This week in RetroNuts, we saw all Bumbad.

Alright. I was gonna do a charge hard joke. I know. I'm sorry. I spoil it for everyone. I ruined everything.

Hi, I'm Jerry Parrish. I make RetroNuts bad. And here with me this week's suffering. I'm still here. I'm reborn.

I'm Bob Mackie. I'm like smooth like grains of sand, right? Is that how it goes? I like that. Oh, yeah. Not rough. Not rough and coarse.

Right. I'm Samuel James Clayborn and I'm pretty rough. Rough and tough. We're the roughest and toughest. And we're here to talk about Star Wars.

I know. You've already heard about Star Wars. You know about Star Wars. But as one of our RetroNuts roots episodes, I think it's important to talk about what Star Wars is and how it's impacted video games. Maybe this is self of it into some of you, but maybe not because you know, we just heard a lot of stories about how LucasArts died. Oh, gun. And you know, the reason they died in my opinion is because they never made a scum style Star Wars video game.

I will explain that. I'll explain it right off the bat. How obvious is that? Do you want the Occam's razor answer? Yes. Because I'll give it to you. Straight from David Fox's mouth and Ron Gilbert. LucasArts made more money licensing out Star Wars. And they would have made keeping the license and making their own games, which is why they sold that license. That was more valuable to them than, you know, internal properties. Why so cynical George Lucas? I kind of get that. But, you know, they managed to license out Indiana Jones, but also produce their own Indiana Jones. Right. They made, you know, Indiana Jones

was crusade Indiana Jones in the fate of Atlanta. That is strange. But then you had, you know, a factor five made the Indiana Jones, right goals or whatever for me. Well, I mean, LucasArts corporate culture eventually changed. They were just Star Wars games, but in that initial super creative period, they're like, no, no, we're going to sell this license to make more money. This is this is a top down directive. This is not like, you know, they also, you know, LucasArts made its own Star Wars games. They had Rebel assault. Right. Eventually they did. But that's why there was no adventure game. It was post scum. Yeah. By that time.

I don't know. Scum was way down the same time that I guess that was early 90s. But yeah, Rebel assault was early 90s. And they were making games like, okay, throttle and the dig well into the late. Well, at least initially, that's why. I mean, that's what I was told by the start to box. I don't know. Is that the, I mean, they made a desktop stories. So anything was fair game. Yeah. It's just a little sad. I guess that the the first story driven Star Wars games that they made were like the first person shooters. Yeah. Right. I think

there are enough Star Wars references and scum games. You can just put them all together and make like a Star Wars super cut, you know, but yeah, it just seems like one of those really obvious. Like, the premier product of their video games division, the premier product of their film division. And yet never did the twain meet. I appreciate that they respected the developers enough to make their own ideas. There was however, once they did Star Wars text adventure game. Oh, it was a knockoff though. And it was called escape from the dog star. But it was totally about the death star. Right. Okay. It was just Star Wars. But I agree. You can see

that about them respecting their developers. But again, they made a couple of Indiana Jones scum games. So I imagine things eventually losing up. But, you know, I'm sure it would have been a great game if they would have made a Star Wars scum game, but never happened. They could have done like Han Solo at Star's End or any of those Landau Clarissian books. Well, we heard about how George Lucas treated the company. He could have walked in one day saw Star Wars scum game in development. Like, what are these words on the screen? I don't, I don't like this. Get rid of this. Yeah. You know, just like, oh, 18 months of development are gone now. Thanks George. Keep on grooming that beard.

There's that possibility. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, go read that article. It's really good. Yeah. So I mean, I again, yeah, I agree with you that it's cool that they gave their developers a little more latitude. But yeah, I don't know. I just can't help but think what might have been like, I think Star Wars is a property right for making a really interesting adventure style game corner Ron Gilbert in the next industry part of your and grill about it. Get to the bottom of this. Oh, Bob, what good is it going to do? Can you do it?

