Lucasfilm Games turns 40: Watch out, behind you, a three-headed monkey!

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2.5.2022

Translation: machine translated

Lucasfilm's games division has gone through a checkered history over the past four decades until it was a mere shadow of its former self.

This is an article from our content partner "Golem". Here you can find the original article by editor Peter Osteried.

When a Star Wars producer starts a game company, the first thing you would expect is a Star Wars game. But George Lucas couldn't release a Star Wars game with Lucasfilm Games because the rights for it were held by Atari. In retrospect, one has to say: a stroke of luck! Because that forced the company, founded on May 1, 1982, to come up with original ideas instead of relying on an established franchise. Who knows if Monkey Island and other adventure classics would have ever existed otherwise.

The first game to be developed and released this way was Maniac Mansion. It came out in 1987, by which time Lucas' game company, initially called Lucasfilm Computer Division with its games division Lucasfilm Games Group, was already eight years old.

The company was based at Skywalker Ranch, but a restructuring of the company led to the game division becoming part of the newly formed Lucasarts Entertainment Company, which also included Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. The latter later became Lucas Digital Ltd, while Lucasarts was responsible for the games and moved to new offices in San Rafael, California.

The great time of adventure games comes - and goes

Lucasarts developed side-scrollers, first-person shooters and simulation games, but above all the company became known for its adventure games in the 1990s. In 1988 Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders came out, in 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, and in 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island. The latter was so successful that several sequels followed. There was also Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, an original adventure featuring the whip-wielding archaeologist.

For a few years, adventure games were the non plus ultra among gamers, but in the second half of the 1990s their traction waned. Nevertheless, Lucasarts launched a third and fourth part of Monkey Island at the end of the decade - games that were still quite well received.

However, the era of adventure games was over, graphics became more elaborate, 3D capabilities became more important, and games underwent a strong evolutionary leap. Games were in development but were discontinued, for example Sam & Max: Freelance Police.

The developers who were then fired founded their own company, Telltale Games. Telltale was very successful with games for the zombie series The Walking Dead, but had to file for bankruptcy in 2018. The naming rights to Telltale were sold, so that a new company was formed in 2019, but it has not yet made a big appearance again to date.

Star Wars and nothing else

So Lucasarts did eventually get around to Star Wars and, when the licenses were no longer outsourced, produced rows and rows of successful and popular Star Wars-related games. Until the early 2000s, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, Star Wars: Jedi Knight, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Jedi Academy were released.

There was a lot of reliance on the bandwagon, which Lucasarts itself was apparently not comfortable with. That's why the company declared in 2002 that in the future 50 percent of new games should have nothing to do with Star Wars - an initiative that didn't last long, though, since the newly developed ideas and games weren't successful or were even discontinued in the production phase.

But even the Star Wars titles couldn't keep up with the most successful games. In 2003, the company made a turnover of 100 million dollars - a lot of money, but that a game like Halo made on its own.

One reason was certainly that they didn't develop the games in-house, but worked with external developers like Bioware, which pushed costs up. In 2004, therefore, they began to build up their own development department. At the same time, savings were necessary. At its peak, Lucasarts had 450 employees, later it was only 190.

In addition, they tried to live up to the promise of the early 2000s and develop games that had nothing to do with Star Wars. Together with Telltale Games, Lucasarts developed Tales of Monkey Island, a remake of the 1990 original. That was in 2009, followed by the sequel the following year.

In 2010, a third of the staff had to be laid off. "That's just because we're reorganizing our team to be more responsive to the needs of the studio," company spokeswoman Emilie Hicks explained at the time. The last game Lucasarts released as a subsidiary of the independent Lucasfilm was Angry Birds Star Wars.

Only the name remains

When the Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm and all of its associated subsidiaries in 2012, everything was initially supposed to stay the same. New games were developed, but no longer published. So they were also working on an open-world RPG and a first-person shooter. However, that was already the end in 2013.

Most of the staff was dismissed, only ten employees remained. The Lucasarts label was kept, but no more games were developed, only licenses were managed. The idea behind this was: If you hand over the Star Wars licenses to different developers, you get first-class games that ensure the visibility of Star Wars, but minimize the risk for Disney.

In 2021, the company eventually rebranded back to Lucasfilm Games and was announced as the co-publisher of Return to Monkey Island with Devolver Digital, scheduled for release in late 2022. Only time can tell what happens beyond that.

Lucasfilm Games' history has been checkered and - apart from a brief period in the 1990s - its success has been based virtually solely on Star Wars. However, part of the company's legacy is that many ex-employees have founded their own successful companies that are still developing games today.

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