The Original Lucasfilm Games Team Talk About Life at Skywalker Ranch | Hacker News Reader

The Original Lucasfilm Games Team Talk About Life at Skywalker Ranch

usgamer.net

154 pointsjsnell52 comments

The Secret of Monkey Island is probably my favorite game of all time.

I remember saving for the better part of a year to buy the ridiculously expensive 512K expansion module for my Amiga 500, basically just for being able to play it. The moment the memorable intro music started playing I knew it was worth it.

All the games from Maniac Mansion up to Grim Fandango are absolute classics, some of the fondest memories I have of video games.

Do you recall how much was the expansion module?

Not really, but it was definitely this weird triangle-shaped brick:

http://thumbs2.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m1ZaYEMj4L9eCCMBaPuZ0...

Now it sells for 25$ on Ebay, apparently :)

random price(time) data point: in 1993, a 500mb external scsi hard drive cost me $500.

The "Adventure" genre is basically gone. Are there any new titles in the likes of the old LucasFilm games being produced today?

I have very fond memories of playing most of the cited games, including many other titles from Sierra as well. They hit a sweet spot of difficulty and overall very nice graphics/story that's difficult to match.

It's also impressive how well these games have aged. You can pick up any of these titles on ScummVM and still be entertained for days/weeks.

Adventure games have seen a bit of a renaissance with the rise in indie publishers. Take a look at Telltale Games' and Double Fine Productions' offerings. Of course, these two publishers have former LucasArts developers....

Indeed, they've received very positive critical reception. Having played a handful of them, they're very well produced and pretty decently written as well. The genre is definitely not gone, just not in the mainstream.

Double Fine Productions is definitely worth checking out. They've recently released Broken Age, a successfully-kickstarted effort. Act I is out now and is absolutely wonderful (in my personal opinion), with Act II still in development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Age

For those not in the know, Double Fine Productions was founded by Tim Schafer, who is ex-LucasArts and was lead on Grim Fandango and heavily involved in the Monkey Island series too.

I just finished Act I last night. Amazing game, and regrettably (although understandably) too short.

It's been years since I've played a good adventure game, and Broken Age definitely scratched that itch.

I played the latter half of Shay's storyline with my daughter (she was amused by the teleporter's side effects), we're going to replay Vella's storyline since she missed that part.

I found Broken Age to be terrible. Visually it was not too bad, but the great puzzles and whacky humour were almost entirely gone. A small fraction remained, but definitely not enough to motivate the price - especially when considering the length.

A game that did manage to get it almost entirely right, though (not extremely visually appealing when compared to 2d art, but still decent), is The Book of Unwritten Tales (and also its prequel, though I did not like it quite as much).

Oh, and there is actually a ton of fantastic, and free, adventure games made by amateurs over here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/

People don't talk about the games made by the AGS community too much, and they keep a lot to themselves, which is a pity, because there are some true gems there.

http://www.sizefivegames.com/games/ben-there-dan-that/

It's an extremely self-referential parody of adventure games, made by guys who clearly love the genre. I found it a lot of fun.

> For those not in the know, Double Fine Productions was founded by Tim Schafer, who is ex-LucasArts and was lead on Grim Fandango and heavily involved in the Monkey Island series too.

Ron Gilbert was also involved in Broken Age, as far as I know.

I don't think Ron was involved much on Broken Age. He's been working on his own games more recently, including The Cave (at DF) and Scurvy Scallywags (indie).

Another great recent adventure game is Gemini Rue. It provided me a good deal of fun and the story was very clever.

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/gemini-rue/

I like the Blackwell series. The writing is excellent and the puzzles are mostly good (I recall only a couple of :facepalm: moments). The first game was released in 2006 and the last April 2014, so you can see the evolution of Wadjet Eye Games. Surprisingly the idea doesn't get old after five games.

I had a lot of fun playing the series (I discovered them last year), and they play just fine in Linux with Wine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(series)

Looking beyond Double Fine and Telltale, there are dozens of indie titles[1] and a thriving amateur scene. Of particular note are the Blackwell series, To The Moon, and Kentucky Route Zero.

[1] http://www.gog.com/games/adventure##release=a05

To the Moon is one of my favorites, and it's got a pretty good soundtrack.

I played a bit of the Walking Dead. It was well done, but seemed more of a limited-action RPG than a puzzle/adventure game that LucasArts and Sierra were known for.

There's also Red Thread Games. They're doing "Dreamfall Chapters", a next installment in "The Longest Journey" saga.

http://redthreadgames.com/

The video is exciting and they mention exactly that about the genre: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-...

I don't know the current status of the project.

The current status is that it's doing pretty well. They ended up splitting the game into two acts; they released act 1 a few months ago, and act 2 is in active development right now. The response to act 1 has generally been pretty good, and it's available on Steam for anybody who wants to purchase it.

I cannot recommend Machinarium enough. The same company also more recently made Botanicula, which I loved, but has a slightly more abstract narrative.

Not as much of a "game", but I thoroughly enjoyed "Gone Home". There's also "Kentucky Route Zero" and "The Novelist".

Agree with the first two (haven't played the third). "Dear Esther", too. There is some fantastic stuff coming out of the indie scene.

