End of an era? Or just a shrug?
Shrug. LucasArts never really made anything on the level of Diablo or Final Fantasy. They’ll license out Star Wars to other publishers and continue to make pornographic amounts of money.
LucasArts published Tie Fighter.
That’s enough to make me a little melancholy.
Dude, Monkey Island and Tie Fighter.
I hope this finally makes Tales of Monkey Island 2 possible.
They made great adventure games in the 90s and Star Wars 1313 looked really good. Seems almost spiteful of Disney, like they just want to erase Lucas’ name altogether.
The Battlefront games were great fun.
It’s really just the fact that pretty much every Disney effort in the published games space has been a money sink with little to no reward. It’s just a business they don’t want to be in, and Lucasarts is a tiny little add on to a big purchase they made. And it’s not like you can turn around and SELL “Lucasarts” while retaining the rights to Star Wars.
LucasArts is basically an unfortunate bystander in this whole thing.
That said, from a personal perspective, I’ve basically never really enjoyed their games - their finest entries were all generally only mediocre entries in their genre (Lookin’ at you, TIE Fighter). Though I grant the exception that I never played most of their ‘premier’ adventure games, because, well, adventure games were never at the top of my list, really. I AM somewhat bummed for the person I know who works (worked, now, I guess) there.
I forgot to mention Sam and Max, as well as Grim Fandango. They were great, once.
Now, they’re bantha poodoo. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the set-up.)
Yeah, they put out a lot of excellent titles in the 90s. Sad, from a nostalgic standpoint, at least.
Maybe someday, someone will get the rights to sell Grim Fandango via Steam or GOG… /sigh
I was surprised to hear they were even still around. They were giants in the 90s, but I haven’t heard of them at all since Grim Fandango. Whatever have they been doing since then? Just cranking out Star Wars prequel console shlock?
I’m not entirely sure anyone wants to sell something with such a broken control system. I personally think that had as much to do with its commercial failure as the decline of the popularity of adventure games. And I think it put a stain on the 3D third person adventure game that the genre is just now recovering from.
And, let’s not forget, the accelerated graphics don’t work on modern versions of Windows. You get software mode graphics, and they are as grainy as all get out.
What I really hope for is a complete remake with point and click controls. I hope Double Fine can pick up the rights to this, and then use a kickstarter to fund such a remake. (I’d say they should hand it over to Telltale games, but they seem to have control problems of their own.)
This exactly. Two magnificent games, though both from the early-mid 90s. I’d also throw in Pipe Dream, Maniac Mansion, Loom and of course Grim Fandango. LucasArts has been pretty meh since the 90s so I won’t weep too many tears (though it is a damn shame for everyone losing a job), but they really did some impressive work back in the 90s.
After they published Grim Fandango, they made the decision to make only Star Wars games (since episode one was on the way); the final Monkey Island was the last for a while, and that had already been in development. Grim Fandango sold something like twelve copies; no matter how fantastic a game is, it’s not going to sell well if you release it just before Half-Life comes out.
The LucasArts of 2012 was not the LucasArts of 1998, but it’s still a shame to see it go.
Don’t forget Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders! I liked it almost as much as Maniac Mansion.
But now who’ll make a sequel to Star Wars Chess? 
I told everybody that Disney would go into a control-freak frenzy, & destroy the franchise, and that is well underway. All of Lucas’s projects are cancelled, Dark Horse is losing the license to create comics, & now this.
The attacks on fan groups and fan artists, and even cosplayers will begin soon.
This is a sign of very little right now. Internal development at LucasArts was a clusterfuck for a decade before Disney took over and while I love The Force Unleashed, a lot of people didn’t. All this move does is put Star Wars games in the hands of third-party developers, just like Marvel and DC have been doing for years.
Also, the comic license is still firmly in Dark Horse’s hands: http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/1349/lucasfilm-and-dark-horse-announce-star-wars
Wait, it’s “control-freak crazy” to say “We don’t want to keep this studio, that hasn’t made a decent game in over a decade, producing games on our dime when that’s not our business or area of expertise, so we’re just going to sell the licenses to our properties to people we think will do a good job with them”? Seriously? :smack:
I mean think about it. There’s now a much, much better chance of some of their older properties seeing some attention because if someone (Like, oh, I dunno, Tim Schafer?) shows up and says “I’ll give you two ham sandwiches and 20% of the proceeds if you let me make a Monkey Island/Day of the Tentacle/Grim Fandango/Full Throttle game. How 'bout it?” Disney has no reason not to say “Well, okay, we weren’t doing anything with that anyway.”
I mean seriously. What has LucasArts done in the past decade that anyone is going to miss?
Agreed with JB. Whatever LucasArts used to be, it ain’t no more. This is a good plan; Disney has done better licensing properties out instead of trying to make them in-house. Frankly, so has LucasArts in recent years.