LucasArts Retrospective

From thecrankyhermit

Maniac Mansion

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LucasFilm Games was originally founded in 1982 by George Lucas, as an attempt to branch the film studio into video games with the help of publishers such as Atari and Epyx. Employees Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick were assigned to create an original game. Drawing thematic inspiration from horror B-movies, adventure game conventions and techniques from Sierra's King's Quest series, and basing the game world's layout on Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, they created Maniac Mansion, a horror-comedy adventure game, which LucasFilm self-published in 1987.

You play as Dave, accompanied by two of his six closest friends (you pick the two), who must break into the titular mansion where Dave's girlfriend Sandy is being held prisoner by the mad scientist Dr. Fred Edison and a mind-controlling purple meteor. Inside, you must search over 30 rooms for clues, items, and secret passages, while you solve puzzles, avoid the mansion's nasty residents, and ultimately rescue Sandy. An unusual trait for the genre is that you control three characters, which makes it possible to search the mansion more efficiently, and to solve certain puzzles which require cooperation. For instance, one character can shut off the mansion's power from its basement, while a second repairs some exposed live wires in the attic. Another unusual trait for the genre is that each character has one or two unique abilities. For instance, Razor (pictured above, right side) is a punk rocker, and can befriend the aspiring musician Green Tentacle by playing a bagatelle on the grand piano. This adds replay value - as you can only pick two of Dave's friends, you won't be able to solve every puzzle on your first playthrough. Not all puzzles must be completed to win the game, and every possible combination of friends has at least one way to win the game (most have two), but you will need to play through several times in order to solve all of the mansion's mysteries and see every possible ending.

Maniac Mansion marked the introduction of LucasArt's famous SCUMM engine, which in fact stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, and would be used in-house to create adventure games for the next ten years. The most notable feature of it was the point and click interface. When Maniac Mansion was incepted, most adventure games were entirely text-based, and the few which had fully animated graphics were still driven by a text parser where you had to type in commands to your character, such as "push door mat" or "unlock door with silver key." Maniac Mansion distilled all possible actions down to 12 different verbs, which were on the screen at all times, and allowed you to generate commands by clicking on a verb, followed by an on-screen object or two. Clicking on the verb "push" followed by clicking on a door mat would generate the command "push door mat." Clicking on the verb "unlock" followed by clicking on a locked door and finally clicking on a silver key in your inventory generated "unlock door with silver key." This eliminated the need for typing commands, or using the keyboard at all, which Ron Gilbert had felt was an awkward compromise in graphic adventure games.

The SCUMM engine allowed for other things as well. It allowed game designers to program the mansion's residents as characters, who have their own dialog, can wander the mansion on their own accord, will react to the player's actions, and even have scheduled events. SCUMM also pioneered cut-scenes - a term Ron Gilbert coined while creating the engine. At various points in the game, an event will occur which is important to the plot, and the game will suddenly interrupt the current scene, take away your control, and cut to the scene of said event, which advances the plot and/or provides you with important information. Afterwards, it cuts back to the scene where you were last playing, and gameplay resumes. This technique is the de facto method of delivering story content in the context of gameplay today, but at the time, any substantial non-interactive movie scenes in adventure games only occurred during the game's intro or ending, and the majority of games told their plots through the instruction manual.

Unlike LucasArt's better-known games, but like other adventure games at the time, Maniac Mansion will punish you for making fatal errors. "Save early, save often" was the mantra of the day, and it still applies, even to LucasArts's first attempts. Your characters can get drowned, irradiated, mutilated, imprisoned, or blown up in a nuclear explosion, should you make a wrong move. You can win the game with a dead kid or two, but it's more difficult, and best avoided unless you're trying to get an alternate ending. Other mistakes could render certain puzzles impossible to solve, and possibly the game impossible to complete, without explicitly telling you that you had made a game-stopping mistake.

Maniac Mansion was released in three versions. The original was designed for the 8-bit Commodore 64, ported to the Apple II and DOS, and featured crude EGA graphics and sparse chiptune music. An enhanced 16-bit version was later released for DOS and Amiga, featured somewhat improved EGA graphics, and in the case of the Amiga version, featured MIDI renditions of the original's music. A third version was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, with redone graphics, and extensive music soundtrack, but also is infamously censored, with many of the funnier gags tamed down or removed entirely.


