Amazon.com: LucasArts Macintosh Archives Volume 1: Video Games. Lucas Arts Entertainment. #2,025 in Video Games > Mac Games > Mac Games.
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The famous LucasArts “Gold Guy” My tenure at LucasArts Entertainment Company was short but sweet. I quickly became a rising star at the company by busting out 9 in my first year.
Then I was told that I should be working directly on the games instead of porting them, so I joined the team and had a blast working on that. I continued by taking lead on the Jedi Knight expansion pack, Mysteries of the Sith. Then I got the chance to see an early workprint of and started working on a new Star Wars game, but my heart really wasn’t in it, and I eventually left to go work on emulation technology at Connectix. However, it bugged me that the old SCUMM adventure games wouldn’t run well on modern Windows systems, so I went back and did a complete set of as a contractor after I left. Dark Forces was my first official port My first job at was to port their upcoming game to the. The biggest challenge was that Mac users expected us to double the screen resolution while at the same time reducing the memory footprint of the game to nearly half of the version’s 8MB. As part of this porting effort, I got the chance to travel to for an -sponsored Games Kitchen, where I collaborated with from Apple on a highly-optimized pixel doubler.
Through an interesting quirk of fate, my next job would be working for Eric at. The Dig was the final DOS-based SCUMM game The next games I ported were and, both of which used game engines that I had already done most of the work for, so it was just a matter of incorporating new features and improvements to get them out the door. By this time, I had begun to educate the other developers on how to write portable code, so my porting efforts got easier and easier. The Mac ports of and went quickly enough that I was semi-adopted by the Afterlife team to help do some last-minute optimizations (which also benefited the memory-starved Mac port). My final porting effort was the casual desktop game.
Unlike the other games, this one had been designed for from the start, using, and posed a number of challenges in bringing it over to the Mac. But I loved the concept so I persevered. Too bad I never got the chance to port the sequel,. DirectX was brand new when we did Outlaws Unfortunately, we didn’t really trust Microsoft’s libraries: things were pretty unstable in those early days.
So every major subsystem in Outlaws was designed around that allowed us to easily substitute non-Microsoft libraries for video, sound, etc. One of the big challenges Outlaws faced was that the in-game were significantly longer than in any other LucasArts game to date. This was a problem because the video playback engine would slowly de-sync the audio and video over time on some systems.
The dreaded final shovel at the end of the opening cutscene Even worse, the was almost 10 minutes long, and there was a bit at the end where a shovel is dramatically jammed into the ground. If there was any timing discrepancy between audio and video, the mismatch would be painfully obvious there. To solve this, I came up with a mechanism to use the audio playback as a clock and time the video to that. I distinctly recall watching the full opening cutscene in a conference room with the top folks in the company holding their breath until the shovel scene played with perfect sync. Outlaws was also LucasArts’ first multiplayer network game, and we unfortunately discovered midway through development that the networking layer was just not holding together. So I and co-worker taught ourselves a crash-course in and other network play techniques, and rewrote the networking system. In the end it held up admirably, regularly surviving 12–16-player games at work.
To be super honest, Day of the Tentacle was one of the main reasons I wanted to revive the games To me, the quintessential games are the, from the original up through the last one,. The problem is, with the notable exception of that last release, all of them were originally written for. In late 2001, having been away from LucasArts for 3 years, this was beginning to bother me more and more. I loved to fire up the games and play them from time to time, but getting them to run on modern systems was getting increasingly difficult. So I proposed an idea: how about we update all the games, dating back to Maniac Mansion, to run on top of Windows?
It might sound like a lot of work, but recall that I had already ported a number of the games previously to run on the. The LEC Entertainment Pack included my updated Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road (but an old version of The Dig) As it turns out there actually was a bit of interest in building updated versions of the original games. So, armed with the original game sources, I went back and converted all the classic adventure games to run on top of a modern Windows system. Unfortunately, they weren’t all released, but at least some got to see the light of day starting in 2003. And appeared on a couple of compilation CDs, and I heard that international partners might have picked up a larger set, though I never heard for sure what they were.