Lucasfilm hired its first games people with almost no brief. “Do something interesting in the games industry” was the charter Peter Langston was given in 1982, and the small group he assembled spent its first years making action games that drew mountains with fractal mathematics. Its lasting work came later, and from a different direction. In 1987 Ron Gilbert, “sick and tired of text parsers”, built a scripting system for a comedy horror game called Maniac Mansion, and for the next ten years the company used it to make adventures that set out to be fair to the player: few ways to die, and almost no ways to get stuck for good. That approach set it against Sierra, the biggest adventure publisher of the time, and still defines what people mean by a LucasArts game.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1982, as the Games Division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm, with backing from Atari.
- Names: Lucasfilm Games; by 1990 a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, and LucasArts on its games from the early 1990s.
- Based: Marin County, California, near Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch; San Rafael; later the Presidio in San Francisco.
- Key technology: SCUMM, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion.
- Closed: 2013, when Disney, which had bought Lucasfilm, ended its internal development.
The games group
The group began as a joint venture with Atari, announced by Atari’s chairman Ray Kassar at a reception in June 1982: Lucasfilm would design games and Atari would sell them. Langston, who already had a reputation for games on the Unix system, recruited people he thought “would go beyond what’s already been done”. David Fox arrived in 1982 and shared an office with Loren Carpenter; Fox asked whether Carpenter’s fractal techniques could work on an Atari home computer, and that question became Rescue on Fractalus! (1984). With Ballblazer, which Video Games Player described as “an intergalactic soccer match”, it was among the group’s first releases, for Atari’s 8-bit computers and 5200 console. Koronis Rift and The Eidolon followed.
For its first five years Lucasfilm Games made the games and other companies published them. Gilbert later listed “Activision, Atari, and Epyx”; in Britain, Activision handled Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus and Koronis Rift, and in America Electronic Arts distributed Lucasfilm’s games until 1988. Its first adventure was Labyrinth (1986), a tie-in with the film of that year.
Maniac Mansion and SCUMM
Maniac Mansion was designed by Ron Gilbert and the artist Gary Winnick, who began by playing a paper version with a floorplan of the house and acetate overlays for each floor. Gilbert and David Fox wrote the dialogue as they programmed; Fox’s contribution included the hamster in the microwave. To make it, Gilbert wrote an entire scripting system, which made the game “about a year late”. It was also, he said, “the first game that LucasArts published themselves”.
The system replaced the text parser with a set of verbs printed on the screen: the player clicks a verb, then an object. START described SCUMM in 1989 as “an integrated system for creating adventure game scripts that control all elements of a graphic adventure”, a language with a C-like structure that “allows multi-tasking, ie multiple parallel scripts to follow the actions of more than one character”. By then it was in its fourth version. The same scripts could be run on each computer by that machine’s version of the SCUMM interpreter, so the games came out for the C64, PC, Amiga and Atari ST, and Maniac Mansion reached the NES.
Fair to the player
The fairness came out of Gilbert’s view of the competition. Fox told Edge that Gilbert would “gather all of us game designers around a computer and demonstrate the Sierra games”, and criticise how they punished players. In one, picking up a piece of broken mirror killed the hero. To Gilbert, Fox said, such deaths were “sadistic behaviour on the part of the programmers”, who were “artificially trying to lengthen the game by having lots of non-obvious ways to die.”
Maniac Mansion itself did not meet that standard, and Gilbert admitted it. Compared with Monkey Island, he told Edge, “there are a lot more places where you die and the game can end in a no-win state. Those were lessons learned.” Loom (1990), designed by Brian Moriarty, who had written Wishbringer and Trinity for Infocom, “was designed to be non-frustrating, to have no dead ends, and be capable of completion by anyone”, in Computer Gaming World‘s words. In 1991 Gilbert took the argument to the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, where he debated Lori Cole, co-designer of Sierra’s Quest for Glory games. His case was that “Death is Bad Drama”: the death of the hero breaks the player’s suspension of disbelief. Cole argued that without the risk of death “the game becomes mere amusement”.
The adventures
| Game | Year | Design |
|---|---|---|
| Maniac Mansion | 1987 | Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick |
| Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders | 1988 | David Fox |
| Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure | 1989 | Noah Falstein, Ron Gilbert, David Fox |
| Loom | 1990 | Brian Moriarty |
| The Secret of Monkey Island | 1990 | Ron Gilbert, with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman |
| Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge | 1991 | Ron Gilbert |
| Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis | 1992 | Hal Barwood, Noah Falstein |
| Day of the Tentacle | 1993 | Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman |
| Sam & Max Hit the Road | 1993 | Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, with Steve Purcell’s characters |
| Full Throttle | 1995 | Tim Schafer |
| The Dig | 1995 | Sean Clark (project leader) |
| The Curse of Monkey Island | 1997 | Jonathan Ackley, Larry Ahern |
| Grim Fandango | 1998 | Tim Schafer |
The Indiana Jones games show how the company worked with its own films. The Last Crusade let the player get through “by following the plot of the movie”, START reported, but also by fighting or talking, and Fate of Atlantis offered three routes through the game, which Computer Gaming World praised as “its daring attempt to provide three playable game tracks”. Its artists painted the backgrounds and characters “on screen with DPaint”, which the same magazine called “the classic Deluxe Paint method” (see Deluxe Paint).