Is it worth playing? There are some design oddities and warts you will need to be able to forgive. The early SCUMM engine is rather primitive, and lacks features and refinement that would be seen later. The interface consists of 12 verbs and three commands which are arranged seemingly randomly. Of the 12 verbs, five of them could have easily been consolidated into "Use." The "What is" command is, in retrospect, a very strange design decision that should have been left on by default. And of course, the possibility of death and/or dead-ends can be off-putting to newcomers of the genre, or even to those experienced with more forgiving games in the genre. But if you can get over these humps, you will find this isn't just an important piece of adventure game history. It's a solid, highly enjoyable puzzle, with a fun exploration factor, weird humor, a delightfully macabre atmosphere, and a fair amount of replayability - a trait rare in the genre. It also happened to be a pioneer in point and click adventure games, and for that reason alone, all gamers interested in the history of genre are required to be familiar with it.

My rating:

2.5 purple meteors (great)

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

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In 1988, LucasFilm Games released Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the second game to use the SCUMM engine. It would be designed and written by LucasFilm employees David Fox and Matthew Alan Kane, with Maniac Mansion veteran Ron Gilbert assisting with design, and Gary Winnick returning as lead artist. It was unrelated to Maniac Mansion, save for some referential jokes, and followed more of a science fiction angle than Maniac Mansion's horror-comedy theme.

Set in the near-future year 1997, you play as Francis Zachary McKracken, a tabloid reporter on a quest for a Pulitzer, but stuck with banal assignments and stupid stories. While on a trip to Seattle to cover a scoop on a two headed squirrel, you discover that aliens have infiltrated the world's only phone company, and have an evil plot to gradually make everyone on earth dumber by broadcasting low-frequency sounds. Investigating this story, you must travel to world landmarks such as Stonehenge, the pyramids of Giza, other places associated with UFO mythology, and eventually the surface of Mars. You will befriend a geologist and Yale coeds, learn long-lost secrets of an ancient alien race, meet new age gurus with transcendental wisdom, discover the true fate of Elvis Presley, and ultimately reconstruct and activate an ancient machine that will save the world from eternal dumbness.

As in Maniac Mansion, there are multiple playable characters - in total four this time, and you can switch between them at will. Unlike Maniac Mansion, you start the game only in control of Zak, and must meet the other three characters during your travels before you can play as them. All four characters are needed to finish the game - some puzzles must be solved with a specific character, and some require cooperation between two or more, who may even be on different planets. The game is also much larger than Maniac Mansion, with 13 different locations, some of which are nearly as large as all of Maniac Mansion.

Interestingly, the best version of Zak McKracken was only released in Japan, for an obscure home computer called FM-Towns. As the only version of the game to be CD-ROM-based instead of floppy disks, it features 256 color VGA graphics, and a digital ambient soundtrack, as opposed to 16 color EGA graphics and mostly silence with occasional beeper music. This version is playable in English, and works well in ScummVM, as all of LucasArt's SCUMM games do. Legitimate copies are rare, and run for hundreds of dollars on eBay.


Is it worth playing? I'd say that depends on what you thought of Maniac Mansion. One one hand, it's somewhat refined and streamlined compared to its predecessor, and it does some creative things with the SCUMM engine. It's bigger, has more puzzles, more zany humor, and is clearly a step closer to the epic adventure game formula LucasArts would eventually perfect. On the other hand, this is a very, very, hard game. It's quite possibly the hardest adventure game LucasArts ever made. There are a lot of obscure puzzles, there are not a lot of clues, there are some tough mazes, and the sheer size of the game combined with its openness can be overwhelming. Death and dead-ends are still quite possible, and thanks to the size of the game, realizing your screwup long after making it is a particularly discouraging prospect. Overall, this is a lesser LucasArts game, but even lesser LucasArts are still quality games. Zak McKracken is quirky and entertaining, with an enjoyable story, interesting locations, and represents an important step forward for LucasArts, if not the adventure genre in general. Patient gamers who finished Maniac Mansion should definitely check out Zak McKracken next.

