Customer Reviews

Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a good, comprehensive look at LucasArts. As someone who has played all of their point & click adventure games and some of their Star Wars ones, this book is a fascinating archive of storyboard/visualization artwork, background stories, domestic/international packaging artwork, posters, photos, and other internal documents.

If you're a reader of RetroGamer, you're probably accustomed to the lengthy "Making Of" articles which goes in depth and behind the scenes on classic games. The opposite is true of this book. Instead of the lengthy article with the tiny photos, you'll find less behind-the-scenes stories on a particular game and pages of large, beautiful production artwork. This book aims to provide a comprehensive view of LucasArts through the years rather than focusing on a particular game. You'll even see a few pages of canceled games like a Full Throttle's sequel and a few paragraphs on that hated Sar Wars fighting game (Masters of Teris Kasi or whatever it was called). It covers everything from the start through 2008 (Lego Indiana Jones, Clone Wars, Star Wars Unleashed).

The $40 Amazon price makes this an affordable, fun gift for anyone who has played the classic LucasArts games. Once this book goes out of print, prepare to watch the selling price of this book jump (just like those CD collections of LucasArts games).

I'm not sure what to make of George Lucas' foreword. I've never been a fan of the recent direction of LucasArts (No point and click adventure games. Two cancellations of a Full Throttle sequel. Oversaturation of Star Wars games. Unavailability of any classic games as WiiWare, on Xbox Live, PSN, etc). So I would have preferred a book that didn't have his stamp of approval on it. But perhaps that was the only way the author could access all of these documents. The George Lucas foreword is only a page long (3 short paragraphs actually) and pretty generic and worthy of a PR newsletter. I don't feel the foreword added anything to the book. In fact, George Lucas didn't even reference the book.

My only complaint about this book: I wish it were twice as long. At 250+ pages, it does a good job. But I wonder what awesome production artwork will never be seen by most people.

If you're curious about the cover, it's actually lenticular. You'll see all 4 images by changing your viewpoint.


LAST NOTE: I hate you Amazon for sending my copy of the book with a big ding on the covers' edges. Thanks for dropping it. You ship like a cow.

Having been a long-time fan of LucasArts's greatest and most original games (The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, et al), it's somewhat disappointing to learn that I know more about the titles than the author. While it is wonderful to see glimpses of rare production art, design documents and concepts for unfinished games, it's also a shame that the original content is light and even sometimes incorrect.

Rogue Leaders typically spends two pages per game. That could be enough room if the type size and line-spacing was that of a normal book or magazine article, but unfortunately here it amounts to little more than 300 words per game for bigger titles, like 'Day of the Tentacle' or 'Sam & Max', and even less for games like 'Loom'.

Major milestones, like 'The Secret of Monkey Island' get a mere 500 words, which means anecdotes, like the fact that the designers had to help package the first printing of SOMI themselves in order to make the shipping deadline, are unfortunately missing.

The book doesn't really have much of a narrative, either, and instead favours segmenting each game into its own mini-article. There is some attempt at the beginning to tell the story of the companies origins, but this seems to quickly evaporate once the company gets going.

This segmentation really works against trying to weave LucasArts's growth into a coherent tale, and the book often feels a bit confused as to where to turn next. You'll read about Monkey Island 1 (1990), its sequel (1991), Loom (1990), Day of the Tentacle (1993) and then Fate of Atlantis (1992) -- in that order.

There are also mistakes to found here, too. For example, the author makes no distinction between the two VERY different Indiana Jones 'Action' and 'Adventure' games for Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis, printing design documents from both as if they belonged to the same game.

The lack of a strong narrative, added to the book's lightweight writing-style, means you never feel the highs and lows of the company's successes or failures. For example, after reading about the making of the early LucasArts title 'P.H.M Pegasus' and the split it caused within the company, you never find out if the game was successful or not.

As a companion to the recent exhaustive 'Making of...' Star Wars and Indiana Jones books, this is decidely a "lite" title, reading almost like a coffee-table book. Occassions when critical commentary is actually applied to the games is extremely rare, but its presence indicates that there could have been more.

Considering that articles of greater depth can be found for free on the internet, and considering this book's target audience is the die-hard fan, its light-weight style a very odd choice.

Why four stars, then? Simply because access to never-before-seen historical material, what there is of it, rises this book to the above-average. It's only a shame that Rob Smith wasn't able to create a definitive, exhaustive and authorative story of the life of LucasArts, because this most definitely is NOT it.

A quick note to adventure-game fans considering this book: Over a third is dedicated to the "golden age" of LucasArts, the rest focuses on the plethora of externally-developed Star Wars games.

