In the days before LucasArts, when Lucasfilm Games was the company that spearheaded gaming development at Lucasfilm, one of it’s earliest successes was the 1985 game Rescue on Fractalus. IGN have delved into the history of the game and its development – a far cry from the multi-million dollar epics of today – and reveal a number of absolutely fascinating pixels of information, including this regarding then Lucasfilm President himself, George Lucas.
When the Rescue and Ballblazer projects reached beta, Star Wars director and head of Lucasfilm himself, George Lucas, wanted to try the games.
Fox recalls that George picked up the joystick and immediately said “How come the fire button doesn’t work? Where’s the fire button?”
Fox told him about his idea of not having direct combat and Lucas asked if it was a gameplay decision or a philosophical decision: “Did you do this to make a better game or due to your beliefs?”
“And I said, ‘well, more the latter, I guess.’ George said: ‘I want a fire button.’ And he was right. The other thing he said was: ‘What if, if everyone once in a while, the pilot you rescued turns out to be an alien. And maybe he jumps up, or something like that.’”
Fox says the suggestion threw the team for a loop. They asked themselves if it could be done, technically. “There were issues with framerate, there were issues with storage, with trying to get more animation into the game,” Fox said.
The full article is well worth a read, a look back at a very different time for Lucasfilm, Lucasfilm Games and ILM. Have a look below at the 17 games released under the Lucasfilm Games banner, before it switched names to LucasArts.
