When Good Publishers Go Bad
They killed Sam and Max. Those bastards!
Tags: Sam and Max: Freelance Police Categories: Features, PC Features
Posted by Ludwig on Mar 4th, 2004
At an inconceivably early hour, a ring of the doorbell motivated me to drag myself out of bed and head towards the front door. Upon opening the door, I was greeted by a somewhat smug expression. The face was attached to a head, which in turn was connected to all the other stuff that composes a standard human being. There wasn’t much time to focus on the other appendages, however, as I was more concerned with the fist flying in my general direction.
I was punched in the face by a LucasArts employee.
That didn’t really happen, but it’s essentially equivalent to LucasArts’ decision to cancel Sam and Max: Freelance Police. Sending goons to pulverize each and every one of your fans may, in fact, have been the preferable treatment (especially after the cancellation of Full Throttle 2). Promising to continue the hysterical misadventures of the canine detective and his maniacal, floppy-eared sidekick, the PC adventure game was highly anticipated by those who appreciated Steve Purcell’s wacky characters and those who experienced previous LucasArts adventures.
Well, to hell with us.
“After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we’ve decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.”
Apparently, the adventure genre is dead. It’s not. The problem lies with the fact that most modern adventure games are awful – in a suprising turn of events, people actually realize this and rightly refuse to buy them. Adventure titles that were of excellent quality, such as The Longest Journey and Syberia, actually performed very well commercially…well enough to warrant sequels. Judging by their wonderfully crafted adventure games of the past, LucasArts knows exactly how to create a stellar adventure game and subsequently capture the attention of a starving group of point-and-clickers. You have the hugely popular characters, the experience and the marketing muscle; now’s as good a time as ever to release a graphic adventure!
LucasArts built their reputation upon fantastic graphic adventures, yet now they view their genre of origin as nothing but niche. It’s not only the dedicated fans of Maniac Mansion and Grim Fandango that should be worried, as newer gamers will have to deal with the consquences too. Having abandoned their history, the company may just as well change their title to “LicenseArts” – an appropriate moniker for what has been reduced to a merchandising machine.
The sheer number of Star Wars games and repeated engagements during the battle of Hoth that await us are nearly incomprehensible. Ironically mimicking the publisher’s founder, LucasArts’ track record with their own licences has been stunningly poor in the last few years. For every great one you can name (KOTOR, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, Jedi Outcast), you can find an external developer behind it (Bioware, The Collective, Raven).
There’s always a chance of some savvy publishers grabbing the license and completing the game (see: Capcom, Rockstar and Red Dead Revolver), though it’s likely to remain the mere defense mechanism I’m using to deal with this tragic ordeal. Sadly, the days of “classic adventure and comedy” LucasArts have passed. In its place, we have “Greedo shoots first” LucasArts. Oh good.
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Tags: Sam and Max: Freelance Police
Posted by Ludwig on Mar 4th, 2004 and is filed under Features, PC Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
