Yesterday's announcement of the death of LucasArts has many around the Ars Orbiting HQ feeling a little nostalgic. If you made a list of each and every one of the memorable games that LucasArts has given us throughout the years and added a description of what made them special, you could easily fill a small book. In fact, someone already has. Still, we felt the need to highlight a few of our favorite moments from the last three decades of LucasArts games in our own far-from-comprehensive list:
Dark Forces (1995)
by Lee Hutchinson
The first-person-shooter genre was very much in its infancy when Dark Forces burst onto the scene. The game had a captivating and easily explained premise: "It's Doom, but Star Wars: Doom." Dark Forces was a fine shooter in its own right and looked amazing, but that Star Wars license rocketed its appeal right up into outer space. Dark Forces promised something irresistible to any geek: the ability to jump into the Star Wars universe and run around. Released in 1995, the game was LucasArts' first foray into the nascent FPS genre. The company set the bar awfully high.
The player took the role of Kyle Katarn, a bounty hunter with the proverbial heart of gold (sure, he has a scratchy voice and kills thousands of Storm Troopers, but he'd never take a contract to hurt a puppy!). The game's success ensured that Katarn would feature in an entire slew of sequels, eventually becoming a Jedi Knight himself. But the first game was purely a shooter—the player had no force powers. That was fine, though, because you were playing a Star Wars game, and at the time, that was amazing enough. Dark Forces improved upon Doom and Doom 2 in some pretty significant ways, and the most important improvement was the ability to actually look up and down. (That should tell you youngsters what FPS games were like back then: looking up and down was a big deal!)
If the game lacked anything, it was on the Jedi side of the house. Dark Forces didn't give you the chance to pick up a lightsaber and whoop butt with it. With the technology available at the time, it wouldn't have been a very satisfying experience (witness, for example, Hexen, a contemporary title with melee weapons). The lack of lightsaber combat and Force powers would be remedied in the sequels, though.
Day of the Tentacle (1993)
by Nate Anderson
You have to understand how it was back in 1993. As a high school student, I had a lack of cash that kept me from picking up a CD-ROM drive—which meant that, when Day of the Tentacle (DotT) appeared, I picked it up on floppy disk. Well, on floppy disks. Like many other high-profile games at the end of the floppy disk era, DotT's audio and artwork required multiple disks (six, in this case). Initial installation involved 30 minutes in front of your computer, listening to the disk drive grind away while poring over the game's box art and manual, savoring the feast to come.
And DotT was a feast, a manic riot of color and lunacy. It opened with a free-ranging tentacle (don't ask) drinking toxic waste and mutating into an evil tentacle genius with plans of world domination. To stop him, three very different adventurers travel through time and space using the power of the Chron-o-John portable toilet while solving puzzles in three distinct historical settings. Puzzles solved in the past could propagate objects or world changes into the future, where they could be used by other characters to advance the plot further.
As in many adventure games of the era, solving some of the puzzles could require a bit of jiggery-pokery, mixing and matching inventory objects with objects in the world, hoping to stumble on the bizarre solution. But like the other great LucasArts adventures, such shortcomings were more than made up for with wit, atmosphere, and whimsy. As a young gamer, DotT looked like the sort of triumph that would usher us into a promised land of unbelievable adventure games that would last for decades—after all, we really knew how to do it well now, right? Instead, DotT turned out to be one of the high points of the classic adventure game genre, which by 2000 looked increasingly moribund. (See our lengthy history of adventure games for more.)
Most of those old adventure games aren't coming back (though LucasArts has recently seen fit to authorize high-def remakes of games like Monkey Island). Still, thanks to projects like SCUMMvm, we'll always have Paris mutant purple tentacles.
Full Throttle (1995)
by Lee Hutchinson
If you don't want to play this game after watching the above video, there's something wrong with your adventure game awesomeness detector. Full Throttle put the player in the role of Ben, head honcho of a post-apocalyptic biker gang. As the game begins, Ben is implicated in a murder, and he must clear his name and save his gang—and, just maybe, his entire way of life. The game delved lightly into the idealized culture of motorcycles and the open road, but what really kept it interesting was the fresh and unexplored nature of the world. It was a journey through fantastic locations, all set to the thrummmm of your bike's engine.
Like many other LucasArts games, Full Throttle's credits read like a who's who of video gaming, featuring art by Peter Chan and writing and production by Tim Schafer (and voice acting by Mark Hamill). The game practically oozed quality and atmosphere, and it was absolutely pure LucasArts: an incredible setting populated with beautifully realized characters.
Pipe Dream (1989)
by Andrew Cunningham
Our family didn't even get a "modern" PC until well into the '90s, so I missed the boat on the seminal point-and-click adventure games that so many people think of when they think of LucasArts. What we did have was basically every piece of hardware Nintendo made between 1983 and 2001, and the Nintendo Entertainment System is how I got introduced to a game called Pipe Dream.
The game, a LucasArts-developed port of an Amiga title called Pipe Mania, was relatively simple. It begins with a mostly empty grid of tiles, onto which the player must place pieces of pipe with different shapes. After some time has passed, a slow-moving liquid called "flooz" begins to flow out onto the board through a starting pipe, and your goal is to lay as much pipe as you can without letting the flooz leak out onto the board. If the flooz travels enough distance, you win the round and move on to the next level.
