Because, like a lot of old games which were made in a period with comparatively severe technical limitations, they made more with less. They managed to squeeze emotion out of orders of magnitude less pixels than the standard game today. And you've got to admire that.
LucasArts's adventure games in particular were brilliant examples, and I think their defining characteristic is that they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate, to time traveling kids trying to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world, the settings just kept getting weirder and funnier.
They had their more serious games too, like Loom which is unique in its tone and gameplay mechanics, and The Fate of Atlantis which, as far as Indiana Jones goes, beats the tripe Lucasfilm was trying to push a couple of years ago.
> .. they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate
How they chose the character name is an example of this:
> The origin of the name "Guybrush" comes in part from Deluxe Paint, the tool used by the artists to create the character sprite. Since the character had no name at this point, the file was simply called 'Guy'. When the file was saved, Steve Purcell, the artist responsible for the sprite, added 'brush' to the filename, indicating that it was the Deluxe Paint "brush file" for the "Guy" sprite. The file name was then "guybrush.bbm", so the developers eventually just started referring to this unnamed 'Guy' as "Guybrush".
The Monkey Island series are my favourite video games. Loom is up there too.
Didn't know Steve Purcell (for me, of Sam and Max comics fame) was also an animator for LucasArts. Neat, this explains some things... And why S&M hit the roadway was so close to his comic style
Oh, I don't know, there's something neat about building something with so many layers of complexity given such tight constraints. "Making every bit count" I guess. Similar to it being impressive that Pi and Following were made with such small budgets (and casts).
I'm not sure what "exceptionally challenging" means exactly, but Lucas Arts was doing something very different from what their contemporaries were doing, and their games still stand as classics twenty years later compared to the much larger budgets and fewer constraints of today.
Anyone who has ever jumped out of the room because of a windshield attack in "Rescue on Fractalus" understands... Manipulate the psyche, not the eyes. (Bonus - at the time LucasArts also manipulated the eyes with their 8-bit fractal landscapes et al. But that was a BONUS.)
This is a good question as the answer should be self-evident -- i.e. they were just great, well-written fun games -- but it's not. As pure gaming, they weren't "great" in the classical sense. I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."
And story-wise...I would think that today's games should have better writing. I mean, games are a huge industry now, and so, theoretically, the writing talent should be much better (in the same way that game budgets can now bring in big name actors to do voices).
So maybe the answer doesn't lie just in the quality of the programming or writing, but in the execution and the way things just fit, despite the limitations of the genre. Hand-drawn cartoons are "limited" in their ability to depict reality, yet the Disney classics will still stand the test of time no matter how good CGI gets.
Maybe there's just something innately appealing with how adventure games, designed during the technological limitations in the LucasArts era, clicked in our brain. Limits are often good things, especially when it stretches creator and player alike to imagine things outside the boundaries.
Of course, bigger budgets/production quality don't linearly translate to "better" -- Raiders of the Lost Ark vs. Indiana Jones IV (I can't even remember the title of it) is a good example. And there's always the power of nostalgia to exaggerate how good things really were back then...
I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."
Yet people did. And still do. People read some books over and over again. People watch some movies over and over again. The same music, over and over again. And some people, the same games, over and over again.
Grim Fandango is at the top of my short list of games I replay once a year, at least. Followed closely by Mega Man 2 and Wind Waker.
There aren't any surprises to it, just a good story, style, music, and humor. Some people like to watch certain movies over and over. I like going back to Rubacava and feeling like an ace detective when I remember Tuesday is Kitty Hat Day.
> the only people who worry that they're going to look like kids for enjoying it are kids
Exactly. Well, adolescents, really: People who are insulted by being considered childish because they still think they are and they don't want to be. They're trying to transition into the new role of adulthood and confusing them with their former role of child makes them insecure because they think they're failing.
They're also embarrassed by the less self-conscious actions of older people, who are less self-conscious precisely because nobody is going to mistake a 50-year-old for a child.
It was also a wonderful departure from the style of the previous games in the series. I loved sailing about, looking for islands and ships to explore. Easily up there in my top 10, along with similar styled games like Okami.
These were very linear too though. Sure: some like Monkey Island had a map that gave you the illusion of having a whole world to explore, but there still was a fixed sequence of events that couldn't be broken.
None of the decisions you made had any effect for the future or could just flat-out prevent you from finishing the game. Some (Sierra) called that a feature, others (Lucas Arts) a bug.
