Sam And Max 2 Got Cancled !!!

Hey.
I know most of you won’t bother with this kind of news, and it’s not really pure BLOG material, but i feel like i need to say something about this.
If you don’t like computer game, or don’t care, you can skip this post.

Sam And Max has been one of the nice adventure games that was produces by LucasArts in the golden days of adventure games. Now adays, the pure adventure game genere is relatively dead. There are a few “first person” adventure games from “The Adventure Company” and 2-3 pure adventure game titles per year, like “The Longest Journey” or last year’s “Runaway” (which is a GREAT game and a MUST for any of the old time adventure gamers). I was actually starting to see the light at the end of the dark tunnle of non adventure games. A few nwe adventuer games were supposed to be released in the upcoming years, amongst them “Full Throttle 2”, “Sam and Max 2”, and “Leisure suit larry 8”. The former two, FT2 and SNM2, both were already in late development staged by LucasArts, got canned. Plus LSL8 seems like it’s gonna be a .. well… console game adaptation of an adventure game, which is far from pure ol good adventure. Not that i won’t play it, or won’t like it a lot. I do like “Beyond Good And Evil” which is Action/adventure, or Star wars: Knights of the old republic, which is an RPG, and either of them will win, in my opinion, the best game of the year award.


Since it’s announcement 4 days ago, the net is filled up with a lot of comments, letters, petitions, and other sites about the cancelation of Sam And Max 2. One of this sites, made me laugh about how far people will go with this.
Lucas art’s reason for caneclling the game is.. of course – Money. They don’t think it’ll make enough of it, to be precise. The official quote is given here.
Everybody who’s in the game business know exactly why adventure games are dead, and why nobody ever makes new ones: Money. Adventure games tend to appeal to only a part of the gamer’s community. Usually the more.. inteligent one. Other games, like Shooting games, war games, car racing games, kickboxing games, sell a lot more, because they tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I don’t say that there’s no place for these kind of games, I just know i don’t play 99% of them myself. I do know i try and play ANY adventure game out there. But i belong to a small portion of the gamers community that isn’t as big as the “first person shooter” part of the community. So when the time comes to do a return on investment calculation, what would you invest on ? A low budget project for a lousy first person shooter game which will sell a couple of million copies ? or a high budget adventure game, with good story, which will sell somewhere around a million copies of even less then that ?
To the executives in the publishing companies, the answer is very simple, and obvious. Let make something that sucks, but we’ll get rich.
Unfortunantly it’s the same thing as what’s happend to the Movie industry in the past 5 years. Stories became so lousy, because it’s now very cheap to make a lousy movie with a lot of good special effect, and make a huge income on it, rather then have a good movie with a good story, which takes more effort to make.


I want to add that i read about one of the possible implications of this game cancelation in The Scumm Bar – Monkey Island’s fan site, which they say that since SMN2 got cancelled, this doesn’t look good regarding the much anticipated next (and maybe final) chapter of the Monkey island series (Monkey island 5).

I don’t really know what i preffer, if given a choice, a lousy MI5, or no MI5 at all…


I do, however, promise you, that one day, if i get the oppertunity, i’ll be out there, making a good adventure game.