All internal game development at LucasArts has finished, a result of Disney‘s $4.05 billion purchase of LucasFilm last year. Games based on LucasFilm franchises like Star Wars will be distributed under the LucasArts name, but development will be given to other studios.
This ends 30 years of games from George Lucas’ game studio, which opened in 1982. It’s very likely that the closure will mean Star Wars 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault will never see the light of day.
Recently, LucasArts had only been focusing on Star Wars games, and its last few releases didn’t set the world on fire. But LucasArts will be fondly remembered for its 80s and 90s heydays, when it was producing well loved adventure games and the first really good Star Wars games.
Our Dutch games editor Rutger Uittenbogaard says Lucas arts had become irrelevant, and had been reliving 1977 for years. But many of us here have great memories of playing LucasArts games.
Games we used to love
X-Wing was a favorite of mine. In 1993, along with Doom it gave me 3D gaming like I’d never seen. There had been Star Wars games before, but nothing that gave you such a great experience of flying an X-Wing. For anyone who’d grown up with Star Wars, it was a dream come true.
One of our Spanish team, Daniel Cáceres remembers Grim Fandango as one of the best games ever, although it marked the end of the classic adventure era. Another amazing adventure game was Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, which Tom Clarke said he played again recently, and found it’s still excellent, despite being released in 1990. The sequel, Fate of Atlantis added voice acting to the point and click gaming, and is one of the best of its genre.
Point and Click Adventure games Monkey Island, Sam & Max and Day of the Tentacle were huge in their day, and while LucasArts never really recovered from the point-and-click genre’s apparent death by the end of the 90s, they are still really influential.
The return of the point-and-click adventure
Telltale Games relaunched Money Island and Sam & Max as episodic adventures, and their hard work has seen the ‘point-and-click’ back in fashion, with last years The Walking Dead even topping many game of the year lists. While LucasArts co-developed Tales of Monkey Island with Telltale, it was the latter that really benefited from the collaboration.
LucasArts may be gone, but its influence can still be felt.