Maniac Mansion 1 and The Fate of Atlantis are the only two Lucas Arts games that provided a little bit of nonlinearity. Maniac Mansion with its different ways to solve the game based on character selection and Indiana Jones with its selection of one of three quite different paths through the game.
Yeah, gameplay wise they're like manually solving a makefile's dependencies. Of course we know the whole point is not in the structure of the solution but in the written content of the story. It's in the way the game world starts living inside the player's head, where all of the action is. I remember thinking about some FOTA puzzle during a bus trip for several hours without even having the game available.
>This is a good question as the answer should be self-evident -- i.e. they were just great, well-written fun games -- but it's not. As pure gaming, they weren't "great" in the classical sense. I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."
And who said games should be player multiple times?
One can conceive of one-time games, and adventure games were precisely that.
> And there's always the power of nostalgia to exaggerate how good things really were back then...
I think it is a bit of nostalgia. I think those are the games we enjoyed playing, and for many, those were the first games we played. Those are always memorable, just like the first love, or first learning to drive.
I played to monkey island games for the first time a couple of years ago and think they actually are as good as the nostalgic people claim. Nostalgia clouds your memory a bit, yes, but the games are excellent.
You mention the limits which were there due to technical constraints and i agree somewhat..
However, there also was a certain degree of "limitlessnes" in a sense that you could (and at least i would) try out a lot of different things and sometimes they'd have some sort of funny effect or some unexpected result - for example if you'd open a stump of a tree in Monkey Island (or was it MI 2? Not sure after all those years) you'd be asked to insert disk #38 or something...
And IMHO it's all those little things and details that makes those games stand out in a time where everything is polished to absolute detail (in terms of GFX and CGI) and yet the worlds feel dull and unpolished...
And Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering design. "Restrictions breed creativity" has become a catchphrase associated with him.
If an author is told to write a science fiction story, that gives no hint or help on what to do with the request. Tell him to write a story about tigers escaping during the process of Mars terraforming, and now you've got something.
In Magic terms, being directed to design a creature doesn't push the designer in any useful direction. But "Design a small black creature that uses this set's new mechanic", and it will come to be. Much of MTG is conceptualized in such ways, right down to the color pie, where what colors can't do is even more important than what they can.
Wouldn't increased budgets actually lead to much worse stuff since you have more employees and production steps and get afraid of the average joe not getting it. You get further and further from coherent artistic visions and jokes you find funny yourself.
Those games back then were not made for average people, because average people didn't even have PC:s. People who played them also had less other distractions so the games didn't need to be so in-your-face to get attention.
Why? Easy. The kids who are now in their early 30s are feeling nostalgia for an institution that meant a lot to them, which is forever lost.
I felt the same way about Sierra adventure games from he 80s.
Fact is, gaming sucks these days because the audience has shifted to the younger equivalent to the millions if people who watch "NCIS: Kansas" on tv. In the 80s and 90s, the gaming market was this demographic slice that allowed for more creative risk in gaming. Now we have Medal of Honor 12 and whatever version Madden is up to, and the whole industry is imploding because they cannot sustain the movie-like budgets.
Let's not forget that they were awesomely written. The humor still holds up today.
The desire for these games is evident, between ScummVM, the indie scene (e.g. Gemini Rue) and possible comebacks of industry greats (e.g. Replay Games) there's obviously still a market for well written, beautifully crafted interactive novels of this form.
The industry switch to 3d killed off most of the adventure game makers and those efforts, but thankfully the industry is finally realizing that 2d is now just as valid a media for crafting games as is 3d.
They were well written because they were written by educated people for educated people. The thing that trashed video games the most is that gaming went mainstream and now the whole industry want to reach as large of an audience as possible and that brings down the level to crap.
Not everyone who's a fan of these games now was around to play them then.
I think it has more to do with the 'gamer' demographic growing larger. In my experience, niche stuff often has more emotion behind it, evident even when it's not your niche and not your emotion. Modern 'indie' games, which are often more focused than 'mainstream' fare, have something of the same feel about them.
I'm in my mid thirties now, and it's not nostalgia for me. If it was nostalgia I'd feel that way about all the games I liked back then. I still think that The Secret of Monkey Island, in particular, was/is something pretty special, yet I don't think this about 99% of the games I liked back then.
>Fact is, gaming sucks these days because the audience has shifted to the younger equivalent to the millions if people who watch "NCIS: Kansas" on tv.
I'm calling selective "get off my lawn" bullshit on this one. There are many, many, many brilliant, beautiful, incredibly well written and well executed games being released every year that will have the same effect in 20 years that these games have now. Saying that games today suck because "Now we have Medal of Honor 12 and whatever version Madden is up to" is ridiculously cynical and very selective.
