Lucasfilm Games

Lucasfilm Games, which later became LucasArts Entertainment Company (sometimes shortened to LEC), was founded by George Lucas. The company is most famous for its line of point and click adventure games, a subgenre that it effectively spawned with Maniac Mansion (1987). See SCUMM and GrimE for more information on LucasArts graphical adventures.

The company created games other than adventures from early on in its life, and after the mid-1990's it increasingly focussed on these other games to the cost of adventures, the adventure genre being seen as no longer popular with gamers. Most significantly, the company's portfolio of Star Wars related titles increased quickly. Early Star Wars titles were landmarks, particularly the space simulator X-Wing and the two Rebel Assault games, which were early showcases for the graphical potential of CD-ROM based games. As the quantity of Star Wars games increased, many critics felt the quality began to drop; the only later Star Wars games generally considered to be classics were the three games (forming a loose trilogy) in the FPS genre, Dark Forces (1995), Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997) and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (2002), and the second attempt at a Star Wars RTS game, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (2001). In 2002, LucasArts recognised that the over-reliance on Star Wars was reducing the quality of its output, and announced that future releases would be at least 50% non-Star Wars-related.