A little bit of both, i suppose... for some reason i wasn't really that much enthralled by Monkey Island.. and also, my time had run out i guess.. i was no longer into games that much.. However, i did consider playing it, but it just never happened...

Why? Conscious decision or coincidence?

My favorite were Day of the Tentacle and Loom And i absolutely never played Monkey Island...

It's sad that LucasArts closed the doors as they made some games I played over and over again.

I still love X-Wing, Tie Fighter and Dark Forces- I "invested" so many hours in those games, that I'm sure I could fly a X-Wing or a Tie-Fighter myself - even after all the years

Forget Wing Commander and Origin - LucasArts ruled the Universe

The LucasArts/Film Adventures are of course very good games too - but I'm not a huge Fan of Adventures over all.

As I didn't play a lot of PC Games in the last 15 Years or so, I don't really know how good their newer games were.
I liked the Rouge Squadran Games from Factor5 - but I don't know who LucasArts was involved in the development of those titels.

I think it's sad, that the "Space Action Simulator" or the Flight Simulater genre died out so quickly - i miss them.

Today everything looks like shooters to me. OK, there is more then Call of Duty but even the other games are mostly first person or third person "somethings" + Racing + Sport Games.

Maybe I'm just overlooking other genres (I'm not talking about Indiegames), but I think 20 years ago gamers had a bigger range of genres to choose from. But I guess that's a bit too far from the topic

Here is an interesting article about the last years of the LucasArts and how they struggled against erratic management and bad timing:
Fall Of The Empire: How Inner Turmoil Brought Down LucasArts (Gameinformer)

I don't know if the parts about Lucas himself are true, but those suggestions he supposedly made sound either really stupid or downright vicious. If not icky or insane.

Yeah… that sort of 'planned marketing' (i.e. just putting a scene in a film to be able to make a game out of it) between different mediums is a legacy which I'd expect Disney to continue

I remember Star Wars Episode Racer. I don't know if the disk still works for it. But I'll play it if I can get it to work.

The first Lucasfilm game I played was Ballblazer, but of course, I didn't know about the company at that time. Not that there would have been all that much to know as that was before their famous adventuring days. I played it quite a bit with friends on their C64s. It is a game I like very much to this day!

I never really played any of the flight simulations they made (including those later Star Wars games), but as for the adventures… as I already hinted at, in the early 90s, I would pretty much buy their new ones blindly. Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max I played pretty much back-to-back. Then came Full Throttle… oh well, I liked it better than I thought after the mediocre reviews. The Dig, on the other hand, destroyed a world for me – horrible!

Before that, Monkey Island, of course! For some time in the late 1990s, I would actually make it my goal to play through Monkey Island daily. Well, it was more like every other day, but still. Thanks to the Internet, I could also get my hands on different language versions of the game then, and so I even played through Italian, Spanish and French versions in spite of minimal to non-existent command of those languages. It proved to be virtually no problem, because by then, I already knew the position of the right answers in the dialogues by heart

Zak, I first got as a cracked copy, so I was spared the re-routing to the pirate's place when travelling, but I still never got far in the game. The beginning was just amazing; that small part of the city seemed so alive and boy was I excited when I noticed there were different ways to deal with the squirrel issue! But, yes, as soon as I had to leave San Francisco, things got really messy and I lost interest. Come to think of it, my view on that game has not really changed a lot.

Interestingly enough, I only played Loom for the first time when I bought that Lucas Arts adventure compilation available on CD in the mid-90s. It was never a conscious choice to skip it before. The game just slipped under my radar, I can't really say why.

What I find so great about those times and games in retrospect, now that I think about it, was mainly that they were actually trying to tell a story. Sure, almost all adventure games before also had sort of a plot, but there was hardly any in-game storytelling. Usually, you'd get some sort of initial setting and problem, then (with regard to plot development) nothing happened at all throughout the game as you solved a lot of fairly abstract puzzles and then there was some sort of revelation or congratulation scene at the very end. I'd claim that Lucasfilm Games pioneered in the techniques of telling a developing story by interactive means in unprecendented ways – in times when others were still just framing their fairly generic games with very basic plot devices!

Actually it's depressing to end this once great company on such a sober note, to just discuss it's unimportance and decline in recent years. How about sharing some of the fondest memories we have of LucasArts?

I remember quite well the very first time I came in contact with a LucasArts game. It was Zak McKracken and I was recovering from a fever. As I was waking up, feeling better after days of raised temperature, my mother was just starting up the game and we were watching the intro. The sphinx, the fat boss, the music (even if PC-speaker) and Zak's flat, it was love at first sight. I distincly remember the strange plurt sound the game made when calling up the Save/Load menus. Back then we had a copy of a typwriter written solution that was a big help, since I was definitely to young to solve all those devious puzzles myself.

