United States · Founded 1982 · Closed 2013 · 8-bit / 16-bit / 32-bit
George Lucas's games division became the finest adventure game studio in the world with SCUMM, Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango — and then made the definitive Star Wars games as well.
Lucasfilm Games was founded in May 1982 by George Lucas as a video game arm of his film company, established through a joint agreement with Atari, which paid a million dollars in seed money in exchange for first right of refusal on anything the group developed. Remarkably, for its first decade the division was barred from making Star Wars games — the licence was held elsewhere — and that constraint forced it to become something far more interesting than a licensing shop. The breakthrough was Maniac Mansion (1987), which introduced SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), the scripting engine that would power nearly all the company's adventure games. SCUMM enabled the point-and-click interface that became LucasArts' signature, and with it came a design philosophy that set the studio apart from its great rival Sierra: in a LucasArts adventure, you could not die, and you could not make the game unwinnable. Puzzles were to be solved, not survived. What followed was one of the finest runs any studio has produced. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and its sequel, designed by Ron Gilbert with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, brought genuine comic writing to games; Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango extended the tradition, the last of these standing as one of the medium's great artistic achievements. The company was rebranded LucasArts in a 1990 reorganisation of Lucasfilm's divisions. When the Star Wars rights finally became available, LucasArts proved it could do that too. X-Wing (1993) established the definitive Star Wars space-combat simulator, and Dark Forces (1995) fused the licence with the emerging first-person shooter to launch a series of its own; TIE Fighter, Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron, and Knights of the Old Republic followed. The studio's later years were dominated by the licence at the expense of original work, and Disney closed LucasArts as a development house in 2013 — but its adventure catalogue remains, by common consent, the high-water mark of the genre.