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LucasArts Entertainment Company (sometimes shortened to LEC), is a video game developer and publisher. The company was famous for its line of point-and-click adventure games and today mainly produces games based on the Star Wars franchise.
The company had its beginnings in 1982 in the Games Group of Lucasfilm Ltd., the film production company of George Lucas. Lucas had wanted his company to branch out into other areas of entertainment, and so he cooperated with Atari to produce video games. The first results of this collaboration were unique action games like Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus. However, they were not released at first because pirated copies were in circulation months before the original release date. Years later, publisher Epyx showed interest in the games, and they were finally released in 1984, under the Lucasfilm Games label.
Lucasfilm Games released its first adventure game in 1986: Labyrinth, based on the Lucasfilm movie of the same name.
In 1987, the adventure game Maniac Mansion was released, which effectively spawned the subgenre of point-and-click adventure games. It was followed by more adventures of high quality and in the following years Lucasfilm built a reputation for producing the best games of the genre.
The company also started producing military simulation games, the first of which were the naval simulations PHM Pegasus and Strike Fleet. In 1988, Battlehawks 1942 was released, later followed by Their Finest Hour and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. The WW2 Air Combat Trilogy, as it was later called, was created by Lawrence Holland's team, who later founded their own company in Totally Games.
In 1990, in a reorganization of the Lucas companies, the Games Division of Lucasfilm became part of the newly created LucasArts Entertainment Company, together with Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. Later ILM and Skywalker Sound were consolidated in Lucas Digital Ltd. and LucasArts became the official name of the former Games Division.
Even though LucasArts had created games based on other Lucasfilm properties before (Labyrinth, Indiana Jones), they didn't use the most promising Lucasfilm license until the early 1990s: Star Wars action games began appearing on the Nintendo consoles, but were developed by other companies for LucasArts. The first in-house development was the space combat simulator X-Wing, developed by Larry Holland's team, which went on to spawn a successful series.
The CD-ROM-only Star Wars game Rebel Assault became one of the biggest successes of the company and was considered a killer app for CD-ROM drives in the early 90s.
Another successful Star Wars series began in 1995 with the release of Dark Forces, a first person shooter, that was later followed by the Jedi Knight games.
The increasing success and popularity of the Star Wars games led to an increased output of these titles. This was costly to LucasArts' line of adventures, the adventure genre being seen as no longer popular with gamers.
As the quantity of Star Wars games increased, many critics felt the quality began to drop; this was especially noted with the titles released since the cinematic release of The Phantom Menace.
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. However, many of the original titles were either unsuccessful or even cancelled before release and currently LucasArts has again mainly Star Wars titles in production.
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