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Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts book review page 2

Rogue Leaders book
Rogue Leaders book

LucasArts.

The mere mention of this name is sure to elicit an involuntary emotional response from countless adventure gamers. With the exception of Sierra, no other company has come close to the kind of intense, almost personal connection longtime genre fans have shared with LucasArts. But almost a decade after their last adventure, those feelings are not what they once were. Many who adored the developer as a pioneer and champion in the glory days of adventure games now feel like a jilted lover seething from betrayal and unrequited affection. LucasArts broke player hearts in turning its back on the genre and never looking back. Some have never forgiven them.

Yet still we care, don’t we? For better and worse, the company who brought us such enduring classics as Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango will always be synonymous with the genre’s heyday, and many of their games remain benchmarks of quality even years after release. There may be no foreseeable future together, which is truly lamentable, but there’s no denying the rich adventure legacy LucasArts has left for us to fondly remember forever.

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This legacy is front and center in Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts, a new hardcover released this month by Chronicle Books. Written by industry veteran Rob Smith, the book sets out to explore the first 25 years (and counting) of game production by the company once known as Lucasfilm Games. Including titles both internally and externally developed, LucasArts’ extensive catalogue extends well beyond adventures, of course, dating right back to its inception, and the genre represents only a proportionate segment of the book. Still, it’s an interesting, if rather abbreviated, historical overview of one of gaming’s most prestigious and recognizable contributors.

At first glance, you’ll probably be impressed by the book’s size, measuring 9 x 11 inches and weighing in at 256 pages… Actually, at first glance you’re likely to go a bit cross-eyed making out the cover, which is a 4-layered lenticular image – you know, the optical illusion-like blending of images that only comes into focus from one particular angle. If you close one eye and squint, then, you can make out a triumphant pose from Purple Tentacle against its bold, primary-coloured backdrop. The rest of the time it looks mainly like Indianabrush Vaderwood. Not the most aesthetically pleasing of covers, but certainly an attention getter, which should zest up your coffee table if nothing else.

And make no mistake: Rogue Leaders is a coffee table book. Despite early marketing promises of being “the first substantive survey of a videogame company”, the only thing particularly substantive about Rogue Leaders is its heft. That’s by no means an outright condemnation of it, simply an observation to help shape expectations. Covering over a hundred different games all told is no small feat, but the fact remains that the book is essentially a fly-by look at the company’s history.

 

 
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Concept art for Maniac Mansion

But what a history it’s been. Few game companies have even lasted a quarter century, so it’s no surprise that the years have brought both highs and lows, innovation and stagnation, risk and retreat, plus light and dark sides of the Force. Oh yes, there are more than a few pages devoted to the most pervasive of brands, that little trifle called Star Wars. But while it’s true that LucasArts has increasingly favoured its space-faring cash cow in recent years, at times to company and gamer detriment alike, that wasn’t always the case, and fortunately Rogue Leaders devotes attention to the full range of platforms, genres, and individual titles that made the company what it is today.

Another niche audience, for example, might be equally interested in Rogue Leaders, as the early LucasArts flight sims were every bit as accomplished as their adventure counterparts, and the achievements of these games were instrumental in getting the once-fledgling company itself off the ground. Over the years, however, LucasArts has pretty much done it all in one form or another: strategy, RPGs, shooters, platformers, MMOs, even puzzle games and children’s titles. Whatever one’s personal gaming flavour, there’s a little something here for everybody.

The operative word is once again “little”, mind you. No game is given much in-depth analysis, often providing little more than a production synopsis before moving right along. Fortunately (and entirely justifiably), the classic LucasArts adventures get a fair degree of focus, at least relatively speaking. With particular emphasis on Ron Gilbert’s now-famous script creation utility, followed by the formation of SCUMM-U, the one-month “university training facility” for designer “Scummlets” like Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, the genre’s importance in the early ‘90s is firmly established in Rogue Leaders, touching not only on hit titles like Sam & Max Hit the Road and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis but even on the lesser lights like Loom and The Dig. Echoing the company’s own changing attitudes, however, the later adventures are given shorter shrift than their predecessors. They aren’t overlooked entirely, but somehow the latter two Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango merit little more combined content than Secret Weapons Over Normandy. Yeah, I can’t figure it out, either.

 

 

 

 

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What Day of the Tentacle might have been

Still, there are some nice behind-the-scenes anecdotes offered to balance the factual details, if once again rather few and far between. From Gilbert’s hiring as a summer temp (and simply never leaving) to Schafer and Grossman’s friendly rivalry about who started first (arriving on the same day and mere minutes apart), there’s just enough personal touch to make the read more accessible. One of the highlights is the story of Schafer’s botched phone interview, in which he unwittingly confessed to pirating one of the company’s first games, only to cleverly recover by submitting his resume in the form of a cartoon with a text adventure cover letter. It’s not only an amusing story in its own right, but it’s a revealing glimpse into a different era of the industry, when image scanners still cost as much as cars.

Sprinkled throughout the chronicle are interview quotes reportedly published for the first time. Many are from corporate types detailing company perspectives over the years, but you’ll also hear from such designers as Hal Barwood (Indiana Jones), Gary Winnick (Maniac Mansion), and David Fox (Zak McKracken), as well as those mentioned above. Never probing too deeply, there are nevertheless some nuggets to be found, such as Grossman comparing graphic adventures to “puppet theater” rather than the “film-quality cinematic extravaganza” they’re often expected to be today, or an explanation of the Gilbert-coined “funativity scale” by which early projects were internally measured.

