Darth Vader is holding a duck.

Book voucher well spent!

I spent a long time playing Day of the Tentacle, The Dig introduced to me the idea of "serious" narrative in games, and for a long while I adored (and I probably still do) the humour of Sam & Max.  I hadn't really noticed before, but LucasArts could possibly have been the most influential game developer during my first few years in gaming.  I'm fairly certain this little tidbit isn't what's going to give George Lucas the warm fuzzies when he goes to bed tonight*, but it at least helps me make sense of where my fixation on adventure games comes from.

The first memory I have of being interested in a game I wasn't playing is watching my Uncle Paul play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.  I never did get to play it myself, but wow!  Indiana Jones, slumming through tombs and trap-infested dungeons with gold, gems and broads trailing from his every pocket, all on my uncle's command!  A game that didn't feature Italian plumbers or masked mutant turtles didn't often pique my interest at that tender age, but something about Harrison Ford's pixellated features had caught my attention.

Since then there's been everything from Maniac Mansion to Lego Star Wars, and like an oblivious Threepwood it's taken an actual book about LucasArts to flick my nose and make me realise that all of these games came from the same people.  Hell, if you even start to Kevin Bacon this a little you get to add one of my all-time favourites Psychonauts to the list; Tim Schafer's job interview as reported by the author is almost worth the price-tag of the book alone.

So nostalgic gushing aside, if nothing else, I admire LucasArt's dedication to the almost forgotten form of the point-and-click adventure game amidst the leaps and bounds the industry has made in other directions.

After fanboying about Day of the Tentacle for the twentieth time today, one of the guys from work suggested I should try making my own adventure games with AGS or similar, which admittedly is a tempting idea, but it's not like I haven't got enough on my plate already, is it?

In diary-keeping news, my weekends are slowly starting to get booked out, which is nice for the first few, but can get tiring pretty quickly.  I'm going to have to start developing some better sleeping habits if I'm to keep up.

-Anthony

*I'm fairly certain that'd be the mountain of cash he'll go nappytimes on.

free sandwiches for roadies