My rating:

2 Groucho glasses (very good)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

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In 1989, LucasFilm released Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, an action/adventure film starring Harrison Ford, and directed by Steven Spielberg. Coinciding with its release were two video games of the same name, both based on the film. One was subtitled "The Action Game," was developed by Tiertex Studios, and was poorly received. The other was subtitled "The Graphic Adventure," and was developed in-house by LucasFilm Games, and was well received as a worthy movie tie-in.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure follows the feature film fairly closely. Set in 1938, you play as Indiana Jones, archaeology professor and adventurer. Returning to your university, having recovered a holy artifact, you learn that your father, who has been obsessed with finding the Holy Grail all his life, has gone on an expedition and disappeared. After discovering his journal and deciphering its clues, you must follow his footsteps. You will search catacombs beneath Venice, explore a castle on the Austria-Germany border, and race across Europe and the Middle East to find the Holy Grail before the Nazis do. While not all of the film's scenes are represented in the game, the game contains several scenes based on the film's script which were never shot.

Several innovative features were added to the engine, not all of which were to last. The single most important was dialog trees. A new verb, "Talk" was added, which would allow Indy to initiate conversation with another character. This was a common action in adventure games before, but the resulting dialog was usually a short stock response, and at most, a linear series of exchanges. With dialog trees, conversations, whether initiated by yourself or another character, would come to nodes where you have a choice on what Indy says. All possible conversation starters or responses would appear on screen, allowing you to select one, which would affect the flow of the conversation. Dialogues could also be affected by the player's accomplishments in the game. For instance, if you discovered a letter implicating that a certain character was a spy, talking to that character later on may give you the dialogue option to accuse him/her, when that option would not exist otherwise, and the game's story would be affected accordingly. This mechanic made conversations more interactive, allowed for greater characterization, increased opportunities for clever puzzles, and served to advance the adventure games' strength at merging gameplay and narrative.

Owing to its movie roots, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is much more linear than its predecessors. You only have Indy to control in this game, and the various locations must be visited in a specific order, without much opportunity for backtracking. However, it experimented with the formula in innovative ways that LucasArts would not attempt again. Many of the puzzles have multiple solutions, and sometimes different solutions would slightly alter the course of the game. For instance, there are three ways you can escape from Germany, by zeppelin, bi-plane, or car, and each method takes the game through several scenes you would not play through with the other two methods of travel, each with their own challenges and puzzles. Another example is that, as in the film, there is a scene where you run into Adolph Hitler at a book burning rally. You could follow the original script and surrender the Grail journal, which he will autograph without realizing what he is signing. Or you could give him a copy of Mein Kampf, which he will autograph, giving you a very valuable collector's item. Or you could give him letters of transit, which when signed, makes leaving Germany much easier. You could also punch him in the face, but that's not recommended.

Also new to the engine were action sequences. A simple fighting engine is implemented by way of SCUMM scripts, and while all of the possible fight scenes can be avoided by stealth, dialogue, or solving puzzles, sometimes the simplest solution (or last resort) is to roll back your sleeves and punch a Nazi out. It's no Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, but it provides some variety to the formula. Other sequences include a bi-plane dogfight, a lengthy stealth section, and some tricky time-sensitive puzzles near the end.

As with Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the best version is a CD-ROM edition exclusive to the FM-Towns computer. It too features 256 color VGA graphics and a digital score recorded straight from the movie's official soundtrack. It too is rare and expensive, but works well in ScummVM. Later DOS versions of the game were upgraded to VGA, but had only sporadic MIDI music.


Is it worth playing? Although innovative, and more approachable than Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade feels rushed at times. Some of the segments are downright tedious, the dialog isn't as fully developed as it could have been, and the puzzles can be obtuse at times. Dead-ends still exist, death is pretty common (sometimes you can get killed for saying the wrong thing in dialog), and numerous action scenes, although skippable, are crudely implemented and may be off-putting to adventure game purists. But if you can forgive these things, it's a very solid adventure game with an epic feel, great use of the movie license, and even some replay value.

My rating:

2 holy grails (very good)

Loom

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In 1990, LucasFilm Games released Loom, their fourth SCUMM powered adventure game. Led by Brian Moriarty, a former Infocom developer who had created multiple classic text adventures, Loom was a departure from the now-established LucasArts adventure formula and an all-time great in its own right.

Set in a high fantasy setting, implied to be Earth's distant future, Loom's story begins with a prologue, which was not part of the game itself, but was originally includedas a 30 minute audio play on a cassette tape included in the box. Human civilization has reached an era deemed "Age of the Great Guilds," where people have settled into cultures whose lives are dedicated to the focus and mastery of crafts and trades. Loom is centered around the Guild of Weavers, a reclusive faction who live cloistered on an island far away from the rest of humanity, and have mastered the art of woven fabric to such extent that they can influence and control the fabric of reality. But for fear of unraveling the pattern of the universe, such powers are known only to the guild elders, and are kept as closely guarded secrets, passed down from generation to generation.

