Why lucasarts was shut down

Health Energy Environment. YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. Fortnite Game of Thrones Books. Comics Music. Filed under: Gaming Disney. Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. LucasArts logo. Next Up In Gaming. Sign up for the newsletter Verge Deals Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Just one more thing! Disney will still use the LucasArts name to license games, but the studio is no more.

Publicly , Disney is saying their current games could be licensed out to a different publisher or developer, but according to our source, that's unlikely. Our source says Lucas has pursued the option for "one or both games," but nothing happened. A second source also told Kotaku this afternoon that the chances of Lucas licensing out are very slim.

The odds are "effectively zero," the source said. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles. This comes after weeks and months of rumors involving the studio, which was acquired by Disney last fall. And as successful as the original Force Unleashed was it represented the opposite of what many long-term fans wanted to see. Lacking the charisma of Han Solo, lead character Starkiller was just another anonymous emo kid with a wry smile and cropped hair, lining up beside Cole MacGrath and Adam Hale on a video game production line of identikit cocky protagonists.

Plus, if LucasArts had a 'jump the shark' moment, it may arguably be the Force Unleashed sequence in which you're able to bring down a Star Destroyer using the force. But where do you go after downing a mile-long spacecraft with your mind? It may be over-simplistic, but it does seem as though the games started to suffer just as the dark legacy of The Phantom Menace started to spread through the galaxy.

Most of the best Star Wars games had their creative roots in the original trilogy, with its strong characters and tight symbolic battle between good and evil. But as the universe bloated and the timeline stretched, there seemed to be a compulsion to craft new characters and plotlines, knitting together the gaps between the cinematic key frames.

Star Wars and games seems like such a strong fit. This is a brand beloved of thirty-something males — historically the key gaming demographic; it's a brand with a vast range of cool characters and technologies; a brand in which even the audio effects are resonant and compelling. I played Star Wars in the playground as a child and I spent hours reconstructing the movies with Star Wars figures and playsets at home.

This is partly about fans just growing up, of course — it is almost impossible to recapture experiences that we recall with such fondness from childhood; they are irrevocably warped through reminiscence. I wonder if LucasArts was creatively stultified by the sheer weight of expectation and history. I visited the studio a couple of years ago — the halls are filled with memorabilia; there is a giant sound stage where the orchestral scores are recorded; there is a Yoda fountain.

This stuff is probably suffocating after a while. So much universe, so much heritage, so much pressure.