Goodbye LucasArts

In case you have been living under a rock you should already know that Disney is now the proud owners of LucasFilm.  This has been concerning to a lot of people, due to the scope of what LucasFilm encompasses.  Owning LucasFilm gives Disney rights to do what they please with film franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and even Howard the Duck (Which allegedly is in Disney's plans for the future).  Also it gave them ownership of LucasArts, the gaming company started by George Lucas himself in 1982.

Sad news came in this week that Disney has shut down the development team at LucasArts, and will solely focus on licensing new Star Wars titles to outside developers.  Initial reports stated that LucasArts would be continuing business as usual.  There were three Star Wars titles currently in development that have all been cancelled.  Most notably Star Wars 1313, an open world RPG set in the Star Wars universe.  It was supposed be based around the criminal underworld.  I'm sure it would have been dubbed Grand Theft Star Wars, and really could have been a cool game.  Perhaps Kickstarter will get that project back off the ground.

R.I.P. LucasArts 1982-2013

Sadly this turn of events has led to the layoffs of over 150 people employed at LucasArts.  While layoffs are never a good thing, the move certainly illustrates the fear that developers have in the immediate future of the video game industry.  I know that I shared a similar fear in my article about the Sony press conference where there was very little information given about the next generation PlayStation, despite the release date being slated for later this year.  I'm not sure that there is a ton of market hype for the new PlayStation and Xbox releases so far, due to the fact that there really can be very little in the way of improvements to the way that next gen games will look.

LucasArts will be best remembered for their seemingly never ending run of Star Wars series.  There was Battlefront, Jedi Knight, Bounty Hunter, Force Unleashed, tons of flyers, and all sorts of other games.  Some were really good and some were really bad.  My personal favorite games of theirs were the Knights of the Old Republic games.  Those two games were really well executed RPG's.  The stories were well done, and used locations that were true to the mythology of Star Wars.

Promotional photo for the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic game

They also did a MMORPG named Star Wars Galaxies that lasted from 2003 until 2011.  There were several Indiana Jones titles, the Monkey Island series, the Maniac Mansion series, Thrillville, Labyrinth, and many others.  Early in their existence they were primarily known for their graphic adventure games, and have done everything under the sun ever since.

Obviously this was also a move to focus on the upcoming Star Wars films.  So in time we will see if the change was worth it.  There will be Star Wars games, lets just see which developer out there is brave enough to try one.