Defunding the Arts

Last month, it was announced that the game studio LucasArts was being closed. It's always sad when a company in my industry shuts its doors and its employees lose their jobs, but I felt especially sad over this closure because of all the great LucasArts games of the past. I had many great hours of entertainment thanks to this company.

My first encounter with a LucasArts game was playing the original The Adventures of Monkey Island back in high school. The game had a fantastic sense of humor, and very clever storytelling. The game might have had my favorite fighting mechanic of any video game I've ever played; you learned to cross swords with enemies by trading insults with them. After a brief exchange of blades, your opponent would throw you an insult. If you had heard and learned the correct comeback from another opponent, you'd take control of the battle, drive him back, and get a chance to toss an insult of your own. If your opponent didn't know the comebacks to your insults, you'd eventually win the battle; if he did... well, perhaps the fight would go long enough for you to learn a few new insults for your repertoire.

The best thing about playing Monkey Island was that it wasn't a solitary affair. This game was long before voice acting was a given in PC games, so all the dialogue simply appeared on screen. I played with a small group of friends from school. We'd go over to a friend's house after class or on lunch break, crowd around the computer, and all cast ourselves as different characters in the game, reading the on screen dialogue. That included the "TM" conspicuously displayed after each appearance of the phrase "Monkey Island." The biggest laugh for us in the entire game occurred when -- one time -- it appeared they had left "TM" off the end of "Monkey Island," and we all screamed, pointed, and marveled... only to have, after a pause, the letters "TM" appear on screen all by themselves.

There were plenty of other great LucasArts games too. We played Loom, a too-short, but wonderful game that revolved around music. That came at a time when my high school buds were all actually composing our own songs on a synthesizer; we loved that game.

I found their adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which managed to be inventive and fun even if you knew the movie well. (Not every puzzle was solved as you saw it in the film.)

There was Maniac Mansion, and its sequel, Day of the Tentacle. There was the then unheard-of idea in Day of the Tentacle to find a computer in game on which you could play the complete original game.

There was Full Throttle, a big step forward in which all the characters were voiced by actors. We didn't get to crowd around a PC and entertain each other, but we did get to enjoy the wondrous vocal work of many great actors, including Mark Hamill (before he was cast as the Joker on the Batman cartoons and more people learned, "wow, he's really good at this voice acting stuff!"). And to this day, I can hear the delivery of lines like "I'm not putting my lips on that", "You know what might look good on your nose? The BAR!", and "I fixed your door... it was sticking" -- and I smile ear to ear.

I suppose, since all these games I'm talking about are in the neighborhood of 20 years old, that I've already said goodbye to LucasArts in a way. Nevertheless, I was sad to hear of their closure. They're a beloved chapter of my history.