"Quiet Please" is a small fun indie Android title with a lot of the elements that I like about adventure games. (I have to use what with what?)

There was a very good one for the Wii that came out not long after that system's launch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_%26_Wiki:_Quest_for_Barbar...

German developer Daedalic Entertainment has been putting out many high-quality point-and-click adventures in the classic Lucas Arts mold. Their most famous series is Deponia. I have a personal affinity for their two games in the Dark Eye fantasy universe, Chains of Satinav and Memoria.

A fan favorite you might have missed since it came out after the heyday of Lucas Arts is The Longest Journey.

In case you prefer retro-pixels, you could also give http://thelastdoor.com a chance (my personal favorite).

Cannot recommend The Longest Journey enough. The sequel is so-so, but this adventure is amazing and one of the best I've played.

> It's also impressive how well these games have aged. You can pick up any of these titles on ScummVM and still be entertained for days/weeks.

Yeah, but remember that when they were released, there was no internet, and you could get stuck for days/weeks on a puzzle you could not solve. That was sometimes very frustrating, no matter how good these games were.

I was a big SCI0-era Sierra fan, and while I did buy a few of those invisible-ink hint books, their best games overcame most of the frustration factor. I was particularly fond of The Colonel's Bequest, where the clever time mechanic drove the game to its conclusion whether the player had solved every puzzle or not.

One of the things I appreciated with the Lucasarts titles was that they didn't seem to have as many obscure puzzles as the Sierra titles.

I recall getting stuck in King's Quest games for hours looking for something (or trying to type in the magic phrase [Seriously? SULEIMAN??]), whereas games like MI were usually more straightforward. The mouse interface helped things along somewhat, but Sierra games still felt too puzzley for my taste.

Sierra was notorious for making games that had to be solved in just the right way. LSL1-3, for example, you would come to a dead end if you didn't pick up some item early on. How would you know to pick up that item? Or even that you were missing an item? You wouldn't. They were still incredibly fun, though.

One theory was the Sierra's ridiculous puzzles were designed so frustrated players would call Sierra's pay-for-clues customer support line.

And then there was the "banana tree" gag in Monkey Island, which was a direct swipe at Sierra's habit of killing you off at every turn...

Adventure game fans still have lots of options these days; I feel like space sim fans on the other hand, have been largely neglected since the days of TIE Fighter.

I don't play many space sim games, but what about Freespace 2, FTL, EVE Online, Escape Velocity, etc?

Not the same really. Strike Suit Zero is somewhat close, as are the great FreeSpace 2 mods. Games that put you in the pilot seat are not that common.

EVE Online's fighting seems incredibly boring and static, the antithesis of TIE fighter's dogfighting gameplay. Great to read about the shenanigans though.

I'm a huge Escape Velocity fan, but those were the days of the X-Wing games; the last EV game came out in 2002.

There's plenty of indie space sims coming through the pipe. Space Engineers, Kerbal Space Program, Planetary Annihilation, Kinetic Void, Strike Suit Zero, just to name a few.

http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Space/

Good stuff to be sure (I love Kerbal, and kickstarted PA), but being picky, Planetary Annihalation is an RTS and Kerbal is not a fighter game.

There are a few space MMOs in the pipeline too. We're probably past the dark ages now.

But being picky, you didn't ask for fighter games, you asked for space sims :)

I meant like TIE fighter. :) A la jet sims.

I would would recommend X3: Terrain Conflict. There's much more to it than Tie Fighter or X-Wing though (but can arrange massive battles like either one). I loved the LucasArts Space sims, but X3 has been as good of substitute as I have been able to find. You not only get to fly fighter craft, but also command capital ships as well as buy/sell upgrades. It's sort of a Sandbox RPG space sim that also has a storyline if you want to follow that.

X series games also have tons of mods out for them. I know there was at least a major Battlestar Galactica one that was well done and would have to double check, but there could be a Star Wars Universe one as well.

Ooh, you're in for a treat. Elite: Dangerous will most likely be released this year. You can already pay to beta test if you can't wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE8B4KptyVI

Just got an idea - one can make new games using some of the engines supported by ScummVM. That way you'd be able to play it almost anywhere. Will try to look into it.

Have you tried Psychonauts? It wraps the adventure game in the structure of a platformer, and is hilarious and charming. Not surprisingly by Tim Schafer.

There are quite a few adventure style games for the Nintendo DS.

The article mentioned Commodore 64 and wow, that takes me back. I remember being about 10, we had a Commodore 64 and I spent my weekends typing in programs from "The Gazette" magazine and getting them to run. When we got a cassette deck to save to I was in heaven. I remember asking my dad for the cassette deck stating I didn't want to have to re-type these each time I wanted to play it. Then the floppy came out!

I always feel like people get too stuck on Star Wars and adventure games when they talk about early Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm did make some other games, and they were incredibly creative genre-busters. BallBlazer, Metal Warriors, Night Shift, etc.

God this drop down header is annoying. I don't even understand why it comes down even if I don't have my mouse near it.

However. Thank you for the nice lunch read :)

Anybody remember Strike Fleet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com