Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
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grumpy_new_yorker
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Disney Shuts Down LucasArts, Cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault
Disney has laid off the staff of LucasArts and cancelled all current projects.
Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio's current projects—Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313—were cancelled. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.
Hypothetically, the company could license First Assault or 1313 to a different developer, but those would be different games entirely.
“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games," LucasArts parent company LucasFilm said in a statement. "As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
This comes after weeks and months of rumors involving the studio, which was acquired by Disney last fall. In September, LucasArts put a freeze on all hiring and product announcements, which many staff saw as the beginning of the end. In February, we started hearing rumors that the studio might be shuttered. Today, it's official: the iconic development house is gone.
The company was acquired as part of a mega-merger last year where Disney acquired LucasFilm and its sibling company from Lucas. Maniac Mansion, one of LucasArts' first self-published titles, introduced the "SCUMM" game engine driving several well known point-and-click adventure titles the company published throughout the 1990s. The Secret of Monkey Island, created by Ron Gilbert and co-written by Double Fine's Tim Schafer, is one of the publisher's best-known graphical adventures using the engine.
The publisher's apogee was certainly in the 1990s, when a wave of Star Wars-themed titles for the PC—such as Dark Forces, X-Wing and Rebel Assault—were supplemented by games like the strategy title Afterlife, the Sam & Max series, and Schafer's Full Throttle.
In the 2000s, the company became more reliant on its Star Wars products and licenses sold to other developers as new efforts like Fracture failed to take hold. The decade's most notable successes—Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Battlefront—were both externally developed, by BioWare and Pandemic Studios, respectively. LucasArts' last title to see mainstream success was 2008's Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. A 2010 sequel didn't live up to expectations. The last game published by LucasArts was Kinect Star Wars for the Xbox 360 last year, a game widely panned by critics.
http://kotaku.com/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-468473749
Disney has laid off the staff of LucasArts and cancelled all current projects.
Staff were informed of the shutdown this morning, according to a reliable Kotaku source. Some 150 people were laid off, and both of the studio's current projects—Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars 1313—were cancelled. Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.
Hypothetically, the company could license First Assault or 1313 to a different developer, but those would be different games entirely.
“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games," LucasArts parent company LucasFilm said in a statement. "As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
This comes after weeks and months of rumors involving the studio, which was acquired by Disney last fall. In September, LucasArts put a freeze on all hiring and product announcements, which many staff saw as the beginning of the end. In February, we started hearing rumors that the studio might be shuttered. Today, it's official: the iconic development house is gone.
The company was acquired as part of a mega-merger last year where Disney acquired LucasFilm and its sibling company from Lucas. Maniac Mansion, one of LucasArts' first self-published titles, introduced the "SCUMM" game engine driving several well known point-and-click adventure titles the company published throughout the 1990s. The Secret of Monkey Island, created by Ron Gilbert and co-written by Double Fine's Tim Schafer, is one of the publisher's best-known graphical adventures using the engine.
The publisher's apogee was certainly in the 1990s, when a wave of Star Wars-themed titles for the PC—such as Dark Forces, X-Wing and Rebel Assault—were supplemented by games like the strategy title Afterlife, the Sam & Max series, and Schafer's Full Throttle.
In the 2000s, the company became more reliant on its Star Wars products and licenses sold to other developers as new efforts like Fracture failed to take hold. The decade's most notable successes—Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Battlefront—were both externally developed, by BioWare and Pandemic Studios, respectively. LucasArts' last title to see mainstream success was 2008's Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. A 2010 sequel didn't live up to expectations. The last game published by LucasArts was Kinect Star Wars for the Xbox 360 last year, a game widely panned by critics.
http://kotaku.com/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-468473749
Comments
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I want another 2D Monkey Island.
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Mickey Mouse just aint giving a ? out here.
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They need to make another knights of the old republic. i wanna be a ? jedi or somethin
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I enjoyed the 2 force unleashed games
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I've been meaning to play Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island (they were developed by LucasArts, right?). Besides that I didn't care too much about them. Can't even name a single game they've made in the past decade.
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A moment of silence for Star Wars 1313 a game I was actually looking forward to
The idea of an M rated game that took you across the unknown Star Wars universe criminal underground was sick and now ? it's gone just like that. Disney really is evil.
I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs out of nowhere too. Thank you for the Monkey Island, Sam & Max and Maniac Mansion games even if Lucasarts had not been living up to their standard for years now. -
I've been meaning to play Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island (they were developed by LucasArts, right?).
Yes. Maniac Mansion too.
They actually remade the Monkey Island games for PS3 and Xbox. -
Dark forces and full throttle were the ? . Rip lucasarts
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Still waiting for starwars battlefront 3.
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Them White folks straight took that ? Jorge ? . It's sad really.
