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LucasArts To Re-Release Old Games Through Steam
LucasArts today announced that they will soon be releasing games from their back catalog through Steam. The releases begin this Wednesday with a group of eight games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, LOOM, and Star Wars: Battlefront II. This is apparently just "the first round of releases," so we can doubtless expect to see more of their old games before long. Joystiq spoke with LucasArts CEO Darrell Rodriguez, who said the company is considering updated versions of the old games, depending on how well next week's launch of Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition goes. He also hinted at the possibility that some games could be ported to mobile gaming devices, such as the PSP Go and the iPhone.
What, no Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus, or Koronis RIft?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I loved that game. Wish they would port some of these over to consoles too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... AWESOME.
Childhood memories, here I come.
For reminding Lucasarts that we were here all along, waiting to purchase more adventure games.
I'd love an updated version of Day of the Tentacle.
That is all.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Greedo will shoot first in the games.
If they aren't going to be releasing original stuff, this is the kind of games they need to be retreading.
Technoli
I'm still waiting on KOTOR to show up on steam. I missed it when it was new and the only way to get it now is in some bundle with 4 other games I don't care about. Seriously, it should be in the next round.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
I have almost all of the old SCUMM games, and would gladly repurchase them all on Steam if the price is decent. Considering their extreme age, however, anything more than $5 is just insulting.
Too bad the talent has withered away since they closed down their adventure division. Still got my Amiga and PC originals, but if they release all games in one box eventually, like the Orange Box, I'll get these enhanced versions.
Tie Fighter! Or any of the same ilk. Updated graphics would be nice, but it would totally be worth going out and buying a joystick if they brought the space sims back even in their original form.
while everyone is feeling nostalgic about their old favorite LucasArts games i would like to point out http://www.gog.com/ for everyones old game pleasure. Lots of our old classic favorites at great prices, DRM free and even works on vista/7.
I demand a re-release of Full Throttle to be included in this.
How can they not give this game the credit it deserves? One of the few games I almost cried when I finished it - it was the perfect game, I just didn't want it to end.
I hope they release Tie Fighter. I loved that game.
Star Wars: TIE Fighter
I wonder if this is now a trend. GOG and now Lucasarts are putting abandonware titles back on the market.
I'm looking forward to these releases... and like many others here, there are some jewels I look forward to even more than the rest.
Day of the Tentacle was the best of all their adventures... the jokes, the plot, the characters - and even the voice acting - were unsurpassed. I was lucky enough to get the CD edition in the mid-nineties, and it's one of the gaming experiences that are burned into my mind - like the Baldur's Gate series and Gabriel Knight: Sins Of the Fathers.
Tie Fighter... X-Wing was good, and you were playing the good side. But Tie Fighter... the story was better, the game mechanics and graphics were better and you got to fly all sort of new ships. And it was balanced just right... for a game, anyway. And there were large battles going around you. The game was the ultimate space combat "sim" for me.
Sounds like vaporware.
Why not create games based on older models? I mean...Megaman 9 showed us that even legacy games are still desired by older generations.
Rather that put thought into graphics and such, you could focus your minds on what makes the game fun, and such...
Me personally, I'd LOVE to see another old school RPG game involving sprites and such.
There is a market out there, and developers should take advantage of it.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
PLEASE!!!!! There havn't been any good space combat sims since this game.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I still have my copy of Tie Fighter, but I'd love to be able to get my hands on Full Throttle again.
Your television will not tell you when to start the revolution.
If they were to actually translate XWing and/or Tie fighter to the iPhone using the motion sensing controls, I might actualy have to jump on the bandwagon. I havent really enjoyed a flight sim since those days.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
This is brilliant marketing by LucasArts... and they are going to make a crap load of cash off it.
By using Steam &/or XBL, they don't have to "go gold", market deals with big box distributors, remaking packaging, etc. And we as the players don't have to screw around with DOSBox or SCUMVM.
I'm excited and ready to buy some classics!
I am actually disappointed by this announcement, precisely because I would rather get the games from Good Old Games and be sure they -are- DRM free, and, more importantly, made to work on modern systems.
Not to look far, the Steam release of X-Com refused to run on a friend's Vista machine, whereas a DOSbox setup for my old copy of the original release worked without issues.
Otherwise blow them, at this point asking money for something rightfully belonging in public archives without doing any effort to actually put value in it is just.. well, typical business model of the media companies...
If you want to milk old games, at least make them bloody playable on modern systems - which is what I pay GOG for - not just the game itself.
