New digital stores, old graphic adventures
It isn’t exactly the end of the world as we knew it, but the dynamism of adventure games publishers and developers in the summer of 2009 seems to have a weight in the great order of things anyway. The fact is that years after their (alleged) commercial and creative death graphic adventures continue to come out, and in some kind of reboot effort the genre noble fathers try to suggest the way for a possible new renaissance of “point and click” games through the marketplace of digital stores already projected into the future.
We talk about new editions of old classics but not only, or not simply this: a joined press release from publisher Snowberry Connection, developer Société Pollene and from the authors of ScummVM (the “Virutal Joy Machine” that can’t be missed in the equipment of any adventurer worth the name) announced the availability of the first three games of Gobliiins series as a free bonus attached to the new episode released on April 2009. Thanks to ScummVM the old DOS titles are playable on modern machines and OSes, filling the 16 years-long gap between the third and just-released fourth chapter.
The French saga created by Muriel Tramis and artist Pierre Gilhodes (who imprinted on it his particular graphic style) for the developer Coktel Vision distinguishes itself for being (especially in the beginning) more a puzzle game than an adventure series: in the first Gobliiins, released in 1992, the protagonists are three goblins provided with unique skills, by exploiting which the player solves the puzzles in each one of 22 single-screen levels composing the game till the end of the story.
The scheme slightly changes with Gobliins 2 (1992), where there are two playable characters and advancing through the game is less linear than before while the demential humour and the characters’ peculiar skills don’t change at all. The third episode, Goblins 3 (1993), concludes the cycle with a single playable character and some variation to the puzzle-adventure game base design. The new Gobliiins 4 goes back to the origins, featuring once again three goblins dealing with a wacky quest and 16 levels full of gags and many, many puzzles.
The main difference is that now the game is in 3D, while style and gameplay continuity is guaranteed by the involvement of Gilhodes, the graphic “father” of the insane goblins and of original developer Muriel Tramis. The single package including all four games of the series can be currently purchased on the PC stores GamersGate and Impulse, at the quite attractive price of 19.99 dollars. Furthermore Gobliiins 4 has been localized in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian.
Apart from the French authors, the other company leading this old adventures renaissance is the “new” LucasArts lead by president Darrell Rodriguez, that not pleased by having announced the Monkey Island remake decided to re-release some of its old games on the Steam platform too. Starting from July 8, Valve’s digital store offers the following titles: Armed and Dangerous ($ 9.99), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis ($ 4.99), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure ($ 4.99), LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure ($ 19.99), Loom ($ 4.99), Star Wars Battlefront II ($ 19.99), Star Wars Republic Commando ($ 9.99), Star Wars Starfighter ($ 4.99), The Dig ($ 4.99), Thrillville: Off the Rails ($ 19.99).
In the same days in which comes out the first chapter of Tales of Monkey Island, an all-new episodic series developed by Telltale and featuring the everlasting Guybrush Threestoge, Lucas starts “by popular demand” an initiative to bring its videogaming history back to life and to make the games available once again thanks to digital downloads. “This effort is going to make it possible to introduce a whole new generation of gamers to LucasArts’ classic games“, said president Darrell Rodriguez, praising an effort that “also gives more people a chance to play our games by making them available long after they’ve disappeared from store shelves. We hope our fans are as excited as we are about our plans and we can’t wait to share what’s coming next“.
“This is just the beginning“, alerted Rodriguez, and after this first games tranche there will be other announcements and other releases of old classics in an exclusively digital package, there will be support for other platforms than PC and maybe some new remakes to couple with The Secret of Monkey Island one coming out the next 15th of July (on Xbox 360 and PC) for a 10 dollars price tag. Contrariwise to the French folks at Société Pollene, anyway, Lucas still prefers to make everything by itself without relying on DOSBox and/or ScummVM, or to be precise they have decided to remove dirt from an old coding work by Aaron Giles, currently managing the MAME project and that in the past worked for the Californian company just in time to make a SCUMM interpreter compatible with newer operating systems.
Maybe the final result won’t measure up with the experience offered by the aforementioned virtual machines to the more exacting retrogamers but it was enough to warm the heart of grumpy Ron Gilbert, the designer who invented the SCUMM and that spent the most important years of his life at Lucas, years that “informed much of who I am as a game designer, a programmer and as a person“. “I don’t work there anymore, but I still take great pride in the things they do and even though there are probably 3 people left that worked there when I did, I feel like they are my family” Gilbert wrote on his blog.
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