| Six of One...
Rich Pizor, Senior Editor
LucasArts is a name that is synonymous with quality. Their games are known for their attention to detail and originality. They are consistently among the most accoladed and esteemed in the industry, and for good reason; they are, by no small coincidence, also consistently some of the most fun games to play.
The fact that they are the only company developing Star Wars titles doesn't hurt either. Let's face it: there is not a one among us who, having seen the movies over and over, doesn't want to grab a blaster or leap behind the stick of an X-Wing or TIE Fighter and rush headlong into battle. No matter who's empire you fight for the glory of, the Star Wars universe captivates even the most jaded gamer.
Which is why so many Macintosh gamers were disappointed when, after a two-year late port of TIE Fighter finally made it to our beloved system, LucasArts development dried right up. They were not alone in this; this occurred at the same time that the Mac was taken out of MacPlay and all the naysayers who had been pessimistic years before shook their collective fingers and said "told you so". You know, the dark days of the Amelio era.
After much prodding and coaxing, LucasArts finally stated publicly that they didn't think there was enough profit margin in the Mac market to make further development worthwhile. I'm not exactly sure how the came to this conclusion. Sure, Day of the Tentacle may not have been a runaway hit, but X-Wing has consistently placed on the Top 10 chart over at (for instance) Mac Gamer's Ledge until about six months ago, when the market was suddenly deluged with hot new games from other developers. Even today, both it and Dark Forces rank in the "Top 25 Games of All Time" survey on that same site. TIE Fighter was almost impossible to find for the first six months after its release because it kept selling out. Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle received an amazingly warm reception on the Mac. Even today, people are still signing petitions to get Outlaws ported over.
In short, there's no demonstrable lack of enthusiasm for the company. The opposite, if anything. But it's the business-suit wearing executives in the board rooms that make the decisions, not the programmers and not the players. (Future Cop of course being the remarkable exception, but we wouldn't all know that if it was the norm.)
LucasArts finally gave us a ray of hope last year when they announced in May that they'd be watching the Mac market very closely to see if the iMac pushed it back into the 10% range of market share. If that happened, they said, they might consider developing for us again. Good news with the bad; sure, maybe they'd come around, but maybe they'd just tease us for a few months and then say "better luck next time". Hard to get happy.
I'm going to go off on a tangent here about what a stupid idea that is. Mark Twain once said of statistics that "once you get them down, you can do anything with them," and in the case of market share, truer words were never spoken. Market share measures different things depending on who's measuring it. It can mean a percentage of a given sample; it can mean a percentage of sales measured over a given period of time; it can mean an estimation of the total size of the market globally, internationally, nationally, or regionally. And it's a terrible indication of the size of a market. Consider the console market, for example; if you look exclusively at the number of unit sold, than logically no one should be making games for any system other than the Atari 2600, which still remains the venerable champ in total units distributed. The only statistic that has any relevance in video games is how many actual games sell, and whether that number justifies the cost of developing it.
Anyway. So time goes by, and LucasArts finally decides that enough people are buying Macs to justify selling games for it, never mind the 20 million or so users who would love to get their hands on Shadows of the Empire or Rebellion. And they announce (albeit quietly) to the Mac press that yes, they are going to make a game for the Mac, and it's going to be based on Star Wars Episode One. I guess that's a good thing, but again, it's good with the bad; six of one, half a dozen of the other. Because there are so many other games out there that we want to see. I lost track of the number of emails I received at IMG asking when (not if) Grim Fandango was going to be ported. Petitions for Rebellion, Shadows of the Empire, and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter have gathered signatures in the hundred of thousands.
But hardest to bare is the lack of a Mac version of Jedi Knight and it's companion Dark Lords of the Sith. Why? Not because QuickTime is a better delivery system for the full motion video sequences; not because it is perhaps the most requested game from LucasArts after XvT. It's hardest to bare because the hard work has already been done; the engine used by Jedi Knights and Dark Lords was ported over to the Mac quite some time ago. So what would be involved in a Mac port? Writing a Mac version of the video game application itself, tossing that onto some CDs with the Mac OS logo on the label, stamping "Mac OS Compatible" on the boxes, and shipping it to customers.
None of which, of course, is to suggest that there isn't a demand for other LucasArts titles, Star Wars branded or otherwise. But Jedi Knights represents a win-win situation: a game that, years after the fact, that Mac community is still hungry for, and one which would now represent significantly less R&D for LucasArts than any Mac port they've ever done before or are likely to do again.
Maybe we just need someone to pull off a first-rate Jedi Mind Trick in the boardroom. "This isn't the OS you're looking for..." |