The Art of LucasArts

Gamasutra has a piece talking with Michael Rubin about his new book, Droidmaker. From the article: "GS: Why do you think George Lucas saw the importance of games so early, and why was he able to capitalize on it so relatively well? MR: I think he actually didn't see the importance early. He had to be convinced that a games effort wasn't going to be a distraction. Quickly though, he was able to integrate his personal interest with education and using technology to aid in education, with the research going on in the games group. Making video games was only one aspect of that groups' work."

Comments

Pac-man: The trilogy: The book...

[Chaffar]

...by 1982 it was quickly buried among the hundreds of new video game "winning at Pac-Man" books produced at the time.

Hundreds of books on how to win at Pac-man? My god... I think most of them would be along the lines of:

1- Collect as many yellow dots as you can.

2- If an encounter with a ghost occurs:

a- If you have consumed the blinking yellow dot (BYD), skip to c- b- Consume BYD. c- Eat ghost.

3- When no yellow dot remains, next level (NL) is achieved. return to 1-.

Re:Pac-man: The trilogy: The book...

[rewinn]

I assume you're joking ... cuz one could just as well have a book on chess that goes "Move a piece when it's your turn until you've got the other guy's king checkmated."

Pac-Man was so wildly successful in part because it nicely combined strategy & tactics, with pure reflexes. Books could describe highly specific strategies, such as the least-time path through a maze, and more general information, such as the differing behavior of the ghosts, e.g. which ones were more likely to chase you, which ones were more likely to head you off.

The right book could save you a lot of quarters!

Patterns

[snuf23]

Memorizing certain patterns could also help a lot when playing Pac-Man.
For more information check out How to Win at Pac-Man.
Ah, those were the days...

Not that it's changed much - most "boss" encounters in games these days rely on finding the "pattern" of attack and repeating it until the big guy falls over.

SCUMM

[sirboxalot]

Lucasarts adventure games were and always will be my childhood. You can't beat stuff like Maniac Mansion, Loom, both Indy adventures, the Monkey Island series (excluding 4), Grim Fandango, Zak McKracken, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and so forth. The only Star Wars games I care about are the old X-Wing series.

Don't forget Battle over/of Britain

[SmallFurryCreature]

and Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe. THE ORIGINAL.

Of course by todays standard they are truly horrible and the flight and combat is a joke BUT at the time it was great. Shooting pixels at pixels. Sitting in a bomber with a bloody rocket after you are trying to fly under a bomber to use your upward firing missles. Great stuff.

Oh also a game that had a manual that not only told you about the game but also the history of the era you were fighting in and a whole chapter in SWOTL about the impact the various real strategies had. You could even follow them and see the effect. Like concentrating on bombing oil installations really worked!

X-wing was a nice game and all but it came with a couple of stencil sheets for a manual. Sigh. The beginning of the end. Soon we would have games that didn't even need a manual. Or PDF's.

I am sad now and must cuddle my F-16 Fighting Falcon 3.0 manual.

Lucasarts also gave us the movie tie-in

[SmallFurryCreature]

In a good way. X-wing was the bomb. Later games would be like The Phantom Menace but X-wing showed us what a movie tie-in was meant to be. Not just the endless disney tie-ins where a bad sidescoller has the sprites replaced with the latest chars.