All during this past weekend, LucasArts has been teasing its Twitter followers with hints of a big announcement for fans of their back catalog. The wait is finally over. After years of pleading and begging from its dedicated fan-base LucasArts has answered the call and plans to re-release some of its back catalog. Partnering with Steam, LucasArts is releasing – in a first round – 10 games on July 8, 2009:
- 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
For the full press release, venture forth here. Joystiq has an interview with more information. Who says crying doesn’t get you anywhere?
I can now finish the Dig. My nephew scratched my original CD and I never finished. That is good news.
Outstanding. A whole new generation exposed to a classic like LOOM? You can’t beat that. I loved Armed & Dangerous and Republic Commando as well, so I’ll have to check ’em out.
I can finally play LOOM. I remember borrowing a co-workers copy (back when it originally released) and never getting it to work properly. I’ve got one of the Indy Jones games, but never got around to attempting to get it to work. This may mean less work! I might even replay The Dig, which was the non-talkie version!
This is great news, though it does seem like kind of a bizarre mixed bag of releases. I would assume we’ll get similar trickle out packages like these, the classic adventures mixed with games released after the great purge. I can honestly say that I’m most excited about the promise of the future with this news. Other titles at my fingertips will be nice. With this package I’m most excited about the Last Crusade, one of the many adventures games where I got stuck, gave up and then apparently lost the disks.
I do wonder what this means for ScummVM. Not only did that make the games available on current platforms, but it also enhanced graphics with filters or interpolation. It doesn’t sound like LucasArts will be following suit here (and I wouldn’t really expect them to). It will take some getting used to to return to 320×240. More to the point, however, will this be stretched out on my widescreen laptop? Because that drives me absolutely nuts.
Anyway, good news certainly. It’s nice to see LucasArts finally acknowledging their back catalog, though I’m not holding my breathe that this will change their outlook on new releases going forward.
I still remember the joy when I finally got Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis running on my old Pentium computer with full sound through my Yamaha 2.1 sound system. Voices! It was a great game too. LOOM I never did finish. I always lost interest. But it’s great to see LucasArts doing this, for whatever reason.