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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."
You just know Tom Servo and Crow are going to kick his ass for cancelling something actually funny.
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."
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.
Read: "George thinks he'll make enough money off of Episode III and the upcoming Star Wars DVD Set. We'll reconsider when he doesn't have pizza grease dribbling down his shirt."
Trolling is a art,
....looking forward to another inane copy protection scheme where I could play dress up with Sam and Max.
i don't think that was healthy for me at that age.
*kicks off high heels*
-m.
"Wait a minute...some kid on Slashdot said he and a bunch of his friends wanted to play this game! Who cares what our high-priced marketing team said...let's go ahead and develop the game!"
Our server is far too weak to be linked twice from a Slashdot post, but thanks :) Here's what the update said which is now unreadable due to you guys owning our server:
LucasArts Cancels Sam & Max Freelance Police, Resigns Self to Mediocrity
Yep, they've done it. LucasArts has just announced that they've stopped work on Sam & Max 2, saying "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."
Don't believe that its possible? Here's the official announcement from LucasArts.com. Our best wishes go out to everyone on the Sam & Max 2 team, who are apprently all still going to be kept on at LucasArts.
To us, the decision seems completely absurd, and not just because "we love adventure games," or something. Surely Sam & Max's production was plagued with troubles, but from the sounds of it so is every game project. Everything that came out about Sam & Max seemed golden. The press was drooling over the game. It looked like they had a sequel going on that, unlike some other recent sequels, was actually going ot get it right. But now, out of the blue, its gone. Which really really makes all of us wonder...
"What the Hell is Wrong With LucasArts?"
an editorial by the staff of Mixnmojo
LucasArts has made a gigantic mistake.
There, we've said it. Everyone else is already thinking it, and other people have probably already said it, but now we've said it too. The official Mixnmojo stance on Sam & Max 2 being cancelled is that LucasArts has seriously screwed up, just about as much as possible.
Production has stopped on the last original game --and the only game really-- anyone around here was genuinely interested in seeing. Cancelled. Why? From the sounds of it, the people in the Sales department spent the last three months winding themselves up about how impossible it would be for them to sell a quirky adventure game, eventually just snapped, and cancelled the title. Is that screwed up? Yes, that is screwed up.
LucasArts has made a lot of really bad moves in the last year. RTX Red Rock was allowed to ship. It tanked hard. Who really thought RTX would be marketable, would sell well, would really catch the attention of gamers? Full Throttle 2, despite a constant stream of negative to lukewarm receptions from magazines and fans, was allowed to live on in production far longer than anyone really wanted.
Armed & Dangerous, one of the few truly original gems LucasArts has dealt with in the last five or six years, was rushed out early by the suits, in hopes of grabbing some Christmas shoppers. This was decided despite Christmas being notorious for huge A-list titles like Lord of the Rings hogging the coverage and hype, and for mothers who know nothing about games being the ones doing the shopping. Not surprisingly, Armed & Dangerous had a poor holiday season. Who knows what might have happened if they'd let Planet Moon refine the game for a few months, and released A&D it in the nearly empty February, after everyone had exhausted their Christmas games and was looking for something new?
Recently, they shipped Wrath Unleashed. For more on Wrath, see RTX a few paragraphs up. And finally, today we receive word that Sam & Max Freelance Police has been axed.
Notice a trend here? Correct. Not one of the recent LucasArts bungles mentioned above contained the two magic words, Star Wars. If you give the suits at LucasArts a Star Wars game, they can sell it. Why? Because they don't have to try! No cleverness is needed. That's not to say it doesn't take any work, but for the most part you just need to get the screenshots out, buy a few ads on Gamespot, and tell the press "yep, it's
this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.
If not this, then what?!?
The genre is dying. And not as much because of less players, but because of less titles released. Young players don't know the tastes, humor, puzzles of Monkey Island style games, they would love them if they saw them - with gfx reaching nowadays standards (at least resolution), but there's no such games. The market is dying.
One thing that could save it would be a few daring, great titles that would shake the game world, attract people, revive the genre, bring profit to the authors. S&M could be one of them.
But it seems, it won't be the case. The time may be actually not appropriate - too late. And it won't be appropriate ever - the genre will die, because "nobody produces because nobody would buy", "nobody buys because nobody knows", "nobody knows because nobody sells or produces".
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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.
Um, yes. The current market is flooded with adventures.
> underlying economic considerations,
LucasArts is nearly broke and it costs a wagons full of money to develop a current adventure, featuring stunning 2D-graphics and top-of-the-edge anti-aliased text-to-screen synthesisation and multi-single-player no-network support.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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.
Grim Fandango was one of the best adventures ever done. It had great graphics, great voices, tough but solvable (for the most part, anyway :)) puzzles, incredible creativity, and a truly superb storyline.
It also sold dismally. LucasArts lost their shirt on GF. And that was BEFORE the huge slump in per-title PC sales.
It's possible that gamers really are 'hungry for' this kind of title, but given how most titles are selling these days, that's an awfully big risk to take. They've been burned badly a number of times in providing exactly what gamers are asking for. We may want these things, but apparently there aren't enough of us that want them to make the projects profitable. LucasArts is literally cutting their losses.
It's a shame... I imagine for this kind of game to really see a renaissance, it'll have to be developed in a low-cost country, which would allow them to sell, say, 25K copies and still be profitable.
The code written to date is being sold and folded into the Duke Nukem Forever.
"Where do you keep that gun, Max?"
"None of your damned business, Sam."
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.
The graphical adventure on the PC isn't quite dead... not yet.
:)
Perhaps commercially it is - but look how long the text adventure has been dead, and that's got a thriving fan/development community producing some outstanding stuff.. (To learn more about that google around for "Interactive Fiction", "Inform" or "TADS")
And as for graphical adventures - there's some really neat free graphical adventure development systems (SLUDGE Adventure Game Studio) - and of course, if you just want to play the games, there's plenty of those two, including some very polished efforts, such as Out of Order
In short, don't wait for Lucasarts to make the next great adventure - get stuck in and do it yourself!
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
This is a huge disappointment, my favorite games have always been adventure games and the Lucasarts ones have always been the cream of the crop. To see this genre fail and falter wounds me. Doubly so, to see the razor sharp barbed wit of Steve Purcell swept under the carpet yet again. Sam & Max is the funniest comic/cartoon/game I've ever read/watched/played and I was waiting, wallet all a-quiver, to buy this one when it hit. Based on the latest stream of crap pouring from the Lucas media group's outlets, I can only presume George has fallen to the Dark Side, and is even now hatching a plan to slip Ewoks into Ep3.
I don't like this heavy trend Lucasarts has made towards console-based game design and development only. Some games were meant to be PC-only - the goofy controls in the latest Monkey Island installment should prove that. Mouse/kb > gamepad for these kind of games. And don't even get me started on FPS and RTS, both are tailor-made for mice. But going for the largest market is the corporately correct thing to do, so I guess us PC gamers will shiver in the cold winter of sterile gaming, brewing up our own indie adventure games like peasants boiling shoes for soup.
At least Syberia seems to have survived to breed another, even if it had to sell it's soul to the art world to do so. I personally found the game beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, and mind-numbingly boring. A sequel I think of with much the same enthusiasm I would have for a new coffee-table book of log-cabin paintings.
Bring back adventure games! Interactive Storytelling is not dead, it's just been forgotten in the back of the Entertainment Media toy chest, along with Reading Books and Playing Board Games. Email Lucasarts(webjedi@lucasarts.com) and rage against the dying of this light with me. Or just flame them. Or whatever, just make a stir to help make this country safe for domesticated animal crimefighters to thrive in once again.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
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)