The most breakingest of breaking news, via the official Lucasarts twitter feed – which has been horribly teasing the poor, frustrated internet for the last few days about what, they promised, was a massively exciting announcement. A Day of the Tentacle remake? A new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game? Officially striking the Star Wars prequels from the record? The Loom 2: Loomier? Nah- they’ve only gone and lobbed a crapload of their classic back catalogue onto Steam. Rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility too, no less.
What’s that strange noise? It’s thousands of 30-year-old men simultaneously having a Special Wee, that’s what.
This little lot is available from the 8th July:
•Armed and Dangerous
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure
• LOOM
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• Star Wars Republic Commando
• Star Wars Starfighter
• The Dig
• Thrillville: Off the Rails
On the 15th, that’s followed up by Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition (the remake, not the new Telltale episodes).
Clap your hands and say yeah. And even overlooked latter-day gem Republic motherfuggin’ Commando finally gets its day in the sun!
Of course, there are immediately notable absences, such as the holy quadrilogy of Sam & Max Hit The Road, Day of The Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, and the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series, but we’re promised “this is just the beginning. We know how much you guys love our old games.”
They’ve taken their sweet time about this, having steadfastedly ignored our changing times for years, and God only knows why. Judging by the current explosion of joy around the web, though, it’s most certainly not too little too late.
Oh, and they’d bloody better not forget about Yoda Stories…
Related Stories:
Was Yoda Stories the one that ran in a window and was played from an overhead view?
Why so much love for the Dig? It got mediocre reviews at the time and I found it to be INCREDIBLY tedious to the extent I was just playing it for the sake of finishing it using gamefaqs.
I do have a lot of love for indy and the fate of atlantis, which is why I still have it! I missed LOOM, so I may give that a bash.
Yah Yoda Stories are grid based adventure kind of game played from Overheard view. Was interesting to say the least :P
There is some new game coming out (maybe the command and conquer FPS?) where the main character can change his primary weapon’s config to deal with diffrent situations and I saw a preview saying it had never been done before. All the while I was screaming at the PC screen “REPUBLIC COMMANDO HELLLLO!!! COME ON!!” and my wife took the kids and went to her mother’s house for 4 days . . . but that has nothing to do with anything.
Nice. The old Lucasarts games I DID own I’ve long since lost, and those I didn’t are basically impossible to find for anything resembling a reasonable price. I’d greatly value the ability to go back to old favorites and perhaps find a few new ones, though like others I do wish this was on GOG instead of (or in addition to) Steam.
@dragon
True, I always forget how badly Steam handles alternate currencies. You guys get the fuzzy end of the lollipop on that one.
I’ve been playing x-wing alliance recently, I seriously would love it if they remade Tie-Fighter and X-wing with the origonal campaign and voice acting but with updated in-game graphics (even leave the same cut scene and menus which I loved. I even loved the font of the briefing and the moving map)
Tie-Fighter was one of the first games I ever modded. There was a map editor released that allowed you to make your own missions and you had to type it all kinds of stuff to get it to work right.
Fate of Atlantis, along with Secret of Monkey Island II, were the only two LucasArts adventure games I completed by myself, with no help from walkthroughs. Looking forward to getting re-acquainted with at least one of them on July 8.
LOOM!
Fantastic!
It’s been a while since I saw Armed and Dangerous. :O Last time I played it was on the Xbox. I think the only thing I really loved about it though were the cutscenes. My god, some of those were hilarious. “GIMME DA KEEEES!” “Give me the keys?”
I think that was probably the only game that made me love LucasArts, seeing as I missed the adventure game era. :( I’ll probably be trying Grim Fandango though, because of it’s acclaim and because of Tim Schafer’s part in its making.
I find Loom interesting for an alternate history of where adventure games might have gone. And that you can only see the real story if you’re willing to learn the drafts by ear. And that if it never satisfies, at any point, the narrative. And, oh, it’s great.
Gentlemen.
Garrrrrg.
No Mac stuff.
Nice and all, but I already have all of these. Call me a dreamer, but I was hoping for a new Maniac Mansion or something…
And while we’re talking about dreams, hopefully these games will sell well enough to convince Lucasarts to get people like Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert back to resurrect their adventure games division.
Woohoo! The Dig!