Not having been very active with MS Windows for many years, I've missed out on Steam as a tool for managing my games.
But there are some nice games out there and, DRM issues aside, Steam seems to be nice and convenient to use, but how well does it perform on Linux under WINE? I'm aware that the Codeweavers product has some support for it, but how well does it work? Is it worth the hassle to use it with Linux?
X-Com's relaunch failed mostly because the two companies that made it no longer exist and the property is now owned by a money grubing meglocorp (Hasbro). Beyond that, they had lost the source code to the games and weren't even able to find all the versions (i.e Windows binary vs DOS) to allow them to set it up correctly.
Conversely, LusasArts is still LusasArts, and the majority of the games they are doing this round are games that were designed to be run in a virtual machine that today is so well understood and documented that there is a third party emulator out there for it (scummvm).
Even if LusasArts went the crap route, you'd still be able to play the games just by installing them and then using SCUMMVM rather than the prepackaged binaries.
Because if there is one thing I've always wanted it's those old school awesome, completely single player, Lucasarts adventure games that to play require a constant internet connection or at least loading through a top-heavy DRM platform that's unlikely to properly support them anyway.
My next wish will be that all the boxed copies of those games that I've got and have been meaning to sell on Ebay for the last 6 months will now be worth a lot less. Oh, wait. Shit.
Run XCOM in DOSBox. That's how Steam rents it to you anyway - just install your own DOSBox and point it at the data files.
It runs significantly better that way than any rejiggered wrapped up Windows .exe would. Also: built in processor slowdown emulation!
Not at home, so I can't give the details, but one of the X-Com games Steam does do DOSBox for and the other is actually a windows executable (i.e. won't run in DOSBox) and was released as such because they couldn't find a working DOS version. The last I checked (which was a week after the games hit Steam) there were a few devs claiming they were working on finding a copy that would work and that they'd release it via steam as an update to the game.
I played that first in a 6-pack of games (came with ultima I-VI, stellar 7, spear of Destiny, etc) then bought it again a few years ago for .99 at Goodwill. DOSBox FTW.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Maybe I should give them a call, I have three different original release versions...
Naah. I'll just hog them. Along with the original packaging.
The way economy is going, call it my retirement plan.
Please!
Absolutely loved those games and I would love to mix it up on XvT on my FiOS connection after playing it on dial-up back in the day
The Anti-Blog
There is nothing to clarify. No matter the tales you have heard - distributing abandonware is no less illegal than any other copyright violation. There is no gray area. It doesn't' matter if the game is available commercially or not.
Abandonware means old software, nothing more. Plenty of companies still search for copyright violations of their "abandonware" (LucasArts and Cyan come to mind). There has never been a legal definition of abandonware and hopefully there never will be (it's time we stop the copyright/patent scheme altogether - small exemptions will just stall that process).
Presuming people already have a copy of these games, why don't they just use an emulator to run them? As demonstrated at http://www.classicdosgames.com/
That's all well and good, but what about those of us who don't want to rent our retro games through some "must be connected to the Net" DRM system and want a real copy? My brother managed to find a copy of Monkey Island 3 for me a year or two back, but most of the Monkey Island games are difficult to get hold of (or severely over-priced) in the UK.
I'm a sucker for good graphics found in many modern games, but they often lack the depth found in the older LucasArts titles.
From http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/06/discover-the-secret-of-monkey-island-again-on-july-15/ (cited in the summary): ... rendered in splendid HD graphics, surrounded by newly recorded voices ..."
"The Secret of Monkey Island:
That does sound like a worthwhile update.
I would welcome the campaigns and scenarios of the Star Wars space sims being ported to a newer engine, even if it is only Star Wars Alliance's.
Note also that publishing games through Steam will delay their becoming abandonware, which is good for the seller, but bad for the public if the games are just re-released without brushing up.
Right, the last time I looked around on the interwebs (2007), I couldn't find ANY version of XCOM that wasn't Windows-based. This pissed me off because the Windows port is notoriously unstable.
Also, I have my old DOS copy of XCOM:TFD, but for some reason it doesn't work well in DOSBox. Whenever I enter a battle, the game speeds-up to ludicrous speed. It scrolls so fast that the view window moves from one end of the map to another instantaneously. Also, outside of battle, strange jumps in time occur, and I sometimes see my submarines get bugged.
Maybe I just need to try another copy.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Sure, the LucasArts' oldies are pure gold, but not again! I have already gone even through the "nostalgia phase" with these years ago. Why must the same handful of games be replayed over and over? Some new stuff instead, please.