You play as Bobbin Threadbare, a child who was born from the Great Loom against the wishes of the guild elders. All of your life, you have been ostracized by the guild. The high council had prophesied trouble resulting from your birth, and had banned you from learning the ways of the guild until your 17th birthday, when a decision could be made. Your foster mother, Hetchel, had sensed great power in you, and taught you how to tap into the powers of weaving, without the permission or knowledge of the council. On your 17th birthday, you are summoned to the guild hall to be judged by the elders. Arriving, you witness Hetchel standing on trial for defying the council, and she is sentenced to banishment. But immediately after her sentence is pronounced, the Great Loom begins to fail, and Hetchel is transformed into a swan's egg. The elders themselves are shortly transformed into swans, and fly away to regions unknown. The island now deserted, you must leave your home, explore the lands of the great guilds, learn of and fulfill your own destiny, and witness several prophecies come true along the way.

Extremely unusual for the genre, even at the time, Loom had no inventory items to collect at all, no inventory puzzles to solve, and its point and click interface has no verbs to represent actions. Instead, you interact with the world by "weaving" drafts from combinations of musical notes. Replacing the usual list of verbs is a musical staff, from which notes can be selected and played. Throughout the game, you will learn simple melodies with powers both mundane and potent, and will use these powers to solve puzzles and progress through the game. The game, in fact, does not have very much gameplay. Puzzles are sparse and simple, design is almost totally linear, and the game's focus is clearly on portraying a compelling world and using the immersive properties of gaming to tell an engaging story. Consequently, provided you are diligent about writing down drafts as you learn them, it is the first LucasArts game, and possibly the first adventure game, to have no possibility of death or of becoming unable to complete the game due to a mistake.

As with previous SCUMM games, there was an enhanced CD-ROM edition produced for the FM Towns, with upgraded VGA graphics and a digital soundtrack featuring excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. But there was a third edition released as well - a CD-ROM for DOS. This version of Loom features even more upgraded graphics, and has full voice acting for all characters. However, it has downsides too. Because the voice acting is recorded onto the disc without compression, the script has been re-written and truncated to reduce the amount of spoken lines. Otherwise, there would not have been room for all the dialogue on a single disc. Much of the music had to be removed as well, and music in the DOS CD-ROM version only plays during cut-scenes, not during gameplay. Because of this, Brian Moriarty has said that the FM-Towns version remains the definitive version of the game. Fortunately, fans of the game have provided a way you can play the FM-Towns version if you already bought the DOS version through Steam.


Is it worth playing? Yep. Loom concentrates on weaving art, music, story, and bare threads of interactivity to build a sublime and surprisingly deep work of art. Loom has been criticized for being too short, too easy, and too linear, and these are all true, but truth be told, great length, difficult puzzles, and non-linear gameplay would not have served Loom's goals as well. This is LucasArt's first masterpiece, and a landmark title in the genre.

My rating:

3 lapel pins (excellent)

The Secret of Monkey Island

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The Secret of Monkey Island was released in 1990, with Ron Gilbert returning as lead designer, cartoonist Steve Purcell (who had produced cover art for previous games) serving as lead artist, and newcomers Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman as writers. Featuring far more plot and dialog than previous games, meticulous design, a distinctly surreal artwork style, and a quirky, charming theme, The Secret of Monkey Island was the beginning of not just one of the best series of all time, but the beginning of LucasArt's stride. Throughout the 90's, LucasArts produced timeless adventure game after timeless adventure game, all consistently excellent to a standard that no developer in the history of gaming has been able to match. Monkey Island is where this streak of adventure game classics started.

Set in the 17th century Spanish Main, you play as Guybrush Threepwood, a pirate wannabe. Arriving at the shores of sparsely populated Mêlée Island, you embark on a quest to prove your worth as a buccaneer. You must master the arts of piracy, gather a ship and crew, set sail to the eponymous Monkey Island, and ultimately vanquish the feared pirate captain LeChuck. While the game bills itself as a pirate themed adventure in the style of countless action/adventure novels and films, it quickly becomes clear that this is one of the wittiest parodies ever seen in a game. Characters are colorful and lively, conversations are often hilarious, situations are absurd, and yet, the humor is subtle enough that the story is engaging, and the setting is rich and atmospheric.

