LucasArts
Lucasfilm Games, which later became LucasArts Entertainment Company (sometimes shortened to LEC), is a video game developer and publisher. It was founded by George Lucas in 1982. The company was initially well known for its line of point-and-click adventure games, a subgenre that it effectively spawned with Maniac Mansion (1987).The company created games other than adventures from early on in its life, and after the mid-1990s it increasingly focussed on these other games. This was costly to its line 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 first-person shooter genre: Dark Forces (1995), Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997) and Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (2002), and the second attempt at a Star Wars realtime strategy game, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (2001). In 2002, LucasArts recognized 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.
See also: SCUMM, GrimE, LucasArts Adventure Games
