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I don't think he's entirely right or entirely wrong. The concept of "a point and click adventure" is almost anachronistic in itself at this point. The genre is a product of a time when it was the best possible marriage of story and gameplay. Back then no other genre of game could incorporate as much of a compelling narrative and still have enough interactivity for the games press and audience to accept it as a "game." Nowadays, every game of every genre can potentially have just as much story content as The Secret of Monkey Island. Every game can have cinematic cutscenes and relatable characters and comedy and drama beats that land. Everything from the old text adventures to visual novels to Myst to Monkey Island to Ace Attorney to The Cave to Gone Home to The Walking Dead to Life is Strange to The Stanley Parable to Coffee Talk to Harold Halibut are all part of that same legacy, and even games like Psychonauts and Half-Life 2 and Portal and Mass Effect and Fez and The Last of Us and who knows what else are building off of that legacy. If you set out to make a game that just tells a great story, it can look like anything and feel like anything and play like anything. The Adventure Game genre didn't die out at all, it just invaded every other genre. Which means that if somebody sets out specifically to make a "pure" point and click adventure game in the current era, it is a conscious decision to make a game that feels more like Monkey Island than it does any of the thousand other things that it could feel like. Nothing wrong with that, but when that's the direction a game takes, those are the comparisons that it will invite, and those are the fans that it will attract, whether it overtly references the older games or not.

Hi folks. The LucasArts Places Mastodon and Cohost bots have been running strong for over a year now, but I haven't totally forgotten about the other part of this project, a browseable online repository for all the art. Around this time a year ago, I had a look around at all the different javascript lightbox libraries out there, and tried out a few of them. "nanogallery2" seemed as good as any, so I did a couple tests on my site, just to see what a single game's page might look like (ignore the page's CSS and overall visual style, that's just what my personal website uses): http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/maniac64/ http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/monkey2/ One of the difficulties I encountered was in how to handle all the games with non-square pixels (ie everything before Curse of Monkey Island). With HTML <img> tags it's certainly possible to non-uniformly scale an original 320x200 image to be the correct aspect ratio, but there's no guarantee it'll look good in most browsers. For the tests above, I pre-processed the images, doing the same kind of upscale + aspect correct that the LucasArts Places bot code does, effectively increasing the image's size X4 so that the nonuniform scale doesn't look too noticeable. The file size increase, while non-trivial, isn't the biggest concern; it's more that it's changing the original image from the collection, and one of my primary goals here is to provide those images as close to the source formats as possible. Of course, the answer there might simply be to have a "download original" link for each piece of art. I also wanted to present the art for each port of each game "side by side", with the alternate versions just a click away. Here's an attempt at that kind of functionality I just whipped up: http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/multi_plat_images/ Alongside aspect ratio correction, this is another feature that off-the-shelf lightbox plugins don't have - as Ron pointed out, most of them are aimed at photographers. And of course there's always the dream features, like being able to toggle on a CRT shader, and heck maybe even embedding the music for rooms where applicable. And gosh, what if the few backgrounds that made use of color cycling (things like the labyrinth waterfalls from Fate of Atlantis) used something like the HTML5 Color Cycling Demo tech to present those? That's getting wayy ahead of myself, though. So I'm kinda wondering if this means I should try modifying one of the open source lightbox plugins to add these features. Or maybe there's already something out there that would work great for this, that I just don't know about.

My thought on this has always been: don't create a game that includes references to popular games, instead create a game that other games will reference in the future.

Im of many minds on this, in that I think I agree with you and with George. The part that I fully agree with is that developers should stop saying “I’m making my own spin on Monkey Island,” which is a sentiment that somehow keeps coming up directly from developers mouths. 1) no you aren’t, and 2) if you’re trying that, you probably shouldn’t be. (are you asking yourself what the actual developers of monkey island thought they were doing that led to the creation of that game? what media they were engaging with? they definitely did not set out to make “a monkey island game” when none existed before.) I think making a genre work that fits in a well-worn groove is a fine and good thing to do. But the reason the LucasArts games hit as hard as they did when they were new was the surprise and variety of them - you never knew what you were going to get next, even with the ones that were sequels. (With the exception of Last Crusade to FoA, but I think they’re the exception that proves the rule.) So is “LucasArts” a genre on any front? I’m not sure. It’s a mostly common user interface, it’s a design philosophy (as written out explicitly in many of their manuals), but I don’t think those are the things devs mean when they say they’re making a LucasArts game. I think they usually mean “has 9 verbs and has jokes in,” and probably has a guy say “look behind you a four headed monkey” in it. I obviously have muddled thoughts on this but I mostly think, taking from a game or developer or genre you like is fine, but I’d hope you are trying to actually examine their work and figure out what in it was successful and unique and spoke to you, and try to figure out how to make your own version of that. Just quoting the references or lifting the art style or name dropping the games won’t get you much, beyond something to pander to lowest hanging fans with.