The standard adventure game template is instantly recognizable today. You assume the role of a protagonist in a linear or semi-linear story. The story has a distinct setting, and the game world is carefully crafted to immerse you in the setting - the concept of "levels" that is ubiquitous to action games is arbitrary and irrelevant in adventure games. Gameplay and story are tightly integrated. The story is told gradually and throughout the game, delivered by dialog, cut-scenes, and often through subtler narrative devices as well. Gameplay is driven by exploration, dialog with other characters, collecting inventory items, and solving puzzles through these mechanics. The Secret of Monkey Island wasn't the first game to do any of these things, or even the first LucasArts title to try, but it may very well be the first game to do all of these things, and do them very well. The writing is consistently excellent, with dialog that is sharp and witty. Characters have distinct personalities that are expressed through not just dialog, but in their animations, facial expressions, and gestures. The setting is both familiar and unique, and contributes to the narrative with its detailed environments. Puzzles are challenging and often require lateral thinking, and yet blend well into the game's context and never feel arbitrary or too illogical. All of this is delivered in a structure that is linear enough that you will always know what your short-term objectives are, and yet open enough that you are rarely at risk of getting stuck on a single puzzle.


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The draw to adventure games has always been about exploring a world. A distinctive setting is therefore vital to any adventure game, and Monkey Island broke ground with its world of cutthroats and bushwhackers. Drawing influence from a variety of sources ranging from Treasure Island to Disneyland (and perhaps a bit of Sid Meier's Pirates!), Monkey Island fully realizes its genre, and pokes fun at its cliches while embracing them. Mêlée Island is eternally dusk, lit only by candles and moonlight, covered with thick forests, and the few settlements are dirty and run down. Its pirate denizens are a rabble of foul smelling, grog swilling, unwashed brutes, with outlandish, colorful garb, battle scars, eye patches, and awesome hats. The uncharted Monkey Island, devoid of any pretense of civilization, is bright, colorful, and with a variety of tropical terrains ranging from dense vegetation to a volcanic mountain. Lending plenty of flavor to the setting is the soundtrack, which is made up of whimsical, Carribean-styled themes, and is one of the most recognizable soundtracks in PC gaming history.

But the other draw to adventure games is their in-game narrative - the story, the writing, the dialogue, and often intangible details embedded in the setting. This aspect was not always the focus of the genre, and during the formative years it was often a neglected aspect. Adventure games at around the time of Maniac Mansion had started shifting from open-world treasure hunts to puzzle-driven narratives, and LucasArt's earlier games went with that flow - they went from the occasional cut-scene in Maniac Mansion to being practically one continuous cut-scene in Loom. But with Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman all contributing to the writing of Monkey Island, its quality surpassed everything that came before it. All speaking characters, from bumbling hero Guybrush Threepwood to the vegetarian cannibals, are fleshed out, developed, and have several pages worth of incredibly witty and clever dialog. The SCUMM engine provides dialog trees - now a common feature in games of several genres - which provides a surprising amount of replay value as dialog lines can vary depending on your current or earlier choices of words. Occasional anachronisms, such as Stan the "used ship salesman" and pop culture nods satirize pirate genre conventions, while fourth wall-breaking gags such as the famous mansion burglary, Guybrush addressing the player, and the infamous (and possibly endangered, thanks to re-releases) stump joke satirize conventions of gaming itself. But behind the endless jokes is an entertaining adventure story with buried treasure, sword duels, sea voyages, voodoo, and a cursed ghost ship of nefarious pirates, and it's a testament to the talents of the writers that it works both as an adventure and as a vehicle for humor.


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But of course, Monkey Island is also famous for another innovation that would become a LucasArts staple, and a common feature of the genre - gameplay without the possibility of death or unwinnable situations. Adventure games of the era were deadly affairs and would frequently kill your character for making mistakes, or even seemingly randomly. An even worse scenario was the possibility of rendering the game impossible to complete, but without explicitly telling you. A common occurrence would be failing to collect a vital inventory item, and then progressing into the game past the point where it is possible to go back and retrieve said item, which would result in a dead-end when you reached the puzzle that the inventory item was needed to solve. Sierra is particularly notorious for having both of these in their adventure games, though perhaps unfairly - during their "deadly" era, all of their contemporaries were also punishing by design (some much more so), including LucasArts. The possibility of death or failure was, at the time, an expected part of adventure games, and players typically kept multiple save slots as a contingency for such events.

