A news article about Lucas Arts laying off some employees reminded me on the good ol' times where Lucas Arts was a synonym for really great adventure games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle and many more. Unfortunately when Sam and Max 2 was nearly complete some stupid decision maker at Lucas Arts decided to kick the adventure department and concentrate on stupid Star Wars merchandizing crap.

I did a little surfing to see whats up with the people who made these games and stubled about Ron Gilberts Blog which had an interesting article back from 1989 called Why Adventure Games suck. Another nice reading on the death of Adventures is available over at oldmanmurray.com. I then stumbled about the site of Doublefine, the new company of Tim Schafer, another former Lucas Arts developer. Looks like they will release a new Adventure called Psychonauts in 2005.

Reading all this made my desire for a really god and new Adventure grow even more so I looked for some option available right now. Of course there is the amazing ScummVM project which allows us to play all the great games of the past on modern hardware. But still playing the old games over and over isn't the real thing. I wondered if there isn't any game creatinging utility to produce new SCUMM based games. It couldn't find one for SCUMM but there is a tool called Adventure Game Studio (AGS) which looks promising. There are links to games created with this tool which I will definitively try.

Again on Gilberts blog I found a list of free adventure games with lots of links I'll need to try