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Audio&Games

LucasArts’ demise

Ex-LucasArts staff describe Lucas as someone who cared deeply about telling stories, but didn’t know much about the game development process—every Lucas-mandated story change meant shifts in every department: the design, the art, the programming. How could that not be frustrating?P

“One of the problems of working in a film company—[Lucas] is used to being able to change his mind,” said one source. “He didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with these changes were.”

Yeah. I’m telling you, calling computer games video games makes them look like they’re movies. Video is like film, it must be easy to change things around!

No. Not at all. I guess you need years in the trenches of game development to understand that computers are powerful and yet so limited.

Always the same story, upper management not understanding anything. It’s comforting to see that it happened even in a place where I thought it wouldn’t. Comforting and depressing are not mutually exclusive in this case.