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Honestly I hope these new movies fail miserably because of this ? disney is on right now that's crazy man smh
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Mickey just said, Star Wars, I am your father!
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Sad to see so may lose their jobs ............... but I guess it had to be done.
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Very sad headline for those who remember the 90s, but damn Wired Mag talked some sense into a ? :
Lucasfilm has been trying to turn the struggling LucasArts division around for many years now, with a musical-chairs game of ever-changing creative leads and executives.
I can see why Lucas, as a standalone company, would want to fix its games division. But Disney has no such need. It has a games division already, it doesn’t need to try to fix LucasArts’ problems. It’s sad when hundreds of people lose their jobs, but organizations that are no longer competitive need to die to make room for ones that are. If it’s Star Wars games you’re after, there’s no reason an external developer can’t handle them.
And if you’re nostalgic for the great old Lucas games of old, like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, this is good news for you. First of all, the people who made those games are already working at Telltale or Double Fine making exactly what you wish Lucas was still making. If you want a new Grim Fandango, a shift to a licensing-only model makes it more likely that Disney will look to cash in on that latent demand.
Again, if you’re in that latter group, the LucasArts you’re so nostalgic for died a long, long time ago when the company cancelled its Sam & Max sequel and laid off the whole team. And then that team formed Telltale Games and eventually made The Walking Dead. The LucasArts that died today is not the one you loved, and it was never going to be again.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/lucasarts-disney/
^^^ tell me that ain't on point
real talk look at they track record since the president been black:
Angry Birds Star Wars (with Rovio) 2012 Android, Arcade, iOS
Kinect Star Wars 2012 Xbox 360
Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars 2011 Macintosh, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360
Star Wars: The Old Republic 2011 Windows
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II 2010 iOS, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, Wii
Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings 2009 Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PSP, Wii
Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues 2009 Macintosh, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360
Lucidity 2009 Windows, Xbox 360
Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron 2009 Nintendo DS, PSP
Star Wars Battlefront: Mobile Squadrons 2009 Mobile Phone
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes 2009 Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii, Windows
Tales of Monkey Island 2009 iOS, Macintosh, PlayStation 3, Windows, Wii
keep it real.....except for Monkey Island & Angry Birds......all these games are straight ass and/or Shovelware.
- They STILL haven't made a Indiana Jones game worth a damn since Fate of Atlantis....21 years ago. Pathetic.
- Force Unleashed II was a half-assed end to a flawed-but-once-promising franchise. When its creator quit Lucasarts, the writing was on the wall.
- Battlefront series was a classic and wildly popular, but these fools cancelled the sequels and reduced it to mobile game shovelware status smfh. They were gonna try to bring it back somewhat w/ First Assault, but....download only? RED FLAG. This franchise should've been their Call of Duty. Idiots.
- Remember how hyped Kinect Star Wars was? ? was talmbout it'd be the Kinect's killer app. Yeah....
- Old Republic is a ? -Synthesis-Level complete ? disaster - when you spend $200 MILLION on a game and the best thing about it is the pre-rendered intro cutscenes......commit dat. ? yourself. Jump off a bridge, put a gun in your mouth. EA CEO deserved his firing for that alone, Lucasarts deserves to be shut down for that alone. We got this garbage instead of Knight of the Old Republic 3.....SMFH. SMFH. SMFH.
- 1313 always seemed destined to be a generic 3rd person cover/stealth shooter w/ Star Wars blaster sound fx. I never bout into all this "DARKER GRITTIER" hype they was talkin....felt like they were gonna add a tiiiiiny bit of blood....some anti-hero moments.....maybe like ONE curse word, call that ? a day lol. ? got all excited over that E3 "gameplay" which was pre-rendered like a muh pfft.
There will be plenty of Star Wars games in the future. You gotta understand that Disney is CLEANING HOUSE over in LucasLand - cancelling Clone Wars, deading that Detox status live-action TV show, and now putting an incompetent, way-past-its-prime game developer out of its misery - because Episode 7 is coming. And Disney is going to push Episode 7 with all of Heaven and Earth. They are gonna push that movie like its Jesus Coming Back. Lucas had no real plans for the future: Star Wars was just gonna drift into the future w/ no real direction. Now? Best believe that ? got direction now. Disney is not ? around ? , they want this new trilogy to gross literally like 10 billion ? dollars, b. Disney is about that paper, my ? . They hear Avatar 2's footsteps......
"Throwin ? off airplanes cause CASH RULES" - Ghostface
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Man they ILM the Guys that did the CGI on the Transformers franchise behind star wars 1313. I was so ready for this game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOzm02HN78s&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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Eh The Old Republic was ? . Story was ehhh but that game got empty and boring quick. I just wish SW:Battlefront 3 had been a thing. Online was fun as hell.
