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Author Topic: Disney Shuts Down LucasArts Video Game Company  (Read 10464 times)
Kham-Ryn Kurios
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« on: April 03, 2013, 06:20:37 PM »



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.

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.

Publicly, Disney is saying their current games could be licensed out to a different publisher or developer, but according to our source, that's unlikely. Our source says Lucas has pursued the option for "one or both games," but nothing happened. "With the teams now basically being dispersed I think both games are effectively dead forever," our source said.


“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.

Source: http://kotaku.com/disney-shuts-down-lucasarts-468473749
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 06:24:10 PM by Kham-Ryn Kurios » Logged


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Luna
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« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2013, 06:47:36 PM »

NOOOOOO!!!!!

I can't form any other words to express how I feel about this....
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AlthaxX
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« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2013, 06:50:25 PM »

Aww mannnn, full throttle and zombies ate my neighbours were 2 of the games I grew up on, its always sad when a good game studio gets shut down.
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« Reply #3 on: April 03, 2013, 07:20:55 PM »

I sense this is the first of many disappointing things to come...
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Big Boss
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« Reply #4 on: April 03, 2013, 07:30:29 PM »


Nooooooooooooooooo!   Cry
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« Reply #5 on: April 03, 2013, 07:52:21 PM »

This is pissing off a lot of people, even more than I would have expected... seriously, there are already around half a dozen threads on /v/ about it. It's like killing a childhood friend, and people don't tend to react well to that.
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Kham-Ryn Kurios
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« Reply #6 on: April 03, 2013, 08:04:05 PM »

This is pissing off a lot of people, even more than I would have expected... seriously, there are already around half a dozen threads on /v/ about it. It's like killing a childhood friend, and people don't tend to react well to that.


And the most ironic part is that George Lucas had absolutely nothing to do with causing the outrage.

He's probably at home laughing.  Cheesy
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« Reply #7 on: April 03, 2013, 08:15:27 PM »

I was really bummed to hear that 1313 was cancelled.

Apparently Disney no longer likes money...
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Kham-Ryn Kurios
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« Reply #8 on: April 03, 2013, 08:27:25 PM »

I was really bummed to hear that 1313 was cancelled.

Apparently Disney no longer likes money...


Just the little bit of gameplay they had shown looked really slick and I was ready to enter into the underbelly of Star Wars.

On top of that, First Assault was going to essentially a new Battlefront, which probably would have been news almost as big as hearing there would be more films.  Undecided
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« Reply #9 on: April 03, 2013, 08:30:18 PM »

Wow why is Disney destroying everything I love
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« Reply #10 on: April 03, 2013, 08:31:10 PM »

Wut.

I can't....

How...

Why...

But...

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« Reply #11 on: April 03, 2013, 09:59:38 PM »

Disney: We've just sucked two games of your life away....



















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« Reply #12 on: April 04, 2013, 12:35:09 AM »

This is very insane. Look at the history of the company!
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« Reply #13 on: April 04, 2013, 12:55:33 AM »

I think this scene from the movies pretty much sums up the situation at hand:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efFl_EDXCW0" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efFl_EDXCW0</a>


I feel like Obi Wan in this scene. It's like they just wipped out a whole possibility of the Extended Universe, alongside all of the hopes and dreams of hundreds of people. And to imagine the workers, who have been hard at work providing us some wonderful material to fuel our Star Wars needs and interests. I mean, some of the games weren't that great, but it's still a big part of Star Wars itself. And I was looking forward to Star Wars 1313, too. I also wonder how this is going to effect SWTOR, if at all.

I really hate how Disney just....does this kind of crap.
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« Reply #14 on: April 04, 2013, 03:14:20 AM »

Would have been better if the planet was the Lucasarts logo.
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