Michael Rubin has written, and is currently touring with, a book on George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, called DroidMaker. This is interesting enough for me as it is, but the great thing about it, is how you can download chapter 1 and 18 off of his blog. This is interesting because chapter 18 deals with the creation of the Games Group, later to become Lucasarts Entertainment.
And that is interesting because they remain, dispite many quite ‘bleh’ titles, one of the most significant game companies in the world.
And while you ponder that, you can check out some of this cool Sam & Max swag (I will kill for those two prints. Kill I tell you!).
They were one of the most significant game companies in the world, but imo, they tumbled dramatically from that pedestal more than 5 years ago. Sometime between Grim Fandango (=awesome) and Escape from Monkey Island (=hideously embarrassingly bad), they seemed to suffer a coronary of the kind that rendered them incapable of making any good games in any genre.
They have started to revive themselves with better choices about development (outsourcing, e.g. KoToR) and using franchises other than Star Wars (e.g. Mercenaries), but there’s precious little significant about them today, imo, other than their distinguished past and the notoriety of their fall from grace.
Famous? Yes.
Significant? Not really.
I’ve not seen much that they’ve created that has actually had any real impact in the way games are perceived. They used to do that, but no-longer.
It’s the same with ID though, they aren’t really pushing the boundries anymore. Just surfing the wave.
Significant doesn’t necessarily mean ‘right here and now’.
Oh well if you mean historically significant… sure, wouldn’t argue that. But that is past tense, and so “remain.. significant” isn’t really the same as that.
But god yes, historically they were kings. Nearly a 3rd of the games I own are LucasArts ones from back in the day. When they produced wonderful gems.
I even loved Full Throttle, and many people loathed that.