The different pipe shapes that the game gives the player are sorted randomly, and you can only see what the next five pieces of pipe are shaped like. Most of the game's challenge comes from thinking ahead and intelligently placing pieces of pipe you don't need right at that moment in places where you can use them later. Destruction of previously placed pipe pieces is possible, but it consumes valuable time and lowers your score. You also can't change or move pipes through which flooz has already traveled. Special pieces of pipe that speed up or slow down the flow of the flooz also begin appearing on the board in later stages, and as you progress the flow of the flooz gradually gets faster, which keeps things interesting.
I wouldn't call Pipe Dream a top-tier puzzle game on the level of Tetris or Bejeweled, but it was an entertaining diversion and its influence lives on. Players of the first BioShock may recall that a mini-game with very similar mechanics was used for its hacking puzzles, to point to one prominent example.
Shadows of the Empire (1996)
by Florence Ion
When I announced my pick for my favorite LucasArts game to my fellow editors, I was met with a few virtual groans. Shadows of the Empire arrived at a time when I had just discovered the Star Wars series, which was when LucasFilm had remastered and re-released the original trilogy for theaters. I chose this as my favorite LucasArts game because it allowed me to continue living in the world of Star Wars that I had just discovered in an interactive way, beyond the movies, at a time in my life when I was eager to do just that.
The game is a side-story that takes place shortly before the frigid battle of Hoth. You play as Dash Rendar and must save Luke Skywalker and Han Solo from Prince Xizor. It sounds cheesy, but I found it really engaging. I would spend endless hours running through each level despite the buggy camera controls (I had figured out a way to "hack" them so that my character could properly shoot level bosses), completing missions, going out of my way to collect Rebel Alliance tokens, and hoarding weapons so that I could the beat the Gladiator Droid in the second-to-last level. I'm thankful that, by playing on the Nintendo 64, I didn't have to sit through the cheesy cutscenes that were apparently part of the PC version of the game.
Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (2001)
by Sean Gallagher
I bought the Nintendo GameCube for my sons, or so I claimed. But I really bought it for Rogue Squadron II, which to this day remains one of my favorite "aerial" combat games of all time. Flying a collection of craft (both space and air) in scenarios out of the original Star Wars trilogy, from the first Death Star run to the last (with a couple of extra ones thrown in) Rogue Squadron II showed exactly how far the graphics power of the GameCube could be pushed.
Maybe it's because I spent hours pumping quarters into the vector graphics Star Wars arcade game as a kid that I put so many hours into flying that trench run again and again—and trying to master the grappling-hook takedown of Imperial walkers. But with a few minor exceptions (that AT-AT takedown was an Imperial pain in the ass), it was the game's kickass graphics and playability that made my kids have to pry the controller from my hands to play Zelda.
X-Wing (1993)
by Lee Hutchinson
Chris Roberts' Wing Commander and Wing Commander II were amazing, and they still rank among my favorite games. But even though Wing Commander created the modern space combat simulator, it took LucasArts' X-Wing to drag the genre into full 3D. Unlike Wing Commander with its lovingly drawn but pixelated sprite-based spacecraft, LucasArts used polygonal models for everything in X-Wing. They didn't include any fancy shading—that would come with TIE Fighter, the sequel—but it meant that the X-Wings looked like X-Wings, and the TIE fighters looked like TIE fighters, from all angles and distances.
X-Wing was gripping from the moment the game started, with the intro movie showing pre-rendered X-Wing fighters taking off from a Mon Calamari cruiser and blasting an attacking bunch of Imperials out of the sky. At various points in the game, the player was given control not just of the titular X-Wing star fighter, but also the heavier Y-Wing fighter-bomber (equipped with heavier ordnance and ion canon, which could disable other spacecraft) and the quick and nimble A-Wing.
The game's campaign—no multiplayer here!—takes the player through a set of missions that roughly paralleled the events before and during the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV, of course, not that other one—remember, this was back in 1993!). Along the way, the player makes bombing runs on Star Destroyers, assists in gathering intelligence on the Death Star, and eventually even makes that fateful trench run and tries to launch a proton torpedo into an exhaust port that's only two meters wide. Hey, it's easier than bulls-eyeing womp rats.
The game wasn't just straight stick-work like Wing Commander, and players were required to balance a finite amount of energy between their fighter's weapons, engines, and shields. Wanted to make like Red Leader and switch your deflectors on double-front? You could do that, diverting spare laser energy to the shields; or you could drop your ship's rear shields and leave your flank unprotected and send that spare energy forward. Attack runs in a slow Y-wing could be particularly complicated, requiring the player to beef up the front shields on approach, deliver your bombs, and then turn away and pump every spare erg of energy into the engines to escape. It was an interesting mechanic that lent an aspect of strategy to the game.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors (1993)
by Kyle Orland
Before survival horror games were even a thing, this game stood out as a love letter to the kind of B-movie, foam rubber monster horror that drew in so many kids growing up. From the bright, colorful sprites and cartoony sound effects to the pun-filled level titles ("Chopping Mall") and weapons like a water pistol, this was definitely more Creature from the Black Lagoon than Evil Dead.
There was some serious gameplay on top of the zany presentation, though. The core of the game involved navigating maze-like levels from a claustrophobically close top-down perspective, rescuing various suburban archetypes while avoiding all manner of wandering monsters. The game became as much a puzzle as a test of reflexes as you had to choose the best routes to conserve your limited ammunition and stay alive. While the first few levels were no sweat, the difficulty cranked up very quickly, forcing you to practically memorize the correct path through each level in order to survive.
What truly set the game apart was great level design that made use of hidden shortcuts, and destructible environments that appeared long before such a feature was common in gaming. Add in a well-done co-op feature, screen-filling bosses, and an infectious soundtrack, and you have one of the best under-the-radar releases of the 16-bit era.
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