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Sam & Max Sequel Canceled
Pluvius writes "A terse press release from LucasArts, the creator of classic adventure games such as Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island series, reveals that development on Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the planned sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road, has stopped. Says LucasArts exec Mike Nelson, 'After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.'" The International House Of Mojo fansite has some editorial comments [original URL] on this move, the second Sam & Max game cancellation in recent years, lamenting: "LucasArts has made a gigantic mistake."
Me and everyone else I know who played the original were waiting for this with wallets drawn and baited breath. Even though we mostly disagreed with some of their design decisions, we were still prepared to buy the game.
Silly lucasarts. Well, I'm off to write them a letter I suggest you do the same.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
The days of PC specific titles are gone. With three, count 'em, three home consoles out there, any game that can't be ported (and be profitable) to at least one of the home consoles is gonna be canned. Yeah, you probably could use a controller to play a graphic adventure instead of a mouse, but I'm sure it would get tedious after a while.
My guess is that they made this decision based on the sales of the most recent Monkey Island games, which honestly haven't been all that hot.
My rebuttal? They need to re-evaluate their audience. Many would-be adventure gamers are likely older (both the kind of folks who played classic Lucasarts games and Myst, and also people who are just too whooped by twitch-and-shoot games), and are gravitating toward consoles since they aren't hard-core.
Monkey Island did get ported to PS2, of course, but I'm not aware of any real marketing push to non-mainstream gamers.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
This is quite sad.... When you get right down to it, advernture games created solid customer bases for both Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts that provided enough support for those companies to experiment and often succeed with FPS and console games. The problem with those sit-down-and-play games is that they are much worse at building customer loyalty. The largest draw that Sierra had, with Half-Life, has been stolen by the overambitious developers at Valve. While a number of Star Wars games are quite good, they've not helped LucasArts in customer loyalty since failing to follow up X-Wing Alliance.... I know of tons of people who would love the X-Wing concept to get a massive update for today's PC hardware.
I do see one bit of logic in what LucasArts is doing, and it's because they probably don't believe that the new game would surpass the original. Just look at the Monkey Island 1 and 2 compared to the rest of the series. However, I believe those flopped largely because of the teams and writers.... Whereas with this Sam & Max, I believe that Michael Stemmle and Steve Purcell were involved in some way.
MobyGames, the reference site for everyone, either involved in the game industry, or just in love with games, has its Top Rated Games: All Time Best list, based on game rankings by registered users :
1 Grim Fandango 4.19 (234 votes)
I'm really impressed by the cluelessness of LucasArts' management.2 Curse of Monkey Island, The 4.14 (168 votes)
3 Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge 4.13 (203 votes)
4 Planescape: Torment 4.12 (189 votes)
5 Day of the Tentacle 4.11 (191 votes)
6 Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis 4.10 (231 votes)
7 Secret of Monkey Island, The 4.09 (285 votes)
8 Super Mario 64 4.08 (67 votes)
9 Fallout 4.08 (230 votes)
10 Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The 4.07 (64 votes)