Sad news
To be fair, LucasArts has been a shadow of its former self for a long time, but I was hoping it'd last long enough for the old-timers still working for them to retire or jump ship; Don't know how many of them have.
I don't mean people like Schafer, Gilbert, Grossman and Holland who we know made it out and formed their own companies, but the more behind-the-scenes guys like Chip Hinnenberg, Brett Tosti, Justin Chin, Peter Chan and Jo Ashburn or near-legendary sound and music guys Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and Peter McConnell and voice actors like Danny Delk (aka. Darth Vader and Murrey the Evil Skull
).
I still have e-mails from people like Tabitha Tosti when I was trying to sort out problems with the awesome but buggy game that was XvT. An e-mail from someone whose name appears in the credits! How often does that happen?
Heck, I can't remember the last time I had a real support person working for an actual company helping me over e-mail; You wouldn't get that these days!
LEC is one of the few companies that I remember names of the people that made the games from; I guess I built up a bit more of an emotional tie to LucasArts.
It sucked watching their decline; The last good game I think I played from them were the last few Jedi Knight games, and also Republic Commando (Although technically they're Raven games), but their best games were always the non-SW stuff.
Telltale does a good job of continuing the legacy of the point and click stuff but is a bit hit-and-miss. The Wallace and Gromit game felt really half-assed and the 3rd series of the Sam and Max has been a fairly half-hearted slog for me (The writing needs work and the voice actor for Sam BADLY needs to be changed or fixed), but on the other hand the Tales of Monkey Island and Back to the Future games are excellent and need to be played! (Do eeet, doit nao!)
Double Fine games have that classic problem where the games should be awesome but are let down by one game-killing flaw; Psychonauts and especially Brutal Legend are good examples of this. Brutal Legend in particular pissed me off; It starts off perfectly but then the game turns into what amounts to a **** RTS which basically ruins it. If they can get the licence for Battle Zone, those ideas could work, but it doesn't fit an adventure game! The more recent game which is sortof a Lost Vikings-esque game has great ideas but doesn't feel fleshed out. Admittedly I've only played the demo, but it's not doing anything for me.
The closure feels unworthily anticlimactic to me; Not with a bang but with a whimper as the cliché goes. It almost feels like there should have been some sort of ceremony! Whatever anyone says, this marks the end of an era in gaming history for me.