I was lucky enough to get an early look at Rob Smith’s Rogue Leaders, a history of LucasArts. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon and is linked on the scrolling ad to the right.
It’s a big book with lots of inside stuff and documents from the Lucas archives. Never before seen concept art, design docs…if you are looking for a lot of inside dirt or a summary of which games were good and which games were bad, look elsewhere.
Smith and Chronicle Books do a great job of integrating images and text, and I highly recommend Rogue Leaders.
I do not recommend Max Payne.
The Fate of Atlantis remains my favorite game of all time. It should have been the basis for Indy 4.
And while I didn’t know it at the time, Rebel Assault II was probably one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I’d be curious to read about how the concept of that series came about. Back then they had great space sims, they had great adventure sims – why did they bother with an action hybrid peppered with embarrassingly bad cutscenes?
F, that should have been adventure games.
I remember Rebel Assault as one of the early entries in the first generation of CD-ROM games (circa 1993), alongside The 7th Guest. I chalk it up to exploration of a new storage medium, with developers who didn’t quite understand how best to use it. Remember, prior to that games were released on floppy disks, topping out at around ~15 Mb. Now developers had 4000% more space to work with, and if you had that kind of space, filming actors against a blue-screen was easier than rendering CG characters.
Excellent point. And I think at the time, it made a great selling feature because CD-ROM and “Multimedia” were so cutting edge. If I remember, “movie-quality cutscenes!” was one of the many features listed on the box. Too bad “tedious rail shooter” and “constantly shifting control schemes” weren’t.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for the book. It sounds interesting.
And the review reminded me that I need to suggest to GOG.com that they try to get Grim Fandango.