If they added proper widescreen support to Republic Commando I’d buy it again. Still waiting for it’s sequel…*cough*
No Full Throttle? 8(
It’s about time. A lot of these have been steadfastly unavailable for years. (Still lacking a lot of the best, mind you.) I gotta second that they should have picked GoG for the older stuff, though. Or better yet, done both and Impulse besides.
There is no sequal Grey_Ghost. The story line plays out in a novel which made me pretty angry. It should be against the law to leave such a huge cliff hanger at the end of a game only to have it fufilled in a related novel O.o
“What’s that strange noise? It’s thousands of 30-year-old men simultaneously having a Special Wee, that’s what.”
OI!
I’m nineteen!
Looks like it’s time to play Armed & Dangerous, and LOOM again >8]
Oh damn I want Yoda Stories.
I already bought this stuff decades ago… I’m not about to go buying it again. Take that Lucasarts… that’s what you get for cashing in for years and years.
When I was a kid my parents bought me the pack with Day of the Tentacle, Fate of Atlantis and Sam and Max. I loved those. I didn’t know how to find walkthroughs so I had to figure everything out by myself.
One of my favorite gaming moments is when I was stuck on a puzzle in DotT so I stopped playing it for a while. A few months later I had a dream where I found the solution, and the next day I tried the solution from my dream and it worked in the game!
Really? So all that fuss was about old titles that everyone already has/can have with SCUMM in Steam? Sigh…
@Vector et al. According to them, they aren’t running in SCUMMVM, but have created native executables. see here
I still have the original box, discs and hint book of Fate of Atlantis. It was my favorite game for so long. I wanted to be Sophia Hapgood, and choosing the wits, brains or fists path made for so much enjoyable fun. Ahhh the joys of orichalcum. So disappointed they didn’t make this into the new indy movie!
LOOM, awwww yeah. Absolutely beautiful adventure game. Been hoping for a sequel for many years, since the ending left a clear opening for one.
uh, what the hell ? ScummVM has been able to run these for years, perfectly (or almost perfectly since they have 90% in the compatibility chart), you can use your old originals (if you still have that 5.25″ drive handy) plus its updated pretty often, multiplatform (you can play them in your damn DS or iPhone, or pocket pc or almost anything with a chip) and the ogg compressed games take a lot less space, wth would i buy them again for a version that will probably stop working with win7 and has no linux support and has been dipped in DRM? and what about Good Old Games ? i thought they were selling xp working drmless versions of these
if you want to make me excited gimme a remake of Tie-Fighter
Oh wow, LOOM was the first non-shareware game I ever owned and finished. I loved that game, and spent more time playing tunes in it, than I did on the real piano I was meant to be learning…
Definitely a purchase both for nostalgia, and as encouragement for a remake/sequel…
Armed and Dangerous is an amusing game too, and sadly is the only other game on this list that I’ve played. That will need to be rectified.
Two words. Holy shit.
Okay, a few more words. Would’ve preferred these on GOG instead of Steam, but I can live with it.
And, of course, for all those people who already have the games: this news is no big deal. You can just fire up ScummVM and play.
But this is big news for all the people who have never bought or played these games before. It’s potentially introducing them to a whole new generation of players, that will work on more modern versions of Windows.
This almost makes up for LucasArts’ “you need a $4,000 PC to play Force Unleashed so we’re not making a PC version” bullshit. I hope this a sign that all the people who would make such boneheaded PR gaffes have been fired, and LucasArts is turning over a bit of a new leaf.
I’ve still got the adventure games listed on Mac CD-ROM somewhere, so not a whole lot of interest in buying them again when they’re easily playable via ScummVM for free.
TIE Fighter, on the other hand, would be an entirely different prospect. I’d happily pay again for XP/Vista-compatible TIE Fighter. TIE 95 works fine in XP but it doesn’t have iMUSE :( It’s not the same without the dynamic MIDI music.
NSFT The Fate of Atlantis rests in his hands.
To the people who say you can already play this through Scumm – yeah, but if enough people buy these, and the remake of Monkey Island, Lucasarts may do graphical remakes of stuff like Day of the Tentacle too….
They better put Grim Fandango on there!!!
Republic commando was fucking fantastic. Best modern starwars game in a decade
Lars, don’t delude yourself. The MI remake will absolutely wreck; modern gamers will be giant question-mark-faced question marks at the outdated humor, smeared out art style and obtuse puzzles.
