LucasArts adventure games could resurface in the future

PALGN News | Classic LucasArts adventure game titles may be revived on current platforms.

In a story that is sure to delight those that reminisce on the glory days of adventure gaming, LucasArts could possibly revive their classic titles on the current generation of consoles.

Speaking with Eurogamer, LucasArts PR boss Chris Norris and Jeffrey Gullett, Producer of the upcoming Fracture have admitted that they have noticed that gamers are keen for their favourite point-and-click adventure titles such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Monkey Island - not to mention the other numerous titles of the glory age of LucasArts adventures - to be revived on current platforms - with particular interest pointed at the Nintendo DS.

Norris explains that the company has "looked at it. It is something we are continually looking at - new venues to put out our library of games on. We're not announcing anything about that because honestly I don't know anything about it."

While the DS could prove to be a great place for these game, Gullett believes that "the cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures. There's literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out."

Still optimistic, he believes that "it could still happen. We've got a lot of pride in our heritage and it's definitely something we're still leaving open."

Norris believes that the adventure genre is not dead yet, and is keen to revisit those type of games that were the pillar of LucasArts gaming, though he points out that "the decision is taken at a pay grade higher than ours. I would love to see new adventure games coming out. A lot of people will say they feel like the adventure game genre is dead. I don't think it is, I think it's changed in some ways. I think we're still making adventure games but they're a little bit different than before with survival horror games and the like."

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17 Comments

David

3 years ago

"the cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures. There's literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out."

DS carts go up to 256mb.

Most of these games originally came on 5 inch floppy disks, 720k double sided. Even the later CD versions were just the disk versions with redbook audio, which would be easily compressed to fractions of their original size today.

What are these guys smoking?

Adam

3 years ago

If space is an issue - here's an idea:

It's called the Wii. It uses DVDs which hold 4.7gb.

It uses a pointing device. You know. For pointing and clicking.

Wii + Adventure Games + ??? (common sense by publishers) = Profit??

rodvcpetrie

3 years ago

I cannot wait until the day comes, if it does, when I see a news item announcing another installment of Monkey Island except in it's original point and click format of course

RXWAG

3 years ago

full throttle!!
if you know what i mean, thats awesome, if you dont, you tube is your friend...

legend166

3 years ago

You'd think the Wii would be the obvious choice.

But I wouldn't be putting money on LucasArts doing anything worthwhile ever again, so they'll probably put it on the PSP or something.

Harry Milonas

3 years ago

David wrote

What are these guys smoking?

Most likely the same substance that inspired their namesake's latest grinding of a franchise into utter stupidity.

Come on LA, pull the thumbs out already. With Zak McKracken, Loom, and the two Indy titles at an ever-growing hard-to-acquire large, I've still got a SCUMM collection to (legitimately) complete.

Evan

3 years ago

David wrote

Most of these games originally came on 5 inch floppy disks, 720k double sided. Even the later CD versions were just the disk versions with redbook audio, which would be easily compressed to fractions of their original size today.

Hopefully he's referring to the talkie versions of some of them which, prior to MP3, were over 200 meg. Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and The Dig are all probably too large (and difficult to emulate) to ever come across without a proper port. And, while it'd probably be possible to do Sam and Max, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Day of the Tentacle, there'd need to be a little bit of work done to shrink them enough to make it economical (given larger cartridges cost more money).

Still, they're fools not to do it. Given an updated interface that works effectively on the DS, they'd basically be re-releasing some of the best adventure games ever made. How could they not sell?!

Black Wolf

3 years ago

Do not hold your breath. If LucasArts was serious about reviving adventure games, they should never have canceled the sequel to Full Throttle or sold Sam & Max to Telltale Games. If they decide to go ahead with this, then I will start buying their adventure games, but until then, LA is dead as far as I am concerned.

David

3 years ago

Evan wrote

Voice can be compressed to almost nothing these days, and the soundtracks mostly stayed midi even in the CD versions. And even the standard DS cart is 128meg. You could easily fit most of the scumm catalogue on a single cart including voices, dropping only the later games like The Curse of Monkey Island which was always on CD.

Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island are another story, as they were a new 3D engine.

ObsoletE

3 years ago

even uncompressed, Sam and Max: HTR (Talkie Version) is only 190MB.

