Because, like a lot of old games which were made in a period with comparatively severe technical limitations, they made more with less. They managed to squeeze emotion out of orders of magnitude less pixels than the standard game today. And you've got to admire that.
LucasArts's adventure games in particular were brilliant examples, and I think their defining characteristic is that they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate, to time traveling kids trying to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world, the settings just kept getting weirder and funnier.
They had their more serious games too, like Loom which is unique in its tone and gameplay mechanics, and The Fate of Atlantis which, as far as Indiana Jones goes, beats the tripe Lucasfilm was trying to push a couple of years ago.
> .. they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate
How they chose the character name is an example of this:
> The origin of the name "Guybrush" comes in part from Deluxe Paint, the tool used by the artists to create the character sprite. Since the character had no name at this point, the file was simply called 'Guy'. When the file was saved, Steve Purcell, the artist responsible for the sprite, added 'brush' to the filename, indicating that it was the Deluxe Paint "brush file" for the "Guy" sprite. The file name was then "guybrush.bbm", so the developers eventually just started referring to this unnamed 'Guy' as "Guybrush".
The Monkey Island series are my favourite video games. Loom is up there too.
Didn't know Steve Purcell (for me, of Sam and Max comics fame) was also an animator for LucasArts. Neat, this explains some things... And why S&M hit the roadway was so close to his comic style
Oh, I don't know, there's something neat about building something with so many layers of complexity given such tight constraints. "Making every bit count" I guess. Similar to it being impressive that Pi and Following were made with such small budgets (and casts).
I'm not sure what "exceptionally challenging" means exactly, but Lucas Arts was doing something very different from what their contemporaries were doing, and their games still stand as classics twenty years later compared to the much larger budgets and fewer constraints of today.
Anyone who has ever jumped out of the room because of a windshield attack in "Rescue on Fractalus" understands... Manipulate the psyche, not the eyes. (Bonus - at the time LucasArts also manipulated the eyes with their 8-bit fractal landscapes et al. But that was a BONUS.)
LucasArts's adventure games in particular were brilliant examples, and I think their defining characteristic is that they never took themselves too seriously. From a guy called Guybrush Threepwood wanting to become a pirate, to time traveling kids trying to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world, the settings just kept getting weirder and funnier.
They had their more serious games too, like Loom which is unique in its tone and gameplay mechanics, and The Fate of Atlantis which, as far as Indiana Jones goes, beats the tripe Lucasfilm was trying to push a couple of years ago.