LucasArts

» see lucasarts.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

lucasarts showed up in turkey mostly through pirated cd-rom compilations in the late 90s. monkey island 3 came out in 1997 and was the kind of game that ended up on a 50-game cd at the kapalıçarşı electronics arcade in istanbul, a few dollars in lira at the time, no manual, sometimes a working cd-key written on the case in pen. that was how a lot of lucasarts adventure games reached me. by the time i was at university the studio had already pivoted away from adventures and into star wars titles.

the company started in may 1982 as lucasfilm games, a small division inside george lucas's film company. the early years did not lean on the star wars license at all, since those game rights had been parceled out to atari and others years before. the team built its own engine called scumm for maniac mansion in 1987 and went on a long run of point-and-click adventures: monkey island, indiana jones and the fate of atlantis, day of the tentacle, sam and max hit the road, full throttle, grim fandango. the engine kept the games feeling of a piece even as the writing rooms turned over.

jim ward became president in april 2004 and decided internal adventure-game development was over. star wars had become the studio's largest commercial lane and the adventure audience was visibly aging out. the lucasarts that disney bought eight years later was already a star-wars licensing shop with a few action-game teams attached.

disney announced the lucasfilm acquisition in october 2012 and closed it on december 21 of that year for 4.05 billion dollars. five months later, on april 3 2013, disney announced it was closing internal game development at lucasarts. the staff count at the studio was around 150 at the time. a skeleton crew of fewer than ten people stayed on to run star wars game licensing as a paper brand. by 2014 the offices in the presidio in san francisco were empty.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the scumm years ~

scumm stood for script creation utility for maniac mansion, the in-house language ron gilbert and aric wilmunder wrote in 1986 to script the studio's adventure engine. the same engine carried through monkey island and grim fandango with steady upgrades, which is why those games ran on dos and windows and amiga and mac without the studio rewriting the core every time. the open-source scummvm project later reimplemented the runtime so you can still play full throttle on a 2026 laptop without an emulator.

~ what got buried with it ~

the cancelled projects are the part that hurts. star wars 1313, an underworld-of-coruscant action game starring a bounty hunter, was demoed at e3 2012 and looked competitive with the uncharted line at the time. star wars: first assault, an unannounced multiplayer shooter, was almost done. both were shelved on april 3 2013 along with whatever internal monkey island or sam and max revival rumors had been circulating that year. ea has shipped a few star wars games under the disney-era licensing arrangement, but none of them are 1313.

~ the brand afterlife ~

disney reactivated the lucasfilm games name in january 2021 as a publishing label for licensed star wars titles. that move ended the ea-exclusive star wars license deal that had run from 2013 onward. the new lucasfilm games is a marketing brand sitting over third-party developers like ubisoft and motive and quantic dream. the bay-area development office that built scumm and grim fandango is not coming back, but the legal entity has been retitled and is shipping again.

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