Game kids leave me alone. He's already the grumpy game. He can't even leverage the rights to Maniac Manchin. I think he could swing the rights to Star Wars. You know, I mean, Disney is going to whore Star Wars out like crazy. So maybe, maybe this is the chance for for telltale to like step in and be like, you know, I could see that we got a we got to bring together the the future in the past. We got to rectify the wrongs of history. Anyway, so that was a lot of talk about a game that never existed. Star War topics. It was elephant in the room.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, a man named George Lucas went to film school and liked Akira Kurosawa movies and decided to make his own in space because he played computer space. Right. No, he didn't. Maybe he did. I don't know. I don't know. Star Wars was in development from around the time of computer space. Yeah. So who knows. Maybe he played a PDP wanted is at his school. He could have been. He went to school at a university of California. Did he go to Berkeley? Was it Berkeley?

No, no, it was I think it was UCLA actually. That sounds right. So I don't know if UCLA had a PDP one. Yeah, Berkeley definitely would have Stanford. Sure. But you see UCLA. So he was more inspired by pong. Yeah, probably that's about the level of the lightsabers. That's about the level.

Pong, Louie decides the struggle of ball and paddle. Well, actually, that is pretty much what Luke plays when he plays his. It's true. His lightsaber dump me. Yeah, pretty much just pong. Yeah. And also, there's battle chest and the movie. Right. Before there was battle chest. Yeah. What a crazy innovator. So 1977. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's when the first movie came out, but it was in development for like five years. And you know, I think at this point, the development of Star Wars is pretty well chronicled. And I

think it's pretty easy to look at the early drafts of Star Wars that Lucas created on his own. It's actually resemble the plot of episode one in a lot of ways. It's very complex, very mirrored in politics. Like he had this idea for epic space operas. And I'm sure it was great in paper. You know, it would have worked really well. Maybe is like an, you know, like a foundation. Yeah, well, even something like foundation. Like if he had someone do the a little massaging on his pro.

It was to make it smart. I would like to watch she span in space. Basically, you know, there's a dark horse comic that is uses the one of the ditched Star Wars scripts. Yeah, yeah, it's called the Star Wars. Well, just came out. I mean, I mean, I read it. It's like an eight part series. They just started weird. And I've heard that it's about as bad as you'd expect. On solos, a lizard. Mm-hmm. Okay, it makes sense. It knows the new scar Starkiller or is it Leia Starkiller? I think it's Luke. Okay. But I've already had a really one. It's not the version where Lucas came in. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. It's

awesome. Yeah. So anyway, basically, Lucas's main strength at this time was that he had really good friends with a lot of talent. He was buddies with Francis Ford Coppola. And he married a woman named Marsha Griffin. And both of these people were very, very smart. And they looked at his work. And Coppola was kind of like the Ezra Pound to his T.S. Eliot and was like, all right, George, you got some cool ideas here.

But this isn't going to fly as a film. And so Lucas went back and did more drafts and more drafts. And finally, kind of whittled it down to something resembling the Star Wars we know. And then his wife came in and did a lot of script treatments. And a lot of people credit Marsha Griffin, Marsha Lucas and sort of the key to Star Wars is success because she went in and did heavy revisions on the scripts, reportedly like really, really just pretty much maybe not re-wrote everything. But did a lot of

help. If you read the book Easy Riders Raging Bulls, it's really good. But it has a lot of accounts of how like secretly the wives of these powerful directors were really really instrumental in getting these movies out. Yeah, like Peter Bogdanovitch and Spielberg and Lucas. And they divorced sometime after Return of the Jedi. And you know, you have like because George Lucas is a classic Star Wars trilogy. And then you have the George Lucas that came after how are the dark and willow. And the Star Wars

prequel trilogy and they're just not, they're not as good as Star Wars. So I think there really is something to, you know, the claims of Marsha Lucas's involvement. Either that or he just got so rich and so out of touch. That, you know, I think that's more like the reality. Like the reason we saw Lucas Arts as a developer go down hills. The same reason why the new episodes weren't as good because the corporate culture was like you cannot say no to this guy. And he needed someone to say no to him. But you guys, you guys need to watch the direct

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