Evan

3 years ago

David wrote

Sure, but I still stand by what I said, namely that while it's definitely possible, it may not be economical. For Loom, Monkey Island 1, and the like, it's boderline a no-brainer (ignoring any interface / control issues) - the cost of a smaller cartridge is minimal. For the larger ones, however, it's not so simple - even if the audio is compressed to MP3, larger storage costs more money, and if there's not enough demand in the market, they still won't make a return.

The guys who did Puzzle Quest compromised on save slots to save money on the hardware costs (storage space, in other words). They later regretted the decision, but apparently it's a fairly big consideration, driven heavily by expected sales.

LeonJ

3 years ago

Who cares about the DS ports, it makes prefect sense as WiiWare titles, or even budget ranged DVDs.

The Wiimote is prefect for mouse actions so I think it would be a match made in heaven. I'd buy almost all of the old games because they are full of such great humour and gaming goodness.

GooberMan

3 years ago

Anyone remember how they managed to fit Resident Evil 2 on to a N64 cartridge without losing anything but video and audio quality?

The major challenge IMO with MI3 and Full Throttle will be squeezing SVGA-quality animations down on to a less-than-VGA-quality resolution without making it look like crap.

kingpeck

3 years ago

Evan wrote

Sure, but I still stand by what I said, namely that while it's definitely possible, it may not be economical. For Loom, Monkey Island 1, and the like, it's borderline a no-brainer (ignoring any interface / control issues) - the cost of a smaller cartridge is minimal. For the larger ones, however, it's not so simple - even if the audio is compressed to MP3, larger storage costs more money, and if there's not enough demand in the market, they still won't make a return.

The guys who did Puzzle Quest compromised on save slots to save money on the hardware costs (storage space, in other words). They later regretted the decision, but apparently it's a fairly big consideration, driven heavily by expected sales.

I can definitely understand where you are coming from, but there would not be any major development done for these titles except for finding a use for a second screen. The only thing that really needs to be done is optimize the video and the graphics to suit the smaller screen (which would reduce storage requirements), and the audio (which with today's compression techniques, makes them negligible).

With the DS cartridges being similar to SD cards, it makes them fairly economical, especially compared to the other mobile platform, the PSP. You can buy a 16 GB card from the shops for about 70-80$. So I could imagine the cost of a 256MB or even a 512MB cartridge to be fairly minimal these days, though not free.

You have a point when it comes to sales. As much as this title would be a jewel in my collection, I don't see a huge demand for it. It's possible that it would re-kindle people that grew up on these games to get the game, and a DS if they don't have one. But as for drawing a new audience, which in these days of bottom lines and cut throat marketing means that a game really has to be a huge success to be highly regarded.

There are instances though of games that aren't major sellers that have a cult like following, which could spur enough people to buy and recommend the game.

And as for RE2 on the 64, they used the BIGGEST cartridge of the time, which was 512 Mega bit (64MByte), and they lost heaps because of it. RE2 was great because of the audio and video. The game play was good, but mostly it was the look of the game. And as with most 64 games, heavy compression took effect, meaning that while the game WOULD fit onto the cartridge, it probably shouldn't have. (PS. I love the 64, but this game was probably the worst port I have ever seen, because of the reasons stated)

Island_Wolf

3 years ago

A few of LucasArts Adventure games are in EB/JB/Other gaming stores for $10. Titles like Sam and Max, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.

If they are going to release it in other platform, the price will have to be reasonable in my opinion, unless they are doing a collection edition.

oracle128

3 years ago

From what I understand, several of the popular SCUMM games (eg Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island) don't work on the DS port of SCUMMVM primarily because of limited RAM, and some experience slow down. Granted, the homebrew version has 2GB of storage to work with (or more with SDHC), but presumably the RAM issue would be common to both the homebrew port and any official ports. You can't really rely on people having the RAM expansion cart either. But then, there's still a lot of SCUMM games that will work fine and dandy on SCUMMVM DS.

Of course there's always the Wii option, but that's unlikely to happen as, quite frankly, the games are too old and poor to really sell enough copies on a non-handheld console to make the port worth it. Especially not with Sam & Max Season 1 coming to Wii already.

warpdesign

2 years ago

LeonJ wrote

Who cares about the DS ports, it makes prefect sense as WiiWare titles, or even budget ranged DVDs.

The 100+ million DS users ?