How LucasArts fell apart

[Newtype]

How LucasArts fell apart

 

Some highlights:

 

Every so often, Lucas would check in with the team, and as he grew to trust the staff behind 1313, he’d offer up changes, asking them to switch characters and rewrite the story based on what he felt would be more fitting for the game. Ex-LucasArts staff describe Lucas as someone who cared deeply about telling stories, but didn’t know much about the game development process—every Lucas-mandated story change meant shifts in every department: the design, the art, the programming. How could that not be frustrating?

 

“One of the problems of working in a film company—[Lucas] is used to being able to change his mind,” said one source. “He didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with these changes were.”

 

The freeze also led to endless questions revolving around Star Wars: First Assault, a multiplayer shooter that had also changed shape multiple times since it first began development in 2010. Created because George Lucas wanted to compete with the gargantuan Call of Duty series, First Assault was originally a large-scale shooter set in a time period after Return of the Jedi, according to two people familiar with the game.

 

One publisher made an offer that was "above the budget of 1313," according to a person familiar with negotiations, but LucasFilm wouldn't take the deal.

 

 

 

In news that will certainly crush anyone who enjoyed LucasArts-branded adventure games, the team at LucasArts Singapore was working on a remastered version of the classic point-and-click game Day of the Tentacle, according to three people familiar with that project. Like the special editions of the first two Monkey Island games, released in 2009 and 2010, the remastered Day of the Tentacle would be pseudo-3D, with remade background art and cut-scenes redone to run at 30 frames per second.1P

 

Although this Day of the Tentacle remake was never officially greenlit, two sources say it was almost finished. One person familiar with the project pegs it at 80% done. But it was never approved, and the company's higher-ups had no interest in continuing to make what they called "legacy" titles like this one. So the game remains unreleased—and perhaps there's a near-finished Day of the Tentacle HD sitting on a shelf somewhere in Singapore, never to be touched again.

 

 

 

[C_U_SPACECOWBOY]

I really wish I never clicked on your spoiler newt....

[The NZA]

UGH fuckin leak that game then! EA and Lucasarts rival each other's douchery for most PC classics left in the vault in this digital age. i wish to fuck Double Fine snuck Grim Fandango out the door with them somehow, fucking tragic.

 

also, more fuckery:

 

a project code-named Wingman that was going to be a Wii U title modeled after the old TIE Fighter and X-Wing games.

 

goddamn, man. i wanna blame him for HL3 somehow.

[the division of joy]

Do it, blame them for HL3. I know I do.

 

This read like getting kicked in the shin a lot.