Lucasarts and the death of the adventure genre

I was reading in this months Retro magazine about good old Lucasarts, who were famous for great games like, Sam & Max: Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle and Secret of Monkey Island, and they were discussing the demise of two sequels, namely Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max: Freelance Police (naturally when fans heard of the canning there was outrage, pitchforks, burning of witches, politicians and more witches). This also led to the demise of the adventure genre with Lucasarts wanting to move into mainstream gaming.

Basically that meant that every game that Lucasarts would focus on, from then on, would be Star Wars related.

Star Wars games would never get to their previous reputation

Go figure...

But the best thing was that it was HOW they managed to can the games. In order for Lucasarts to get what they wanted, they went to extreme measures. Firstly they replaced the marketing department with new folks, who then did research on the adventure genre and effectively came back with:

You know our biggest demographic being europe?? Well they've dropped dead!
Just like that.

I couldn't believe that was pretty much said. Could you imagine the letters from this demographic?

Dear Lucasarts

BRAINS!!!!

Yours Necrofearfully,
A dead and disgruntled fan.

This from Lucasarts with most of their adventures being a guaranteed sell! Even Grim Fandango (the last of the adventure games from Lucasarts) managed to sell well!

I've heard some bullshit excuses from publishers, in my time, but this is probably the worst!

Speaking of Lucasarts and adventure games, did you know that the first adventure game was based on a film tie-in? And that film being Labyrinth - the one with David Bowe as the Goblin King, Sarah and Hogwart.

It's HOGGLE not Hogwart!!!

It was written for the Apple IIe/IIc, Commodore 64/128 and MSX2 and here is a link for the online Apple 2 emulator with Labyrinth.