Last week we talked about the video gaming shame of Steven Spielberg, but what’s on the flipside of the Spielberg/Lucas gaming coin? George Lucas founded LucasArts some 26 years ago, and it’s still going strong. Lucas clearly had some sort of video gaming mojo that continues to vex Spielberg to this day. Although what’s even odder is that many of LucasArts’ games never crossed over into the movie realm, so maybe the duo has some sort of dual blessing/curse going on. Good games, bad movies; good movies, bad games.

Lucas formed Lucasfilm Games in 1982 (the name was later changed to LucasArts) so his company could branch out into other venues of entertainment, namely the extremely profitable and fast-rising video game market. Lucasfilm Games in turn developed games in conjunction with with Atari. Notably, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, which were both widely available on computer BBS systems at the time, making them some of the most pirated game around long before BitTorrents.

Rescue on Fractalus actually had an outer space plot; you were the pilot of a rescue ship, trying to pull downed pilots out of the fatal atmosphere of an alien world. You’d have to defend yourself and land near a downed pilot, then hear him bang on the door to be let in. However, you had to be sure that the pilot wasn’t an evil Jaggi alien in disguise, who would wreak havoc in your ship. We never saw this turned into a movie, although it was born out of the special effects in the Genesis Project from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Loren Carpenter, who designed the fractal graphics used in the that sequence, and they asked him to design fractal landscapes for this alien world. He got an Atari 800 computer to take home, and over several weeks he taught himself 6502 assembly language and lo and behold brought the same concept to gaming systems, on an 8-bit scale. Engineer Montgomery Scott would have been proud.

According to designer David Fox, Lucas also had a very active hand in the game development. “The original game design did not include any shooting of enemy ships. I was still a peace-loving hippie at heart and didn’t want to create a game in which you had to shoot things.” However, when Lucas was given an early build to test, he immediately started trying to shoot the enemies. “He wanted to know if this was a gameplay related choice or a moral choice. I hedged a bit and then admitted it was really a moral choice. He said, ‘It needs a fire button.’ We reworked the game so you could shoot at the saucers and gun emplacements.”

From that point on, LucasArts went on to create a multitude of games that were high on everyone’s radar. Lucas adventure games using the SCUMM system as it came to be known (it started as the Script Creation Utlity For Maniac Mansion) such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and even several Indiana Jones games are still beloved and played using emulators on a variety of systems from everything everything from PCs to the PlayStation Portable, and some even have their own fan sequels.

LucasArts also created several military simulations like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, and Battlehawks 1942 while continuing to churn out fun and eccentric adventure games, which helped define the game imprint as a place for kooky games and humor. However, things started to change once LucasArts finally started churning out Star Wars games in the 1990s. Looking at their current development slate, it’s like the Star Wars dog and pony show. In the upcoming months alone you’ll see Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Lightsaber Wars, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Jedi Alliance.

Once they started raking in the dough, LucasArts pushed other types of games to the back shelf, including a sequel to one of my favorite games, Full Throttle. To their credit, they have released other non-Star Wars games in the past few years ranging from Grim Fandango to Thrillville, and they have Fracture, a terrain-distorting adventure game coming up soon. However, I’d love to see them return to their greatest adventure game / movie possibility: The Dig.

The Dig came out as a CD-ROM game in 1995, and was based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg. Famed scifi author Orson Scott Card and interactive fiction great Brian Moriarty wrote the dialogue. It was a deeply moving story about five astronauts who were sent on a fairly routine mission to divert an asteroid from hitting the Earth (hello Deep Impact and Armageddon… still several light-years away). Things go awry when the asteroid turns out to be a spaceship in disguise, and they get warped to points unknown.

The Dig was everything LucasArts stood for at the time, great adventure gaming with tongue-in-cheek humor, and this title was so popular that they put out a novel and even an audiobook. It’s an extremely cinematic game, down to the ambient music and the scenes that play out over the credits, and has sadly fallen by the wayside while the Star Wars bulldozer goes plowing by. Although, Lucas made the game a strange footnote when LucasArts filed with the trademark office against the website Digg, saying that the trademark was “identical or nearly identical to Opposer’s mark The Dig.” Somehow, I don’t think people would confuse a social news site with an outer space scifi adventure.

Ironically, David Fox provides the best quote about the current onslaught of Star Wars titles every year.

What do you consider to be the biggest mistake that modern game designers make?

“They focus too much on the technology, e.g. flashy graphics, and not enough on story and characters.”

That’s funny, because that’s about the same thing that people keep saying about George Lucas’ movies. Here’s hoping that LucasArts can right the ship and release more eccentric adventures on one side, and Star Wars games on the other.

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, io9, Cinematical, Film School Rejects and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. Please ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments. Game on.