If I was to pick my favorite LucasArts game it would probably be Loom, for it's marvellous music and unusual gameplay for an adventure. The intro's Swan Lake melody (something I never realized until years and years later when seeing Black Swan ), preferably in PC-speaker high pitch mode, always sends shivers down my spine. ECED is burned to my mind forever.

And I never felt so much cheated by a game as with Le Chuck's Revenge. Give me a Conglaturation screen or even just the credits anytime, but don't end on one of the most far-fetched cliffhangers ever. Especially if you do not plan to ever pick it up again. But the ultimate reason for this disapointment must be, that I actually really loved the rest of the game. The fun with the voodoo dolls, the spitting contest, browsing through the library, solving the infamous backally door puzzle after days of pondering with a very cheap save/load trick, no wonder it had me hooked for weeks. Probably one of the first adventures I solved on my own too.

One of the proudest moments in my career as a gamer has to be, when I reached the inner most circle of the emperors hand selected mysterious order in Tie Fighter. On hardest difficulty of course, back when hard actually meant next to impossible. Oh the joys of boarding my first Tie Defender, finally having something to make up for all those missions in all that unshielded and underpowered flying coffins.

Though it's not all in the past: Just recently I managed to finally take a look at Grim Fandango, which instantly proved to me that good humor and creative design are timeless.

Possible, but the question was about Monkey Island versus current Disney games and I cannot find reliable sales figures for Monkey Island anywhere. The 'Special Edition', in any case, was apparantly not a bestseller according to modern-day standards.

Concerning the general worth of the more recent Lucas Arts titles, agreed, they could be worth quite a bit. However, what is the actual reason for their success? Is it actually that people (like in the late 80s/early 90s) said to themselves 'Oh, a new game by Lucas Arts, I have to get that one!'? Or is it rather the Star Wars name which made these games popular regardless of the team behind?

It's a question I certainly cannot answer. In the latter case, nothing is stopping Disney to have other teams develop games within those franchises for them and still have the same success. Maybe it's not really important which company name is in the credits. So, again, for me the question comes down to the relative worth of the Lucas Arts organisation / development team versus the plain worth of the licences.

Well even if you look at the absolute numbers, LucasArts still had a lot to offer: Just think of the Star Wars-games. Actually come to think of it, in the end they had almost only Star Wars. Though in my opinion, their non-SW titles were always far better than the SW ones. I think I only liked Tie Fighter and probably Knights of the old republic.

Anway: Looking them up at VGChartz, a lot of Lucas Arts titles outsell Epic Mickey. Now I am quite aware, that this is not the only Disney video game, and there might be more successfull ones, still I think LucasArts still was a bigger player (on the video game market) than any of the other Disney subsidiaries. At least their games have a far greater renown.

Well, that's hard to answer. What you have to take into account there is the overall size of the market, though. A game like 'Epic Mickey' might not have the relative mass appeal nowadays which Monkey Island had in its day, but on the other hand, even a semi-successful game of today still outsells any old hit by a large margin. So its absolute mass appeal might easily be larger.

Well, not for the company as a whole, but can you think of any Disney computer game with a reputation as huge as Monkey Island? Or with a similar cultural phenomenon? To some this series is the adventure game. For a long time it defined what point&click should be like. The most famous Disney game that comes to my mind would be Duck Tales for the NES/Game Boy.

Yes, well, as much as this game studio may have influenced our lives, we have to admit that none of their original assets ever really had an impact in mainstream media and society as a whole. Maniac Mansion probably came closest with that short-lived TV series (which I never saw). Let's face it, even Monkey Island is not a major asset in a mega corporation like Disney.

They do have quite a lot of assets, take a look at the Wiki: List of Disney's Assets. Didn't know it was that much… Entertainment monopoly here we come!

LucasArts is somewhere at the bottom, under 'Dormant or shuttered'

Disney MegaCorp. I no longer know how many licenses it has.

Still it's kind of depressing to see it's finally over. All that appears to remain is a hollow husk, a label under wich Disney will cash in money from the licenses.

I heard it on the radio, but also thought the same, LucasGames died a long time ago.

Exactly what I was thinking. Sure, they have a great history, but it's been history for a long, long time already.

I am either having a bad dream right now, or this is a delayed April fool hoax.

Come to think of it: What was the last game to bear the LucasArts label, that was any good?