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Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, this is not the first time LucasArts existed as a licensing arm and not a development house. For much of Jim Ward's tenure in the mid-2000s LucasArts was essentially what Disney is positioning it as now. LucasArts as everyone knew it died a long time ago, the most upsetting thing was that the company that was left had no vision past the Star Wars license, leaving all the other IP to rot.

My hope is that Disney actually has a more holistic view on the LucasArts properties, because it's used to managing many diverse properties in a way LucasFilm was not. Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle etc etc might actually get released out to those who want them. This might be the best thing that has happened to LucasArts and its fans, but of course the job losses are disheartening.

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One interesting aspect of that episode in LucasArt's history is that it led pretty directly to the founding of Telltale Games (by laid-off LucasArts employees), which has been reasonably successful, and has produced some interesting games. Doesn't mean the same will happen here, but it's intriguing.

Yes, I also would love to see some of their original IP in modern full glory. Full Throttle and Grim Fandango both have a special place in my heart...

I hope you are right.. probably dating myself by saying this, but I remember playing MI when I was younger..it felt like magic. I felt so sucked into that world, I used to just listen to the soundtrack for hours.

Fun fact: the original monkey island CD was a music CD with the soundtrack, too. This is possible because music is written to a cd outside-in and date inside-out (or visa versa, I forget). This blew my mind as a kid, and you could even see the physical distinction on the cd between the two data streams as well.

I believe the data was in the pregap and other than that it was just a normal CD. The physical distinction was probs something else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregap

This was not unheard of. CD-Extra/Mixed Mode CDs were used for a lot of games[1] because they could use the drive's hardware decoding so there was no performance impact. At that time decoding a MP3 track could take more than 50% CPU.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD#List_of_Mixed_Mod...

Isn't the data just in track 1 on such CDs while the music is in tracks 2–n? At least that was the case for all the games that had CD Audio I tried putting into a CD player.

You're right. Judging from the recent releases and the upcoming ones, Lucasarts joins the likes of Bioware.

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