LucasArts may resurrect adventure games

Posted at: 4:35am 2nd June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

I have these fine leather jackets for sale, and so on …

While LucasArts may be trying its best to promote its new Star Wars games, as well as future warfare title Fracture, there’s a whole generation of gamers who fondly remember the twinkling LucasArts logo appearing as a precursor to a Monkey Island or Indiana Jones game. It’s now been five years since LucasArts laid off its adventure game division, but the company has revealed that it could be rethinking this move.

In an interview with EuroGamer, LucasArts’ PR manager, Chris Norris, said: ‘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.’ As well as this, assistant producer on Fracture, Jeffrey Gullett, told the site that ‘We've got a lot of pride in our heritage and it's definitely something we're still leaving open.’

The pair also admitted that they get asked about a potential adventure game revival a lot, showing that it’s often a hot topic in interviews. However, Norris also said: ‘The decision is taken at a pay grade higher than ours,’ and went on to suggest that today’s games were just a progression of adventure games, saying ‘I think we're still making adventure games but they're a little bit different than before with survival horror games and the like.’

However, Monkey Island’s designer Ron Gilbert, disagrees on his Grumpy Gamer blog, saying: ‘Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren't really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. If this is true, they've done a pretty bad job of it.’ Gilbert is currently the creative director at Hothead games, which developed the recently launched Penny Arcade adventure game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.

Is there a gap in the market for a new LucasArts adventure game? Let us know your thoughts.

Via EuroGamer