Full Throttle Remembered

I would like to publically declare my love for Full Throttle. Something very strange happened with history and opinion on that game - it was well received by critics, it was completely fantastic, it was Tim Schafer's most mature writing (three years before Grim Fandango). And then somehow it became the black sheep of LucasArts' output, condemned by false memories of being too short, and having awful arcade sequences throughout. Which just isn't true! Certainly it was a shorter adventure compared to others in their catalogue, but it was such an astonishingly fine one. And the arcade bits? Pieces of piss, apart from one crappy section with the demo derby. Get over it! Restore Full Throttle to its rightful glory! And then check out this excellent piece from Adventure Classic Gaming, discussing the fate of the two aborted sequels with former LucasArts artist, Bill Tiller.

LucasArts did seem to have a bit of a phase at the beginning of the decade, hellbent on killing off anything with a spark of imagination in order to focus on churning out dreadful Star Wars dross. Tiller provides some insight into those times, as well as going into excellent detail about what the first, almost unknown, sequel would have been about. Full Throttle: Payback was apparently going to be a straight point-and-click adventure, going deeper into hero, Ben's life.

“The story line we wanted to be similar in them to FT1, so it revolved around a large corporation and the territorial governor concocting a plot to replace all paved highways with hover pads to help make the hover mini vans and family hover cars safer and faster. Of course, this plan didn’t sit well with the bikers and truckers, who were going to unit to fight this plot at a rally. The evil governor had secretly hired the Rotwheelers to assassinate Father Torque, the leader of this new alliance at the rally... So the first half the game Ben tries to stop the assassination, and the second half he teams up with a persistent undercover female reporter to bring the governor down and uncover his nefarious secret."

Check out the rest of the interview/retrospective, here.

Thanks to Jonty.