Ubisoft) or instead of we getting shitty popamole games, we are going to get mediocre popamole games. Could Obsidian trick Disney into making a Fallout New vegas clone on Star wars, with decent shooting mechanics this time (I'm a huge fan of the Jedi Knight games)?

 

[agentorange]

what was the last good game with a lucasart logo slapped on the box? grim fandango?

KotOR 2. The Battlefront games were also fun.

 

[DemonKing]

No big loss really, considering the last game they made internally that I quite enjoyed was released 8 years ago (Republic Commando). They're still going to outsource their IP to other studios though which I think is a more sensible business strategy than holding on to an internal development team that hasn't managed to produce anything decent for almost a decade.

 

[Azrael the cat]

NY Times did a great article on Epic Mickey, and why Disney consistently sucks at making games a few years back. The gist of it was that (aside from hiring a guy known at the time for making adult-oriented FPS/rpg hybrids to make a kids' platformer - that as a symptom rather than the main cause) Disney have insane quality control over their movies and tv shorts, but their gaming studio is basically the black sheep that gets all the guys deemed too shit to make films. There's not a single Disney film that the CEO and every member of the board has seen multiple times before release - and unlike game publishing, that's a good thing, because they're stocked with guys who know and love animated film. Yet not a single member of the senior board saw epic mickey prior to release. Not one. And it wouldn't have even made a difference if they did, because they know jack all about computer games. They neither care enough (even when the game is using their NUMBER ONE FUCKING PROPERTY), nor do they have the right people to make a good computer game.

 

[Fowyr]

I wonder if those 360k disks would still work.

Most of my 5.25" disks still work. They were really more reliable than 3.5" disks.

 

[Western]

They finally shot Old Yeller Lucas Arts, it was a kindness.

 

[deuxhero]

I was first meh at the death of LA, now I'm glad, because fuck yeah Outcast and Jedi Academy source code!

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...i-knight-ii-and-jedi-academy-source-code.aspx

 

[msxyz]

what was the last good game with a lucasart logo slapped on the box? grim fandango?

I enjoyed Jedi Academy for the *gasp* multiplayer aspect: the various classes were so nicely balanced and Jedi were not made overpowered (actually it was quite challenging to play one).

The last game from LA, developed in-house, which I enjoyed was another FPS: Dark Forces II. After that, it has been a constant decline. Don't get me started on Kotor 2 which was a disaster of mis-management. Not only Lucas Arts forced Obsidian to ship an unfinished product but they denied the resources to work on a proper patch. Never mind the horrible audio (which was later updated because PC users went up in arms against LA) that had voices and music that could be mistaken for coming out of a Megadrive single DAC channel!

 

[DalekFlay]

As someone else said that squad FPS was decent... Rogue Squadron? Rogue Commander? Whatever. Wasn't amazing but was fun for 10 hours.

Can't think of a decent one after that.

 

[Jashiin]

Ow would someone please get grim fandango on gog.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/04/rip-lucasarts-a-personal-obituary/

RIP LucasArts: An Obituary

By John Walker on April 4th, 2013 at 11:00 am.​

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It’s always genuinely sad when a game developer closes down. People lose jobs, many lives are affected, and the industry as a whole loses a degree of potential. But before now no news of a studio closing has brought me close to tears. The death of LucasArts, while perhaps inevitable to anyone following closely enough, has made me very sad indeed.​

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No developer has ever had such a wide-reaching, hobby-defining impact on my life.​

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It’s certainly sadly the case that the studio has made little I’ve cared about in a very long while. The Monkey Island remakes were as close as they got to me in the last, what, decade probably. But even they were emblematic of what the studio was capable of, of how much the people working there cared about their projects, no matter how successful they might have been.​

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At a GDC gathering last week, I was chatting to a LucasArts employee I’ll obviously not name. For me, he captured the sense that so many had at LucasArts – he loved it there, and he loved the people he worked with there, but he was planning to hand in his notice in a couple of weeks. He was working on a project he couldn’t mention, but was incredibly excited about. Thrilled to be working on. (A game we’ll likely of course never even know the name of now.) But still feeling like his time there was done.​

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Churning through CEOs, constantly horrendously mismanaged, and cancelling so many projects as to become farcical, it’s a wonder that LucasArts kept going until 2013. Cranking out Star Wars licenses, or indeed cancelling numerous Star Wars licenses, it had certainly lost a significant portion of its heritage. But it never seemed to lose its potential. Whomever you spoke to there, they still had the drive, the sense of a history that pushed them forward. They had some of the best in the business in many areas, especially sound and voice recording, and it always felt like they could at any time turn themselves around.​

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But of course no matter their recent state, they were and always will be the studio that brought us Day Of The Tentacle, Sam & Max: Hit The Road, X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter, Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis, The Secret Of Monkey Island, Dark Forces, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Jedi Knight: Mysteries Of Sith, Maniac Mansion…​