The problem with remaking these old adventure games is that unless your remake IMPROVES on the game and actually brings it properly up to date, there’s no god damn point. I’d actually be much more interested in seeing a Secret of Monkey Island brawler than a straight up adventure remake, because the gameplay is less timeless than the story and setting.
I make a point out of replaying my Lucasarts favorites annually. Sam&Max, MI1-3, Fate of atlantis, Full Throttle. Full Throttle in particular is a standout. These are wondeful, wonderful games, but they are, currently, extreme niche and a cultural relic not much above text adventures like A Mind Forever Voyaging, which, while absolutely amazing, you probably can’t PAY people to play these days (unless we included it (AMFV) in our school curriculum. Which we should.)
I would rather they be allowed to become classics, like gaming equivalents of The day the earth stood still, Forbidden planet or even Casablanca or Citizen Kane, rather than be remade into modern anachronistic monstrosities. I would rather see them revered and updated for compatibility, made readily available to anyone curious about the most visual story-heavy genre videogames have seen.
Sidenote, anyone try the Sam&Max port for Xbox360? Why they put a mouse cursor in a joypad controlled game is beyond me. If you’re going to bring adventure games to the modern unwashed masses, methinks the interface needs some serious retooling, even if it’s just a cursor that scrolls through hotspots.
The problem with remaking X-Wing or TIE Fighter: no-one, but no-one has a joystick these days.
Expect it on consoles, or not at all.
@sunjammer: “Lars, don’t delude yourself. The MI remake will absolutely wreck; modern gamers will be giant question-mark-faced question marks at the outdated humor, smeared out art style and obtuse puzzles.”
Well, thing is, there are quite a lot of 30-something gamers on Steam… We shall see how the sales go.
:-)
UPDATE: At this article, a very mouth watering hint:
“While these ten titles are straight ports – so no Steam Achievements, and no fancy new graphics and sound a la Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition – LucasArts is considering enhanced versions of other titles, though “a lot of it will ultimately depend on the commercial success of Monkey Island Special Edition,” we’re told. “We have the plans in our back pocket and if things go extremely well, we’ll roll out those plans and put them into action. Whether it’s Maniac, Day of the Tentacle, or Grim.”
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/06/breaking-lucasarts-classics-coming-to-steam-this-wednesday/
Better be Grim then! They should hire double fine just to handle that
This is really great news. At the time when those games were new I was a kid with no money and piracy was just “normal” then. I’m glad I can use this as a chance to re-play those games while (finally) giving them some well-deserved money. Lucasarts games entertained me for many fine hours. Thanks for that!
Bah! no Tie Fighter!?
I would love for an iTouch/iPhone version of any of these. I already own the vast majority on PC but portable versions would be divine. I know you can jailbreak the iPods, but such tomfoolery terrifies me…
Pirates will be critical.
@Demikaze Can’t speak for iPhone, but ScummVM is available free on any Android handset.
WAT WAT Wat wat wat twat wat twat wat wat wat tawt awt
Now where’s dem good games at, Lucas?
Yeah about no one still has a joystick, but if they remake X-Wing/Tie Fighter I’ll go buy one for sure.
/signed
Well, I am sort of hoping that they throw Knights of the Old Republic on Steam. Not available for digital download that I can find anywhere. It isn’t listed yet, so I hope away.
Star Wars Republic Commando and KOTOR are the only games based in SW that i enjoied so far.
god whats with all these old games where are the newer ones
“Legionary says:
When TIE Fighter comes out, I’ll be splashing the cash: easily the best Star Wars game there’s yet been, and easily the best space fighter sim ever.”
What he said.
No TIE Fighter / X-Wing / XvT (even XWA), no cash. Adventure games bore me right into a coma, and the rest of the list elicits a resounding “meh”.
As much as I loathe the looks of the remake, at least there’s an instant option to play the original.
Hopefully Maniac Mansion will follow soon: If they’re putting up Loom, Indy 3 and Monkey Island, they need that one to show just how much they could do with such a new and relatively restrictive genre.
Awesome! Now all we need is the old Infocom games for people who were getting nostalgic back when Loom was new :)
Yeah, they’re in need of a rerelease.