Of course, no discussion of LucasArts and adventures would be complete without exploring the reasons for moving away from the genre. It’s not actually a question that Rogue Leaders addresses, but viewed in the context of greater company difficulties from the turn of the century onwards, it’s not difficult to understand how those adventure roots were neglected and ultimately abandoned. The book clearly pulls its punches in assessing these lean creative years, but it doesn’t gloss over them either. From over-reliance on the new Star Wars movie trilogy to misreading console audiences, through an imbalance of internal/external development to severe staff downsizing, the years following Escape from Monkey Island in 2000 were clearly turbulent at times, and the company underwent multiple reassessments of its fundamental principles and corporate restructuring. As one incoming executive put it, LucasArts had become “a mess”, and this was no culture in which a niche genre could thrive, no matter how near and dear to the hearts of longsuffering fans.

Somewhat disappointingly, the focal point of so much bitterness now felt for the company barely gets a passing mention. That would be the much-publicized cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police in 2004, for those too traumatized to remember. Despite the significant public outcry at the time, the decision isn’t questioned, the reasons never explored. But if left unexplained, what Rogue Leaders does make clear is that the canine shamus and hyperkinetic rabbity thing had a whole lot of lesser-known company on the game production scrapheap. Including themselves.

 

 
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Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels

Indeed, perhaps the singlemost intriguing aspect of Rogue Leaders is its reference to the many projects that died somewhere between concept stage and gold master. While perhaps already known to hardcore devotees, many readers will be surprised to learn that Freelance Police not only wasn’t the first Sam & Max sequel to be trashed but was actually the third, albeit the one that got closest to release by a large margin. Similarly, while you may know that the action-y Full Throttle sequel called Hell on Wheels (already considered an unforgivable sellout by some) was cancelled, you may not know that a more traditional sequel known as Payback had previously been ditched. But if you think those examples are bad enough, you’ll be reeling from the growing list of other games buried by LucasArts. Two Indiana Jones adventure concepts: dead, only to be picked up as comic series by Dark Horse. Two planned Loom sequels: never started. And FMV fans, read it and weep, but a point-and-click multimedia adventure proposed by Hal Barwood called Rapid Transit made the development list but never found the support it needed.

Lest the conspiracy theorists begin uniting, however, adventures were by no means the only genre represented on the cutting room floor, as a planned Diablo-killer called Justice Unlimited was among those that met an early demise. Even projects from the almighty Star Wars franchise – a shooter with a Wookiee as lead character (which, quite frankly, would have been incredibly cool); a stealth game starring C-3PO; a fairly substantial Knights of the Old Republic 3 RPG proposal, to name just a few – never saw the light of day. In fact, even in the early years a remarkably inventive “online community” game called Habitat was dropped, not because of potential failure but because of its overwhelming test success. A then-unheard-of precursor to today’s wildly popular MMOs, the game was simply too far ahead of its time for the Commodore 64 technology for which it was built. These insights may not ease the sting of lost adventures at all, but it’s a telling reminder of the complexities involved in a high-stakes industry.

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There are certainly some interesting tidbits to be gleaned from Rogue Leaders, but I daresay that most if not all of the same information is available for free with a little research. So why fork out for a fairly streamlined compilation like this? Well, the other main enticement is its reproductions of over 300 pieces of concept art, character development sketches, and storyboards. I said this is a coffee table book, after all. Flip open the very first page and there’s a full-size concept design of Monkey Island 2’s box art by Steve Purcell. There’s plenty more where that came from as well, from the most rudimentary pencil sketches to stunning coloured paintings covering a broad range of LucasArts games, many of them adventures. For some people these alone will be worth the price of admission. There are also some original internal documents included, though these aren’t nearly as plentiful or particularly revealing, so don’t be expecting a treasure trove of previously-unreleased gems.

When all is said and done, Rogue Leaders will most likely appeal to people at one end of the gaming spectrum or the other. The most passionate fan of LucasArts adventures or Lucasfilm franchises (particularly Star Wars, as Indiana Jones gets surprisingly little play here) will almost certainly find value in these pages, primarily from the published artwork if not so much any new information provided. Far more casual gamers will likely also find enough here to make for an interesting few hours of reading about a company whose rich history has long deserved to be told. If you find yourself in the middle of these two extremes, however, you may find the book a little too lightweight in content for such a heavyweight price tag (and size). Having any existing familiarity with popular LucasArts titles, there likely won’t be much here you don’t know to some extent already, and just when you find a topic that intrigues you, it’s time to move on. And no matter what level of interest you bring, anyone expecting a detailed exposé will not find it here, as the book was written with full cooperation from LucasArts, including a Foreword from none other than George Lucas himself.

Covering such an extensive background is no small undertaking for a single book, of course, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling that a happy medium might have allowed for a little more depth than what is found here. Even so, the presentation is solid from start to finish and the author never attempts to overshadow the book’s real star – the LucasArts legacy itself. In deciding if Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts is right for you, then, think of it like a whirlwind tour on a cross-country trip. It’s the “10-cities-in-10-days” package, with quick stops at places that are well worth seeing – so much so, you’ll want to stay longer but aren’t afforded the opportunity, though at least you’ll come away with beautiful pictures of your visit. Just be sure you have a nice coffee table for them when you return home from far, far away.

Rogue Leaders is available to order from both Amazon US and Amazon UK. (Note that these are Adventure Gamers affiliate links.)

 

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