I agree whole-heartedly with J.C. Walker's review - it's spot on. It's a beautiful book that's attractive and fun to look at, but the amount of actual information is spotty and in many places, poorly researched. I worked at LEC from '92 to '97, and then at Larry Holland's Totally Games after that for 6 more years, so I had a hand in many of the projects that are featured. It seems that very few people from those days were interviewed, and those interviews lean heavily toward the producer/project leader side of things. If Mr Smith had cast a wider net (and those who were with the company back then are quite easy to look up and contact), many glaring omissions and inaccuracies could have been avoided.

I certainly don't want this to sound like sour grapes at all. It's a beautifully done book and I would recommend it to any fan of LEC's games. Just be aware that it's a lightweight compendium rather than a historical document of the company. I wish more artists (far beyond myself) had been interviewed for the book, but then I suppose it might have ended up a few hundred pages fatter than its already ample 250 pages.

This is an absolutely beautiful guide to the history of the LucasArts gaming franchise from its beginnings through the Force Unleashed. Along the way, Rob Smith hits the high points for their hottest properties including among many others Full Throttle, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and of course Star Wars.

The book feels like a museum exhibit dedicated to the gaming company with loads of amazing full color photos and art, with insights and artifacts from the making of these great games.

The book is larger than I was expecting, but it is put together very well and uses very high-quality paper. Upon its arrival, my son and I sat down with it and flipped through the entire book, page by page, 3 times.

This is a wonderful collectors item for any fan of gaming, or for fans of any of the franchises covered in the book.

I greatly enjoyed this book for what it was, a visual recap of Lucasfilm's history with a quick stop at every title. Many glorious images are printed throughout, and there's plenty of anecdotes and mentions of interesting products you may never have heard of.

However, be aware that Rogue Leaders won't go into great detail of any title in particular. Being a fan of such titles as Zak McKracken, Loom, Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island, I personally would have wished for more elaborate handling of these. But I suppose that's not really the fault of this book, for it tries to fairly go through all of Lucasart's history, which consequently ends up focusing much on its Star Wars 3D franchise, which I was less interested in. The definite book on the history of the adventure game classics of Lucasfilm still needs to be written then, and I'll be happy to buy that book too and put both books side-by-side in the book shelf.

I bought this book for my son for christmas. He wants to be a conceptual artist, and I want him to not only see the progression of conceptual art in a book that he can relate to, but read the story behind it. This book delivers. It has a large collection of art from begining to end. I honestly doube he will read the book anytime soon, but it will be there when he does. In addition, I want to add a book or two a year to this collection.

If like me you remember with fondness the LucasArts games of years gone by, this beautifully illustrated book will certainly bring back many happy memories. From their early inventive 8-bit efforts all the way through to the instantly-recognisable graphic adventure games (many of which, especially 1990's "The Secret of Monkey Island", still stand up well today), this is a fondly-constructed timeline of how these favourites came about. True, the historical narrative that Smith weaves is pretty much telling the party line, and if you're looking for tales of behind-the-scenes controversy then you're unlikely to find it here. But if, on the other hand, you've been waiting for a glossily-presented account of how the LucasArts canon of games was developed, you'll find plenty of nostalgic charm in this volume.

Es un libro para nostágicos de la historia de lucasarts, siempre ligada a la adventuras gráficas / point and click etc...

Se nota el cambio de línea de la empresa en el propio libro, de echo en la actualidad la creatividad de lucasarts pasa por un meno hecho tecnológico, cómo hacer más grande el mito star wars en el mundo de los videojuegos cuando en el pasado siquiera hacían juegos sobre star wars...


la mayoría de la gente de la que se habla en el libro ya no trabaja en lucasarts... una pena :)

While a little short on depth of each game still a fun read of the history of LucasArts.
While the price might scare some it's stuffed with full color photos of classic games and pre-production artwork.

Now if I could only convince them to start work on "Tie Fighter II"

At the risk of being branded un-popular, I have to be honest, this book was quite the disappointment. After reading some great classics on this period of game, game console, and personal computer developement, I expected alot from this book for it's price and size. A real in depth story of the beginning of LucasArts and all the stories and details I would have assumed accompanied each game they released and those I remembered playing and enjoying so well! What I received in my opinon was no better than a collection of the back covers of the game boxes with a tiny blurb covering each.

It comes across more as a coffee-table book or one of those huge budget books you can buy at any mall bookstore that have lots of little pictures but not much in the way of detail or entertainment. It seems more of a collectors item than a real history of the company and game development. The book is huge but at least over an inch of white border covers each page. Yes, some photo's are quite big, taking up a page spread but it seems to me like so much wasted space that could have used with more text for each game. To think so many of my favorite games are covered by a paragraph or two instead of a half chapter or so! Don't get me wrong, there are some nice pics in here you cannot see anywhere else (story boards, internal memo's, etc) but otherwise you get box art and maybe one screen-shot for each game.

At a much lower price, I could give it another few stars as a collector's item but at this price, I expected more.