Eurogamer has a few interesting comments from the folks over at LucasArts regarding some of their celebrated games of old. During a recent interview regarding upcoming console shooter Fracture, Lucas representatives were asked about their older games. When could we hope to see re-releases of our favorite classics? Would LucasArts ever try their hands again at another Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, or Loom? Some general question-dodging ensued, but when offered the suggestion of re-releasing the games for the Nintendo DS — which seems like a perfect place to play a point-and-click classic (even if it sometimes isn’t) — LucasArts’ Jeffrey Gullet had this to say:
“The cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures,” claims Gullett. “There’s literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out.”
Er… yes, there is.
Wikipedia puts the size of a common DS cart at 64 megabytes, with larger cards existing that can hold up to 256MB. I’m perfectly willing to concede that Wikipedia may be inaccurate, and maybe LucasArts knows something about DS carts that I don’t, but it takes an immense stretch of the imagination to believe that they are incapable of holding games which originally came on floppy disks, weighing in at a typical size of less than 10MB. Hell, they already ported Maniac Mansion to the NES, and I’m fairly sure the DS can handle more than that.
To top it off, the feat seems significantly less impossible when you consider the fact that it’s already been accomplished. As Exophase points out, the popular backwards-compatibility utility ScummVM has been successfully ported to the DS, making Gullet’s assertion fairly unbelievable.
Look, LucasArts. We know you don’t want to make adventures anymore; there’s a whole company dedicated to making the games you decided to stop. But, be reasonable — this would be like printing money. Which, as you know, the DS already does.
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