Sure those games are being churned out as easy money making machines. But while you're complaining about them, you're forgetting games like Portal and Portal 2, two of the funniest games released in the past 15 years. Games like Shadow of the Colossus and Read Dead Redemption, both of which are regularly used as arguments for why games are art. Magnificent indie games like Braid and Fez and Limbo.
To say that gaming sucks these days is to ignore all the wonderful things being done and instead take a dried up, cynical view that is out of touch with reality.
You're wrong. It's not that current games suck overall; it's that the proportion of genres and styles has hugely changed to favour the lowest common denominator.
That lowest common denominator is: Sports; war; first-person shooter; music/singing/party (eg., Guitar Hero) games; fantasy RPGs; and various simplistic puzzle/physics games such as Bejeweled and Angry Birds. There is also a smattering of strategy such as Civilization and Starcraft II, but the golden age of real-time strategy (Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Homeworld) is over; the last semi-classic, Age of Empires III, came out 8 years ago.
I am an adventure game enthusiast. LucasArts, Sierra and so on are some of my favourite games. Believe me when I tell you there is a huge hole in the current games market. During the last decade, my single great game experience has been Machinarium. Before then, the last classical point and click game I really liked was, I think, Silver in 1999.
There have been a few blips. The Syberiad games were decent. The Book of Unwritten Tales, a German game, was quite decent. Not great, just decent. I hear Vampyre Story was OK. I liked Hector from Telltale Games; it had that kind of rowdy, satiric tone that Sierra was famous for. I honestly did not very much like Telltale's other recent point and clicks, such as Back to the Future and Sam & Max and the new Monkey Island episodes. Overall, some OK games, but nothing great.
Games like these -- slow, difficult, fairly literary, full of dialogue, patience-demanding -- just do not sell well enough anymore. It's not that they don't sell, obviously there is a fairly large market for adventure games. Machinarium sold well, I think, but counted in thousands, not millions, of copies. That's not the sort of sales figures the games business is interested in.
Sure, Portal, Braid, Fez and Limbo are fine games. But they are platform puzzles; comparing them to the types of games that LucasArts produced is apples and oranges. Ron Gilbert, an ex-LucasArts genius, recently released The Cave, which disappointingly turned out to be yet another plattform puzzle game, and a fairly boring one at that. And actually, they are few and far apart. There are years between each game that is as good as Braid. A tiny game like Limbo took six years to create.
I think some of us lament the loss of certain genres. Turn based strategy, flight sims, space sims, turn based RPGS. I stopped playing games in the mid 2000. There haven't really been any games in my favourite genres since then.
Of those, XCOM is the only game that exists. Star Citizen, Project Infinity, Torment Tides and Wasteland 2 are all Kickstarter-funded games in development. Kerbal is available, but not finished, and as you say, not really a game.
Sure, there are some interesting games in development (I'd add the Elite remake and Double Fine's untitled adventure game to the list), but who knows what they will be like. We don't know if they will be "quality".
It's noteworthy indeed that a lot of these kinds of games are now out or upcoming, but it's equally notable that a year ago this conversation would have ended rather differently.
LucasArts old games were essentially perfect adaptations of 90s cartoons that never existed. With everything from the exaggerated art and sound effects, to dialogue that caters to both childish and adult humor, LucaArts games perfectly took the feel of 90s animation and packed it into a couple of floppies.
I don't think it's unusual that games like Day of the Tentacle are still popular today when people still talk about 90s cartoons like Rocko and the Batman, and 80s action movies like Terminator and Die Hard. Media today tries to emulate that nostalgic feeling, but there's this undefinable element that distinguishes the time period. Years from now, people will yearn for early 2000's FPSes and we'll remember how games like HL2 and CoD defined this period.
I'm in a good position to answer this: because they're AWESOME.
My girlfriend's never been a gamer, but she's been playing some games recently (specially Minecraft spiked her interest).
I finally convinced her to play some Lucasarts classic adventures some months ago. She loved them. Went through the whole Day of the Tentacle in three days on her own! No walkthroughs. I didn't even help her once. She was obsessed with it! Now she's eager to play more adventure games and looking forward to the new release of ResidualVM (Grim Fandango's engine reimplementation) which she left halfway through because she met a nasty blocker bug.
Lucasarts adventures are and will be all-time classics because they're genuinely good. The plots are engaging, the dialogues are real fun and they're good intellectual challenges.
