LucasArts To Re-Release Old Games Through Steam

LucasArts today announced that they will soon be releasing games from their back catalog through Steam. The releases begin this Wednesday with a group of eight games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, LOOM, and Star Wars: Battlefront II. This is apparently just "the first round of releases," so we can doubtless expect to see more of their old games before long. Joystiq spoke with LucasArts CEO Darrell Rodriguez, who said the company is considering updated versions of the old games, depending on how well next week's launch of Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition goes. He also hinted at the possibility that some games could be ported to mobile gaming devices, such as the PSP Go and the iPhone.

Nostalga

[AdamBv1]

while everyone is feeling nostalgic about their old favorite LucasArts games i would like to point out http://www.gog.com/ [gog.com] for everyones old game pleasure. Lots of our old classic favorites at great prices, DRM free and even works on vista/7.

Re:Bring back...

[TrippTDF]

I completely agree... it's been ten years since a Star Wars simulation was released, and that's just too long! There's been a fair amount of homebrew work at updating the models for X-Wing: Alliance [wikipedia.org], but I think it's time to see another game built from the ground up taking advantage of newer hardware and internet play. And there is a ton of unexplored room with the first three episode's.

I think there's a lot of room for a MMORPG that is just around a Star Wars space sim.

Re:And thank you TellTale Games...

[Briareos]

What, like Tales of Monkey Island [telltalegames.com] (aka "New Monkey Island") that comes out tomorrow?

np: Tim Exile - I Saw The Weak Hand Fall (Listening Tree)

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[Chyeld]

Where have you looked?

Remember, while Valve is doing the publishing, the developers are doing the packaging.

Not all of the publishers (or Steam Users) realize that there is an option to let you link the manual to the game so that you can load it by right clicking the game entry. But even then, many of them have the manual avaliable on the actual game's store page if you look on the side bars.

Re:Nostalga

[Chyeld]

In the case of most of these 'old' games, there is zero DRM. You install the game and you can launch it from it's folder just as you could back in the old days. DRM, for the most part, is reserved for modern games.

Sigh, 'abandonware' means nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing to clarify. No matter the tales you have heard - distributing abandonware is no less illegal than any other copyright violation. There is no gray area. It doesn't' matter if the game is available commercially or not.

Abandonware means old software, nothing more. Plenty of companies still search for copyright violations of their "abandonware" (LucasArts and Cyan come to mind). There has never been a legal definition of abandonware and hopefully there never will be (it's time we stop the copyright/patent scheme altogether - small exemptions will just stall that process).