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God, that’s a list of games.​

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The same studio in the same year gave us the incredible FPS Dark Forces, Tim Schafer classic Full Throttle, and adventure epic The Dig. That was some of 1995 for LucasArts. It’s a lineage the like of which gaming has never known since. This is who we’re losing.​

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These are games that defined my teenage years, and without question, defined gaming for me. I loved Dark Forces so much more than Doom – hell, you could talk to the monsters. Full Throttle may have been relatively short, and may have had racing sections, but it was an exceptional adventure game, packed with brilliant writing the likes of which the genre hadn’t seen before. And The Dig – I implore you to go back and play it again now. While its ending doesn’t quite match its potential, it’s an incredibly thoughtful, gentle and brilliantly paced game.​

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And clearly anyone alive for enough years will have a LucasArts game they wish to celebrate at immense length. Whether it’s the original X-Wing, or the peculiar god game Afterlife, or idiotic time wasted away on Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures, their genre-spanning genius reached everyone. It’s this that we’re losing now.​

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In the last few years I went back to many of their games for Eurogamer, finding that so many of them still stand out today. Here are my thoughts on Dark Forces, The Dig, Jedi Knight, Zak McKracken, Day Of The Tentacle, Armed & Dangerous, The Curse Of Monkey Island,Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis, and Escape From Monkey Island.​

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Yes, a look at their recent releases isn’t the most cheerful sight. A string of Star Wars prefixed titles stretches back for a decade, interrupted only by the peculiar misfire of Lucidity, an experimental platformer that never quite came together. For a new generation of gamers, that’s who LucasArts were – the Star Wars people, occasionally seeming to stumble on something decent, but mostly cashing in on the success of Clone Wars. And it seems their final release, their swansong, shall be Kinect Star Wars. It couldn’t be a more degrading end.​

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But I swear that they were still a company bursting with the potential to revive themselves. Everyone I spoke to there believed it. If only, it was said, there could be management who’d let it happen. Management confident enough to let a non-Star Wars licence make it through to release, and then remember to promote it when it got there. Management not resentful of a more successful past, willing to make the incredibly obvious moves of releasing their extraordinary catalogue of games for tablets and phones. Day Of The Tentacle on iOS is so stupidly clearly a sensible move, and yet one that was never taken. Damn, even getting their classic games onto Steam seemed to require juggernauts to drive them – and they absolutely always refused to speak about what they were hoping to get on there next, as if they were determined to flatten any excited buzz.​

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And now, in the hands of Disney – a company that couldn’t prove itself incapable of managing gaming more – LucasArts is gone forever. In a time when the adventure has revived itself, when digital distribution allows far smaller scale games to achieve big success, when people are desperate for that personal touch on the FPS, a studio – that with the correct management, the correct downscaling, and the important freeing of staff – could have taken such strong advantage of it all, is gone. No, of course they don’t have Schafer, Gilbert, Grossman, or Stemmle. But with their heritage, their IPs, and the passion of those still working there, it’s hard to believe the magic couldn’t be revived.​

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So goodbye, LucasArts. I bloody loved you. You were so damned important to me. You helped make 1988 to 1998 some of the most special years in gaming, and provided my childhood and teenage years with genuine joy. In truth, I was already missing you. I’ll miss you more now.​

 

[Trash]

Goddamn good article.

So goodbye, LucasArts. I bloody loved you. You were so damned important to me. You helped make 1988 to 1998 some of the most special years in gaming, and provided my childhood and teenage years with genuine joy. In truth, I was already missing you. I’ll miss you more now.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

 

[Keshik]

Holland rocking the aviators, hah.

 

[Mastermind]

2013 brings only bad luck to big fishes in the pond. But closing Lucasarts? Didn't expected this one coming. They didn't want do anything meaningful with Indiana Jones, too bad for them. The adventure games were excellent.

"It's true I'm your father, it's true I'm your father..."

Force Unleashed was a horrible game with a bad PC port. I didn't even bother with finishing it, the second one was on the same level, judging by the comments. But this was a new level of bad. Well at least the news will encourage me to finnaly try Republic Commando.

Republic Commando's shit too.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

saw those in schafer's twitter

 

[Tolknaz]

I think that on itself it's actually a pretty good news, as the studio released almost nothing but shit lately. It all depends on what Disney wants to do with the ip-s though. It could turn out both an opportunity to see decent games from the likes Obsidian, Double Fine, Telltale etc. and it could turn into burying everything, harassing SCUMMVM and so on.

 

[Average Manatee]

Well something good came out of this. Probably unreleated but nicely coincidental.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedioutcast/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jediacademy/

Sadly Disney still has Jedi Knight

 

[Jick Magger]

 

[MapMan]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/04/rip-lucasarts-a-personal-obituary/

RIP LucasArts: An Obituary

Oh come on!

Have we reached new lows here? Since when copy/pasting (stealing) news from other websites gets you BROFISTS!?