Lucasarts classics
 

In Sweden one can obtain most of Lucasarts adventure classics in DVD-cases for ~€7 - € 15. The games I've found are: Dig, Full Throttle, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 3, Monkey Island 4 and Grim Fandango. My question is, why didn't Lucasart bother rereleasing Monkey Island 1 & 2 as well as Zak McKracken, Indy - last crusade & Indy - fate of atlantis and LOOM?
Example (69kr ~ €7)

HI :)

I think maybe Lucasarts didn't release Monkey Island 1 & 2 as well as the other games, you mentioned since it would involve to much work to get these games to run on moderns OS like Win XP or Vista.

I think getting these games to run on these systems would require a lot of
backwards editing (reverse engeenering, I think it is called ?) just to get them up and running on modern OS.

aries 323

With ScummVM around I think that would be a breeze. That's what Revolution used when they rereleased Broken Sword 1 & 2

Maybe LucasArts is just lazy. Or more likely they're ashamed of their earlier works which might look crude and primitive in comparison (although as we all know, they are just as much fun to play, if not more so than their later ones).

Not that he has anything to do with it, but it would be typically George Lucas-ish to not want to show something old because it's, well, old.

The new Lucas Arts sees it's adventure gaming days as a constant thorn in it's side. They really don't want anything to do with those games anymore. They don't want to spend the time or effort (little as it may be, due to ScummVM) to make them work on the modern Operating Systems.

Lucas Arts is no friend to the adventure gamer.

If they still have the source for the scumm interpreter,and I guess they have, it shouldn't be hard to port it to windows xp, the dos header files and mode 13h would be a problem though, since Microsoft abandoned the support for dos executables in visual c++ 4.0 (I think). soo they have to rewrite the blittering methods to directdraw, sdl or something, or compile it whit dev-c++ or simular compilers. since the game engine uses scumm scripts, they don't need to touch the game itself, only the interpreter.

For those who understand Germon: On telly (Giga) there's going to be a LucasArts adventure special retro something thingamabob feat. a live interview with Ron Gilbert (*faints*) amongst other hot stuff in about 40 minutes. You can stream it online if you wanna. :9

Either way, that's a bargain getting so many good games for small price... :)

But I've heard when you play the Broken Swords on ScummVM you don't get the voice acting. Is this true? If so, that's not real compatibility in my opinion.

Not true.
I bought the doublepack (with ScummVM already implemented) and I hear the voices just fine :)

I own all the classic LucasArts adventures you discuss and they all run very well indeed on ScummV with full support for voice and all features. It is a breeze to run them wint Scum, and they all work great.

LucasArts continues to do great games in other genres, it is too bad they turned away from AG, maybe they will have a change of heart, life is always open and there can be nice surprises.

I'd kill to play the original Indy games!

I wonder if Lucasarts would have the sense to rerelease the old Indy games around the time Indy 4 comes out. But then I remember they can just rerelease Infernal Machine and Emperor's Tomb again. :( I'd kill to play Fate of Atlantis again.

I am playing Fate of Atlantis now, and am stuck in the big room with the map, so far i have not figured out how to set the sun and moon, for my play through and my first play thorugh is lost in the mists of my lost memories :)

it is still a wonder of a game, great screens, and action and lots of fun, with quite a bit of sophistication. There is even a sophisticated variety of paths you can play, which i had somewhat forgotteen about i am playing the team path, may go back and play the wits and then the fists for fun if i can get past the map room. And as i said, it runs beautifully on ScumV which is no surprise as the whole purpose of the ScumV project has been to allow us to play these Lucas games and some others on modern machines. The ScumV team keeps adding acceisibility to more titles each year, and with this as a resource LucasArts (if any of you LA people wander thru this forum by some loooooog chance)....could easily re relase a set of the classics. My next play thorugh will be to finsih Monkey Island III, which i has to stop in the middle of due to life stuff. And then a revisit to Loomo which remains one of my favorites as being almost a work of art, in its enigmatic and surreal beauties.

That's where I too always get stuck :)
I played it last 2 months ago and remember I had to try every possible combination..*sigh*

Ohh and last night I actually played and finished Beneath A Steel Sky for the very first time.
What a great game - and it too played like a charm in ScummVM :D

I seem to get past that part no problem, but it's always the final wheel puzzle, at the end where the nazis show up, that i get stuck on.

As for LucasArts, it annoys me how they seem to be ashamed of their early days and pretend the adventure games they made never happened. When i checked on their website once before i couldn't find anything about their earlier games. Until i stumbled on a complete list of all the games they made but their adventure games were right at the bottom in small text. :shifty:

Anyway, it'd be great if they could re-release the Fate of Atlantis in a dvd case or something. :)

I've only ever managed to find a demo copy of Fate of Atlantis, its such a brilliant game (Hints to my member name anyone?) And I swear my brother owned them all long ago.. dont know what he did with them, probably sold them all like everything else we played..
I've now got a hard copy of Beneath a Steel Sky, what I fear most though is, when Im an adult I'll have all my adventure games that I've hoarded over the years, and a good deal wont work.. I mean, thats just horrible, unless we have to go out and buy an old 95 PC.
What we have now-a-days is all built on 3D. Tbh, I much prefer 8-bit graphics, or toons, to 3D realistic games.
Things like monkey island may be old, but you're hard up to find a modern adventure game that even begins to compromise on the quality of the storyline, humour and character of the game.

Considering that the re-release of Sam and Max (and, IIRC, the other DOS games in this re-release series) actually is properly updated for Windows, complete with some new features, they already did most of that work since the games share a lot of the code (known as SCUMM). The answer isn't that simple.

More likely is - as Flyboy said - that they didn't think those games worth re-releasing. They probably think games with such crude graphics and without voice acting would be pretty much unsellable. Maybe even that they might risk damaging their trademark by putting them on shelves. Note that the games they did re-release all have full (and very good) voice acting, and graphics that still look quite decent even compared to modern games.

I think what it comes down to is that LucasArts is too cheap to physically re-release the old games for fear of them not selling (keep in mind that all of the re-releases of the past several years have come from the games' overseas distributors), and they're too generally apathetic toward their back catalogue to pursue some sort of digital distribution alternative which would probably make them a decent sum of money in the long-term. And while it's a little more conspiracy theory-ish to think so, it wouldn't shock me if LucasArts were consciously trying to distance themselves from their past games. The end result is that people who are looking for the old adventure games are told their only option is ebay and they pirate the games, and I find it really hard to sympathize with LucasArts when that happens.

I don't think there's any personal hatred by LucasArts suits for adventure games, but I do think they're too closed-minded to consider anything that doesn't have an immediate, guaranteed return even if it's something as simple and presumably inexpensive as a paper sleeve DVD with all the graphic adventures on them.

samIamsad

That's for reviving a year old thread (start a new one next time so people don't respond to posts and revive a discussion from November of 2006). ;)

There are all these rules for posting, that is not written anywhere(or are there?). They are complicated to follow. I remember seeing another thread, where a person was smacked upside the head for posting something about a topic that there already were a thread about.

The distinction between duplicating another current thread and reviving a year-old thread is complicated? :crazy: A little common sense ought to do it.