I play the games regularly, at least once a year (the whole collection!) and I still enjoy them. There's always something left to explore, an action you didn't try, a line you didn't pick... and just like The Simpsons, you can re-experience them several times as you grow older (the funny jokes are not the same when you're 8 then when you're 21).
There was always something very accessible about SCUMM games (not just LucasArts ones, but they certainly had some great ones). The story lines were simple and playful enough for kids to enjoy--even 8 year olds can understand the humor in an evil purple tentacle trying to take over the world, or a talking dog and rabbit solving crimes, or a quiet biker trying to repair his motorcycle.
It didn't take an intricate story or fast-paced action to set the LucasArts games apart from the competition. It was how simple, yet outlandish the plots were. 15 years later, I can still remember using a crowbar to remove a coin from the ground that was stuck there by chewing gum in Day of the Tenacle, or Ben Franklin naming a sandwich after a main character (Hoagie). I remember SCUMM games much in the same way I remember the plots of my favorite books I read as a kid. For me, they were much more like interactive novels or comic books than they were like video games. I remember Full Throttle, Dig, Loom, Monkey Island, and Day of the Tentacle in a very different way than I remember the other video games I played at the same age (Final Fantasy, Link to the Past, Super Mario World).
If you haven't had a chance to play any of these wonderful titles, I would highly recomend you grab the ScummVM and play some of the freeware titles (even if they aren't LucasArts): http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Where_to_get_the_games.
It was just a good excuse to talk about our favorite games. I haven't played any of the Double Fine games yet, but to my knowledge they haven't made any classic point-and-click graphic adventures - before the kickstarter-backed Broken Age that is [1]. I hear the old talent is still evident in the DF games though, and they seem to be story and character based.
While not a point and click, Psychonauts is widely considered to be a worthy successor of the golden age Lucasarts craziness. Let's have a look at the synopsys: a runaway circus boy goes to a summer camp for psychics lead by a international team of superspy. He discovers that a mad dentist is stealing everyone's brain by making them sneeze, and in order to get him he has to travel into the mind of several deranged persons. Certainly on par with the purple tentacle trying to take over the world or the deathly travel agent, if you ask me :) .
Also, while not being a point-and-click game stricto sensu, you should really have a try at Stacking. It maybe not as brilliantly written as Psychonauts, it has some pacing issue but it's a really charming adventure (with Matryoshka dolls !) from the start to the end !
I would not consider Psychonauts a worthy successor, nor do a wide section of people who have tried it. A good deal of the issue seems to be exactly because it's not a point and click - it's actually a 3D platformer with a number of playability issues. Most point-and-clicks have major playability shortcomings as well, but they're such different breeds that the appreciative audiences are distinctly different.
I never liked Psychonauts. The humour was spot on, but it wasn't an adventure game at heart; it was basically a bunch of mini action games strung together where you run around in people's minds, and those mini games were awful. Really cheap-looking 3D, stupid goals (collect dream symbols and stuff), and just overall annoying.
FWIW I've been a huge fan of indie developer Wadjet Eye Games, who have continued to make old-school adventure games in the modern era (all available on Steam). http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/
Ooh, they are the ones who made Gemini Rue [1], which is great. It's a low-rez game that looks a lot like Beneath a Steel Sky. Impeccable cyberpunk design, interesting story, very well written. (Gemini Rue is for Windows, but it's playable on the Mac via Wine. Happy to explain how, if anyone is interested.) I didn't know about their other games.
Edit: Oh, they are a publisher. Gemini Rue was not created by them. Anyway, looks like they have quality stuff. Will be checking out their other games.
I think the most interesting bit is on the last page:
While other game companies of the 1980s had to rely on the income from their games to survive, we had the unheard-of luxury of taking our time to get our games right, with years to experiment, try new things, push the envelope, and with no pressure from marketing, focus testing, or even George Lucas. We also had time to develop our company culture, starting where the Lucasfilm culture left off.
So we’d spend months thinking about our games... brainstorming with the other brilliant designers, refining, reworking, revamping, tossing out the parts that didn’t work (or the entire concept) and starting again. One of our edicts was “don’t ship shit” and we wanted to make sure we never did.
Maybe working in a creatively supportive environment like that, one that wasn’t just focused on the bottom line, enabled us to think outside the box, take time to add tons of backstory and detail... tune, tune, and tune again. Until WE felt it was time to ship. Unheard of then and I’m sure even more unusual now (other than with indie games done by people in their spare time).
