The LucasArts Graphic Adventure
But LucasArts has also had a number of highly successful games - most notably, a long string of graphic adventures - based on its own properties, some of which have developed into hot properties in their own right. All these games - from the seminal Maniac Mansion to the newly released Grim Fandango - have one thing in common. "Everything we do," says Barwood, "almost without exception, has some sort of story underneath it."
Ben on his Harley in one of our favorite LucasArts adventures, Full Throttle.
How true. From Loom to Monkey Island to Day of the Tentacle, LucasArts fleshed out fanciful tales that were just as rich and entertaining as any novel you'd read or movie you'd see at the local cineplex. And gamers took notice. By the late '80s, a LucasArts adventure was perhaps the most cherished possessions a gamer could have on his or her shelf. Before the glut of first-person 3D shooters and real-time strategy games, adventures from LucasArts and arch-rival Sierra On-Line represented the most important genre in the industry.
Ken Williams, founder of Sierra On-Line, remembers well the battle for supremacy in the genre. "LucasArts adventure games had extreme polish and attention to detail. I thought that Lucas could have beat us in adventure games if they had a stronger technical team. I thought their technology was weak, but that overall their writing and art was better."
Ken Williams, founder of Sierra On-Line, provided LucasArts' primary competition in the adventure game genre.
Barwood is quick to disagree. "By the time Sierra retired from the field - I guess that's the best way to put it - our technology was quite superior to what they were doing."
Josh Mandel, who worked at Sierra during the early '90s on many adventure games, is reflective about the rivalry between the two companies. "It was the perception that adventure games from LucasArts were labors of love and faith, not designed to be the chief support of the company as they were at Sierra," he recalls. "So, while LucasArts was concentrating on advancing the art, we were concentrating on both feeding the appetite of the market and supporting the company."
Today, the adventure game remains an integral part of the LucasArts mix. But for how much longer? As Barwood puts it, "a lot of soul-searching goes on in the company when the market changes and wants different types of games." But he goes on to say that dwindling sales alone won't doom the genre at LucasArts. "[We] will always do adventure games so long as people in the company want to do them."
The Curse of Monkey Island, released in 1997, is the latest in the award-winning, swashbuckling series.
For Schafer, the adventure genre is still alive and kicking. "Adventure games aren't dead - each adventure game we do sells better than the previous one. Industry-wide, fewer and fewer are being made, but not because people have stopped making them. It's because they take longer and longer to make." It's true. Consider that less than a decade ago, only a year separated the release of the first Monkey Island and its sequel. The development cycle for Schafer's most recent game, Grim Fandango, was more than three years.
Myst, from Cyan, is one of the most successful PC games of all time, and, according to Schafer and Barwood, a primary reason for the stagnation of the adventure game market.
Another factor cited by both Schafer and Barwood as a source of trouble for the genre was the massive success of Myst and the subsequent flood of Myst-clones. Putting it bluntly, Schafer says that the inflow of Myst-style games of the past few years were made by people who "couldn't care less about making adventure games and - big surprise - they sucked. The Myst-imitators feel like someone who doesn't speak a language repeating the phonetics of it - they don't get it, don't understand the meaning of it, but they are going through the motions of creating an adventure game."
Barwood is adamant that lots of people saw Myst and said, "'Let's make a world with no people,'" he says. "These 'deadworld' games were the new trend of the industry and really destroyed what the adventure game was all about."