Monkey Island was made by what Retro Gamer called the “LucasArts Triforce”: Gilbert with two young writers, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Schafer had joined straight from college and began as an assistant designer on Monkey Island. Edge later described how he and Grossman were then “allowed to build their own game”, Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion. His first game on his own, “with about 30 other people”, was Full Throttle, which he designed and for which he wrote all the dialogue. The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) was the last LucasArts game on SCUMM, with the verb list replaced by a pop-up menu. Grim Fandango (1998) moved to a new 3D engine, and was the last of Schafer’s LucasArts adventures.
Star Wars
From the early 1990s LucasArts published its own Star Wars games, among them X-Wing, Rebel Assault and Dark Forces (1995), a first-person shooter that Retro Gamer noted had a real story told in cutscenes. It also backed outside studios: in 1996 it sponsored the German developer Factor 5 to move to California, where it made the Rogue Squadron games. After 2000, with a new Star Wars film trilogy in cinemas, Star Wars games became the company’s main work. The Star Wars games of those years ranged from the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic and the online Star Wars Galaxies to the Battlefront series, and Retro Gamer judged that the company’s last in-house Star Wars games, The Force Unleashed series among them, failed to match its earlier critical success.
Closure
Many of the adventure designers left and carried the approach with them. Tim Schafer founded Double Fine Productions in 2000, and former LucasArts staff who had worked on a cancelled Sam & Max sequel founded Telltale in 2004, whose episodic adventures Edge traced to “its founders’ LucasArts pedigree”.
In October 2012 Disney agreed to buy Lucasfilm, with all its subsidiaries, for $4.05 billion. The following April Disney closed LucasArts’ internal development, shifting it, in the company’s words as reported by Retro Gamer, “from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games”. About 150 people lost their jobs, and projects in development were cancelled, including a Star Wars game about the bounty hunter Boba Fett, Star Wars 1313. Chuck Jordan, a co-writer of The Curse of Monkey Island, told Retro Gamer that he felt for “all the people at the Presidio who lost their jobs”, but that the LucasArts that had made him “move 3000 miles away from home to work for them, hasn’t existed for over a decade.” Gilbert said he had come to terms with it when Disney bought the company. Lucasfilm revived the Lucasfilm Games name in January 2021 for its licensed games.
Sources
- Antic vol. 3 no. 4, August 1984: Peter Langston hired two years earlier “with an open charter — do something interesting in the games industry”, and his recruiting.
- Video Games Player (Computer Games), December 1984: the June 1982 Atari–Lucasfilm joint venture; Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus as its first products.
- Commodore Power/Play, August 1986: the Games Division “formed in 1982”; David Fox, Loren Carpenter and the origin of Rescue on Fractalus; Koronis Rift and The Eidolon.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990: Activision UK’s distribution of Lucasfilm games including Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus and Koronis Rift.
- START vol. 4 no. 2, September 1989: Lucasfilm Games in Marin County; SCUMM described; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and its three ways through.
- The Games Machine issue 20, July 1989: the Last Crusade adventure team of Noah Falstein, Ron Gilbert and David Fox.
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Gilbert, Winnick and Fox on the design, SCUMM, self-publishing, the Sierra games and deaths, and “lessons learned”; Zak McKracken as David Fox’s game.
- Computer Gaming World issue 70, April 1990 (review of Brian Moriarty’s Loom), and issue 73, July 1990, pp. 24 and 63 (Scorpia’s review: “no dead ends”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991, pp. 44–45: the Computer Game Developers’ Conference debate between Ron Gilbert and Lori Cole.
- Computer Gaming World issue 87, October 1991, p. 34: Deluxe Paint at Lucasfilm Games; issue 100, November 1992: Fate of Atlantis by Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein and its three game tracks, and Monkey Island 2 by Ron Gilbert.
- Compute! November 1990: Lucasfilm Games “a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company”; San Rafael address in AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga.
- Edge issue 30, March 1996: Tim Schafer’s career, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 9, August 1994: Sean Clark on The Dig; PC Zone issue 95, November 2000: Michael Stemmle and Sean Clark as the Sam & Max authors.
- Edge issue 250, February 2013: Telltale’s LucasArts pedigree.
- Retro Gamer issue 115, 2013, pp. 6–8, “LucasArts 1982–2013”: formation in 1982, Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion and SCUMM, the “Triforce”, Dark Forces, the Star Wars years, Disney’s $4.05 billion purchase and licensing model, the cancelled Boba Fett game, Chuck Jordan and Ron Gilbert.
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: interview with LucasArts president Jack Sorensen on Factor 5.
- Wikipedia, “LucasArts” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the closure of internal development on 3 April 2013 and about 150 lay-offs; the founding of Double Fine (2000) and Telltale (2004); the revival of Lucasfilm Games on 11 January 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LucasArts
- Wikipedia, “The Curse of Monkey Island” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): its 1997 release, designers Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, and its place as the last SCUMM game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Monkey_Island