I'm not sure if I should mention this here, since it looks like an ad, but that also happens to be on sale this weekend (along with a bunch of other D&D games) at gog.com. It's $1.99. I'm not sure if that's the price for it by itself or if it's in the bigger bundle.
Not mentioned in the article (strangely) was the innovative music system in X-wing, iMuse, where the music dynamically and seamlessly shifted depending on the situation. It's surprising how useful and immersive that was from a game play perspective and it was often my only cue not only that enemies were inbound, but how large the threat was (squadron vs capital ship). I admit there's some nostalgia here, but how often do you play games scored by John Williams?
Perhaps not the first time it's ever been done, but their execution of it was amazing. Lucasarts was literally a game changer.
I'm of two minds when it comes to LucasArts. In both graphic adventures and in space shooters, they owned the genres with quality games, which is great. The problem is that because they so totally dominated, all competition left to pursue other branches (mostly to FPS, it seems). When they stopped development in those genres, there was nobody remaining to fill the void. Those genres are now the sad, atrophied remains of what used to be pillars of computer gaming.
I was not a Sierra adventure fan (except Gabriel Knight), but I loved EVERY ONE of the Lucasfilm Games. Why? I think they managed perfection in these four areas:
ACCESS, FUN, CHARACTERS, DESIGN
ACCESS:
You fired up the game and could immediately start playing. Most of the games had no or very short intros or cutscenes. Lucasfilm was very strong at telling the story throughout the game. "I'm Guybrush Threepwood and I wanna be a pirate" -> There you go!
Controls were also very easy, I think they were even the first games that you could play through by only using your mouse. That's important, because you could just literally lean back and play.
FUN
Maybe it's just me (obviously not) but Gilbert's and Schafer's writing style, that's my idea of fun! Well written, perfectly executed and timed. Often with very few or no words at all. Sometimes Bernard or Guybrush just turned to you and said nothing…all said!
CHARACTERS
The teams put a lot of effort in creating unique characters. Why the hell do I know names like Guybrush, Elaine, Stan, Bernard, Hoagie, Laverne, Ben, Bobbin, Manny, Glottis; but I can hardly remember any other adventure game character names.
It's because I was emotionally bounded with them. They were mostly struggling with their environment but managed their obstacles often with unorthodox methods.
DESIGN
Especially Ron Gilbert and Hal Barwood established adventure game design that is still considered standard today. Brought to fame by Ron's article "Why adventure games suck – And what we can do about it" (http://grumpygamer.com/2152210). This article still inspires me today and I'm throughout checking my designs against it.
Here's a provocative thought:
RPG games have boomed because they're the descendants of point&click adventure games. I'd like to have the name "cRPG" changed to "Adventure". It describes much better what the game is about, the majority of players doesn't care about role playing, and many cRPG games don't even support that. Diablo is often called Action RPG for some reason despite not offering a choice at all, the story always unfolds in exactly the same way.
Anyway, old point&click games were usually about a story. Now cRPG games are the vessel for that. Exploration is also crucial to both genres, I know of no cRPG game which takes place in the same area, where variety comes from changes, events, new people arriving rather than unlocking new zones. Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment are a good example of what I'm talking about - both have big cities, but what you're really doing is getting access to new areas within them.
I highly, and wholeheartedly recommend checking the rest of extra-credits series, for anyone interested in game design, gamification, and the gaming industry in general:
I've been drifting away from electronic games to board/card games for some time now. My cards will still be there if the publisher goes belly-up. I don't need to have a constant internet connection to play, just a few friends and a table.
All that and no mention of _Rescue at Fractalus_, _The Eidolon_ (An 8-bit FPS 11 years before Doom), _Koronis Rift_, or _Ballblazer_? I'm getting old...
Still, relating this to storytelling, I continue to believe that the single most terrifying moment in a video game, to this day, occurs in _Rescue at Fractalus_. Everyone I know has literally fallen backwards in their chair at that moment.
But since all the people I allude to are now old fogies, it would be interesting to see the reaction of someone a lot younger who went into the game unaware and played up to that point, a point integral to the gameplay, and to see if they instinctively do the right thing to address it.
LucasArts's adventure games in particular were brilliant examples, and I think their defining characteristic is that they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate, to time traveling kids trying to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world, the settings just kept getting weirder and funnier.
They had their more serious games too, like Loom which is unique in its tone and gameplay mechanics, and The Fate of Atlantis which, as far as Indiana Jones goes, beats the tripe Lucasfilm was trying to push a couple of years ago.