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Lucasarts looking at reviving adventure games?
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 2nd June 2008
Lucasarts is always looking to revive the adventure game genre, but has nothing to announce right now.
Speaking to Eurogamer recently Chris admitted that Lucasarts was often asked whether they were looking to revive the adventure game genre it made such a success of with games like Sam and Max: Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle in the early 90s.
"We have looked at it," admitted Norris. "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."
Eurogamer weren't going to give up the ghost that quickly though and asked Chris if Lucasarts had given any thought to re-releasing the old games on new hardware - the Nintendo DS and Wii would seem to be ideally suited to them.
Unfortunately, this is where the interview takes a turn for the surreal as Chris says the DS hardware just isn't up to the task of running the old Lucasarts adventure games. We beg to differ though and it seems slightly preposterous that a DS cart can hold a 3D Zelda game, but not a decades old point and click like Loom.
"The cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures," claimed Fracture producer Jeffrey Gullett. "There's literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out."
"The decision is taken at a pay grade higher than ours," said Norris a tad more convincingly. "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."
Would you love to see a re-release of Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis or are you just shocked that Joe managed to write a news post without once mentioning The Secret of Monkey Island? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (31)Stats: 0.072 seconds
Maybe he meant the later games like Grim Fandango.
That was my second thought.
My first was: revive adventure games? Yes, please. :D
If there's one man that can make it happen, then it would be Chuck Norris
My bad. The guy's name is actually Chris Norris. Don't know why I got it wrong. Maybe Chuck Norris was psychically influencing me.
Wait.. oh, psychically. I read that as physically.
I'd have thought they'd be doing something for the new Indy flick.
The DS/Wii would suit a point and click perfectly, imo. I wonder if the honours are going to another hand-held console though?
None of which, save Monkey Island, are particularly well known outside of point-and-click fan circles, and none of which, save Monkey Island, are the titles that people will be after if Lucas Arts rereleased their back catelogue.
It'd be like id releasing their back catelogue onto the DS, but only providing Wolfenstein 3D, it's sequal, and the custom port of Mario that Jonh Carmack did when he was 17. Better not to do it at all than only release the more obscure titles.
(2) you don't need super ninja high quality audio for a DS game, so could compress aggressively.
(3) I'd imagine DS carts vary in size according to the size of the game. 160MB of flash would cost you about 3p nowadays, and you can fit 16GB in an SDHC card, so there's no technical or economic reason why something the size and cost of a DS game couldn't have enough space.
I think Maniac Mansion and the early Indiana Jones games are perfectly well know. Besides, if audio was THAT much of a problem then you could just run DOTT and Sam and Max in text modes anyway. The only games I can see them having trouble moving to DS would be Curse of Monkey Island and Full Throttle since they have higher quality visuals and full audio.
full throttle would be an awesome game for the DS
The ScummVM DS emulator (http://scummvm.drunkencoders.com/) can play the vast majority of lucasarts games (not monkey island 3 and beyond), and the games are at most 60MB. I think it's just the audio that would take up space, but that can easily be compressed. There are also DS cartridges as big as 256MB, although only seen in Japan, but 128MB is pretty common in Europe and North America.
With todays techniques like Mpeg layer 3 compression the voices would be reduced to almost nothing. They all are mono 16bit 22khz anyway. so they would be reduces to max 20mb or something. Then make a compressor for the whole code and you could decompres on the fly when the game is loading parts.
If I'm not mistaken, most of these games predate MP3 compression.
(Fraunhoffer LLC released the first commercial codec in 1994, Fate of Atlantis was released in 1992...).
Come on Lucas Arts! Stop acting like you're selling the Golden Goose and just release the darn games, before gamers scummvm the heck out of them!
Great game, really like the way you can choose whether to go down the brains or brawn paths.
You're not the only one.. I reckon it's that mean beard that Norris sports, you know, the one with another fist instead of a chin.
On topic: (Good) Adventure games for the DS please. Hell. (Good) Adventure games for any hand held console, please!
I've done the same thing and have had various LucasArts games up and running on my DS with ScummVM. Ok, so the games take up between 100MB - 250MB, but that's with standard audio compression. Use MP3 and you could get that figure down to <100MB.
Now, as far as I know, the biggest DS cart at the moment stores 1Gbit (128MB), make it completely text based and there's no problem whatsoever.
It hasn't really died, it's just the point and click method that has died. The only reason it used AFAIK was because of hardware constraints. Look at things like Call of Cthulhu, Dreamfall, Deus Ex, Bioshock, Morrowind and Alone in the Dark game. They all have traits of an adventure game but some decide to focus more on combat because it makes a more adrenaline rushed.
They aren't really dead, they've just evolved, point and click is dead(ish). When I played the new Sam and Max episodes, I did enjoy them, but I felt it was a point and click for the sake of being a point and click.
I would like to see some decent adventure games though, as Joe said in his review of Overclocked, the genre seems to attract bad developers. It would be nice a new (mostly non-combat/non-acrobatic) adventure game though.
at the moment i have Day of the Tentacle on my DS flash cart:
106mb in size and of that 106mb, 93mb is the MP3 soundtrack (extra 1.4mb if you include the actual scummvm NDS rom file as well)
there are plenty of DS Roms of 128mb in size floating about so i really can't see where the problem lies :?
Check for:
Xir
It seems odd that they're saying about capacity problems, I'd thought it'd be more a practical one. I can remember some aspects of adventure games, that feature a certain simian obsessed pirate, which are quite small on-screen and I'd imagine trying to find and click them on a DS screen would be near impossible.
As far as capacity, what about the PSP and its UMD format, those can hold up to 900mb (or 1.8Gb for a dual layer) of data! I know the platform may not be as popular as the DS but still, a market is a market none the less.