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Why Are We Still Talking About LucasArts' Old Adventure Games?
jones_supa writes "The gutting of LucasArts was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark. But why is that? Why is it that we still consider these games among our pinnacle achievements as an industry? Why do developers still namedrop Monkey Island in pitch meetings when discussing their proposed game's story? Why do we all continue to mentally associate the word "LucasArts" as the splash screen we see before a graphical adventure game, even though the company hadn't released one in over a decade? Gamasutra has collected a good majority of the answers. Following these responses, as a special treat, Lucasfilm Games veteran David Fox attempts to answer that question with his own insider perspective."
Its Monday morning, stop asking so many damn questions until I've had my coffee.
Thinking and puzzle solving (to a greater extent it's why people still mention Myst, although that was problem solving and really neat scenery). They were fun, with memorable characters and funny catch phrases ("I'm Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirateâ). They weren't twitchy, blow-things-up-to-solve-problems games.In some, the characters had continuity between games and in others they were tied to movies of which we had fond memories (Indiana Jones and Star Wars).
Bark less. Wag more.
For the same reason scummvm has been ported to damn near every platform and why I still play these games on brand new smartphones. Reminds me, I need to find my Full Throttle game files.
It's not because those games were just particularly amazing, well-written, and well-constructed. It's because those were the games that we grew up with. Those of us in their 30s and early 40s are the ones currently dominating the industry, and we grew up playing King's Quest IV and Monkey Island and Loom and X-Wing etc. We have a fondness for those now because we were kids and those games were the world to us.
Same reason most of us love Voltron and hate Power Rangers, even though they're damn near the same thing.
Nostalgia.
Everyone doing that right now is getting old. Kids today will be doing the same thing about Gears of War, Borderlands and Splosion Man.
And some of us, who are older, are still doing it about Joust, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers.
Welcome to the pool of people not at the top of the generation queue.
Those games are gone.
Really? I bought Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Steam in 2012. The updated graphics and sound are great, but you can switch it back to the original very easily.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
When I was 8-12, I thought adventure games were pretty awesome. I rarely beat them, and figured it was just a lack of creativity/ingenuity on my part. Even though I failed and failed and failed some more, I love solving puzzles/problems (I'm a technician by trade and math student by hobby currently) and spent hours going over the same few screens, scouring for clues that I missed, inventory combinations I hadn't tried (and in the days of the infamous parser, word combinations I hadn't tried). I'd spend hours doing this.
Then I got a little older, installed a few of the old games out of nostalgia's sake (even still have a few of the more memorable ones installed) and given that I don't have hours to spend staring at the same screen, decided to give up, look up some FAQs and at least push my way through the story (some of those games had some really well written ones). At this point I discovered that my failures were not entirely due to a lack of problem solving ability on my part, as I found that the majority of puzzles I had always gotten stuck on lacked any sort of logic at all (I believe there is an excellent write up on Gabriel Knight 3's issues somewhere on the net). They required the kind of creativity and problem solving ability you get at 4am from numerous bongs, a few beers and the inability to click where you want to click.
And before anyone "wooshes" me, I totally got the sarcasm in the parent and just felt this was the perfect spot for a mini-rant =)
In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.
If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.
There was not one game from that era that could install without spending a day trying to tweak config.sys files and autoexec.bat
I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming, ... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.
Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).
You spent all day mucking with config.sys? Why didn't you just Google the issue???
Those games are gone.
Wait... where did they go? Did some mass fire destroy all remaining copies in the world? No. They're still there. I can still have my kids, born after they came out, play those games. I can - and do - have my kids play games from 30 years ago, from when I started gaming. Even the games that actually were lost to me due to fire or whatever ravages of time. Games do not suddenly cease to exist a few years after they are released. The good games are still played 15 years later, 30 years later, and I'm assuming 60 years later, 100 years later. Like classic books, the good ones will survive, they won't go anywhere. The games that only have nostalgia going for them will be lost once the people with that nostalgia stop lamenting or die out.
By the time the servers of today's games are shut off, someone will have hacked/cracked them and made them playable without those servers. Games needing activation or some kind of server has been around for years now, many games have had their servers shut off. But I can't think of a single game that I still want to play, but that I absolutely can not play.