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Lucasfilm Games

Lucasfilm Games (known as LucasArts between 1990 and 2021) is an American video game licensor, former video game developer and publisher, and a subsidiary of Lucasfilm. It was founded in May 1982 by George Lucas as a video game development group alongside his film company; as part of a larger 1990 reorganization of the Lucasfilm divisions, the video game development division was grouped and rebranded as part of LucasArts. LucasArts became known for its line of adventure games based on its SCUMM engine in the 1990s, including Maniac Mansion, the Monkey Island series, and several Indiana Jones titles. A number of influential game developers were alumni of LucasArts from this period, including Brian Moriarty, Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert, and Dave Grossman. Later, as Lucasfilm regained control over its licensing over the Star Wars franchise, LucasArts produced numerous action-based Star Wars titles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while dropping adventure game development due to waning interest in the genre.

Lucasfilm was wholly acquired by The Walt Disney Company in December 2012, and by April 2013, Disney had announced the shuttering of LucasArts in all but name, keeping the division around to handle licensing of Lucasfilm properties to third-party developers, primarily Electronic Arts (EA), and having any in-house development transferred to Disney Interactive Studios. Disney has, since 2021, revitalized the Lucasfilm Games brand as the licenser of all Lucasfilm-related properties.

In 1979, George Lucas wanted to explore other areas of entertainment and created the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1979, which included a department for computer games (the Games Group) and another for graphics. The graphics department was spun off into its own corporation in 1986, ultimately becoming Pixar.

The Lucasfilm Games Group originally cooperated with Atari, Inc., which helped fund the video game group's founding, to produce video games. Though the group had spun out of Lucasfilm, the video game development license for Lucasfilm's Star Wars was held by Atari at the time, forcing the group to start with original concepts; Ron Gilbert, one of the group's first employees, believed that if the Lucasfilm Games Group had the rights for Star Wars from the start, they would have never branched into any new intellectual property.

The first products from the Games Group were Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus!, developed in 1984 for the Atari 5200 console and Atari 8-bit computers. Beta versions of both games were leaked to pirate bulletin boards exactly one week after Atari had received unprotected copies for a marketing review, and were in wide circulation over a year before the original release date. Planned to be released in the 3rd quarter of 1984 under the Atari/Lucasfilm label, the games were delayed when Warner Communications sold the assets of the consumer division of Atari, Inc. to Jack Tramiel in July of that year, and were ultimately picked up by publisher Epyx and released by May 1985. Lucasfilm's next two games were Koronis Rift and The Eidolon. Their first games were only developed by Lucasfilm, and a publisher would distribute the games. Atari published their games for Atari systems, Activision and Epyx would do their computer publishing. Maniac Mansion was the first game to be published and developed by Lucasfilm Games.

The early charter of Lucasfilm Games was to make experimental, innovative, and technologically advanced video games. Habitat, an early online role-playing game and one of the first to support a graphical front-end, was one such title. It was only released as a beta test in 1986 by Quantum Link, an online service for the Commodore 64. Quantum Link could not provide the bandwidth at the time to support the game, so the full Habitat was never released outside of the beta test. However, Lucasfilm Games recouped the cost of development by releasing a sized-down version called Club Caribe in 1988. Lucasfilm later licensed the software to Fujitsu, who released it in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat in 1990. Fujitsu later licensed Habitat for world-wide distribution, and released an updated version called WorldsAway in 1995. The latest iteration of Habitat is still called WorldsAway, which can be found at MetroWorlds.

Initially, the Games Group worked from Lucas' Skywalker Ranch near Nicasio, California. In 1990, in a reorganization of the Lucas companies, the Games Division of Lucasfilm became part of the newly created LucasArts Entertainment Company, which also comprised Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. Later ILM and Skywalker Sound were consolidated in Lucas Digital Ltd. and LucasArts became the official name of the former Games Division. During this, the division had moved out of Skywalker Ranch to near-by offices in San Rafael, California.

Also in 1990, LucasArts started to publish The Adventurer, their own gaming magazine where one could read about their upcoming games and interviews with the developers. The final issue was published in 1996. In the same year, Lucas Learning was created as a subsidiary of LucasArts, providing educational software for classrooms.

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