LucasArt's first game to buck the trend of unforgiving gameplay was Loom, but it did this at the expense of gameplay. Loom had no inventory, and therefore no possibility of forgetting inventory items, and also remains LucasArt's most linear game of all time, ensuring a tightly controlled playthrough with no possibility of skipping vital parts. The Secret of Monkey Island brought back inventory puzzles and semi-open gameplay, but everything is carefully designed so that you can't die or otherwise screw up the game (save for an Easter egg and a dead-end situation you could only reach on purpose). To achieve this, the designers had to look at the standard walkthrough, and then think of every possible deviation from that walkthrough, and ensure that no possible deviation could ever result in a dead-end. For instance, on Mêlée Island, you will collect a rubber chicken which is needed to reach Monkey Island. But by the time you need it for this purpose, you are on a ship miles from Mêlée, and there is no possibility of returning. So to prevent the possibility of needing the rubber chicken and not having it, the designers made it a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, and added an obstacle to a vital location in Mêlée that you can't reach without using a pulley. As a result, it is impossible to leave Mêlée without collecting the rubber chicken first, and you can't get stuck at sea without it.

This absence of death and dead-ends makes the game inviting to newcomers of the genre, and eliminates major potential frustration. It also encourages exploration and experimentation. You can wander the game's rich world without the risk of getting jumped and killed by bloodthirsty pirates, you can use the branching dialogue system without fear of saying the wrong thing, you can deliberately provoke the locals just to see how they react, and you can toss inventory items into a cauldron without worrying that you might need them later. This design philosophy became a LucasArts trademark - of the nine adventure games they would develop next, only one (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) had the possibility of ending the game with the player's death, and none had the possibility of dead-ends. This approach made the genre more accessible to casual gamers, and was massively influential to the genre - Sierra and other developers gradually made their games more forgiving, and eventually no-death gameplay became standard in the genre, and dead-ends, even ones resulting from obvious player mistakes (such as pressing a button labeled "DO NOT PRESS" which disintegrates your inventory items but doesn't end the game) were treated as unacceptable.


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The Secret of Monkey Island isn't perfect - of the four chapters, the first has the bulk of the good ideas, the second and fourth are very short, and the third feels padded at times. The next two games in the series would feature better writing, better artwork, better music, better humor, better puzzles, and better plot, as would other future games by LucasArts. But it is still one of the best games in its genre - all of the ideas and concepts of adventure games we expect today can be seen here in a mature and developed form. As the first adventure game to follow the now standard template, and as a really well designed and written game, with forgiving gameplay and puzzles that err on the easy side, and as a sign of even better things to come, The Secret of Monkey Island is the perfect introduction to the genre.

My rating:

3 monkey totems (excellent)

LucasArt's early years can be seen as a build-up to perfecting the adventure game formula. Gimmicks and experiments came and went, and with Monkey Island, everything clicked. It's this style that adventure games emulated throughout the 90's, and still do, to the extent that these games are being made. What's more is that elements of the genre are now present in many genres. At a time when narrative in games was rare, adventure games built a genre around the concept, and pioneered methods of delivering it. The term cut-scene, now ubiquitous to video games of all genres, was coined by Ron Gilbert when developing Maniac Mansion. The dialog trees, first seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and perfected in Monkey Island, are staples of RPGs, and can be found in many action games as well.

Yet, these innovations were more incremental than revolutionary, and almost all of them had been tried before. A visual point and click interface had been used before in ICOM's MacVenture series, but LucasArts successfully combined one with a animated scene with moving characters and interactive objects. Pac-Man had animations in between levels approximating cut-scenes, but it wasn't until Maniac Mansion that scenes would interrupt gameplay in a manner that seemed natural and that furthered the narrative. Ultima V even had dialog trees, but Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade expanded its keywords into fully written dialog, and combined it with a graphical interface that removed any need to guess what topics you could discuss with any given character. And when their innovations failed, their games still had high production values, compelling stories, and great humor, and remained enjoyable anyway.

Adventure games pioneered the concept of having a cohesive world to explore, where every pixel of every screen was drawn for artistic purposes, as opposed to action games which had a series of discrete "levels," with design constrained by game mechanics. All of these things left their mark on gaming, and LucasArt's games, with their incremental innovation, emphasis on accessibility, and excellent execution, are an ideal way to see where these ideas came from.