LUCASFILM GAMES / LUCAS ARTS ______________________check the classics
Lucasfilm Games (from 1991 re-named Lucas Arts) completely changed the whole genre
of Interactive Fiction with many important novelties and in this way brought out
the very best of the medium. Their releases basically mark the Golden Era of
adventure games and something of that quality has never been put to screen again,
not even by themselves. Starting with Labyrinth in 1986 (for the Commodore C64)
the real breakthrough came with the legendary MANIAC MANSION and the completely
new SCUMM-sytem.
THE SCUMM SYSTEM
This revolutionay new interface was created by Ron Gilbert for a game he designed
in 1987, the aforementioned Maniac Mansion (SCUMM meaning - Script Creation
Utility for Maniac Mansion). This system starts from the fact that with text
adventures you only use a small number of commands for 90% of the time, like PICK
UP, LOOK AT, OPEN, CLOSE, etc. and that the remaining 10% can be paraphrased by
these. This simple discovery made it possible to communicate with the computer as
before without any loss of complexity. Together with the use of graphics this also
allowed the point & click method we all know today. Instead of writing 'CUT ROPE
WITH KNIFE' you ´now click on USE, KNIFE and the graphic of a ROPE in the screen.
The idea is the same, but the handling became much more intuitive. One thing that was
missing in the first LUCASFILM games was a LOOK AT button. This
command usually gives a verbose description of an object, in nice prose mostly,
and often contains some hint on what to do with it. With THE SECRET OF MONKEY
ISLAND that came, and from that on you got the funniest descriptions coming: 'That
[small bed] reminds me of my old dollhouse! Ah, the dollhouse of MY SISTER, of
course...'.
DIALOGUES AND CHARACTERS
With the dialogues prose came into graphic adventure games. The felt lack of
deepness compared to text-IF and the things that prose can do to imagination were
quite apparent at a point. There was just not much to read with the new graphic-
oriented stuff and LUCASFILM' branched dialogue system changed that. Since INDANA
JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, but really perfect only since MONKEY ISLAND 1, it was
now possible to talk to everybody with various tactics and change the outcome of
events in the story. Also puzzles based on dialogues (like the talk with the head
of the dead in navigator in MONKEY1) were a new thing.As a side effect of the many
dialogues the characterization of persons in the plot
received more focus. All kinds of people come up with their crazy life stories
while maybe telling you something of importance. A thing that can greatly add to
the atmosphere of a game and that was a bit too neglected in the text adventures.
CUT-INs AND SUSPENSE
Hitchkock once said that, to create action you need just a bomb to explode
somewhere. But to create suspense you need a ticking bomb in a room with two
people in it who don't know about it. So when these people start talking about a
thing like the prices of used cars then - the bomb ticking under the table - this
boring conversation suddenly starts to be highly interesting. That's suspense,
when the audience knows something more about a danger than the protagonist of the
story. But how can this effect be applied on an adventure game, where audience and
protagonist are one and the same? LUCASARTS came up with a brilliant solution to that -
their cut-scenes. For a
short time the audience stops to take on the role of the protagonist and watches a
movie-like scene where, for instance in MANIAC MASION, the mad scientist tells his
tenatcle-creature to go and check the reactor problems in the basement. You as a
viewer of that scene know then that danger is about to appear in the basement.
Switching back to the point of view of the unsuspecting protagonist who happens to
be in the basement at that moment the whole story gets a very nice tension.
I-MUSE AND DYNAMIC SOUNDTRACKS
When it was possible to listen to music from your PC without getting any permanent
ear-damage - the Adlib soundcards came to replace the PC-speaker - the background
soundtrack of a game became much more important. In order to create a nice movie-
like feel it was important that the score should respond to the events happening
on the screen, just like anybody knows from cinema. But in adventure games a scene
takes as long as the player needs to reach the next step so you have a problem of
timing there. For that purpose Michal Z. Land developed I-Muse, a musical system
that directly responds to actions within a scene by jumping to the appropriate
song parts of a theme. Danger is about to happen - the music suddenly becomes
darker. Action - the beat changes and the music drives forward. Dynamic
soundtracks without any breaks. A great contribution to the atmosphere.
If you have never played any IF game before, the LUCASFILM stuff is the best place
to start! Those are the most perfect games of the genre and absolutely worth any
time spent with them! Check out all the classics and be prepared for an extremely
nice time!
LEGEND
