It's hard to write business history about the games industry. You have less than three decades to work with, numerous technological shifts that push studios out of fashion, and numerous closures, mergers, bankruptcies and slow deaths. Even basic business reporting, which is about the now and the soon-to-be, is usually second-rate for games. Few writers have the knowledge to get to know any company particularly well, and there are very few corporate stories worth telling.

This makes books like Rob Smith's "Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts" all the more important. This book about the evolution of LucasArts hits the high points in the storied studio's history and makes excellent use of the access he was given. Smith, a longtime games journalist and current editor of PlayStation: The Official Magazine, thinks that LucasArts has a legacy that deserves a proper history.


"It's a really interesting story, given that so few studios have lasted so long in this industry," Smith tells me. "When you look at the kinds of games the company started doing, then evolving through the Star Wars years, while maintaining a proud legacy of original game ideas, it charts a pretty unique path in the games industry."

"Rogue Leaders" is a colorful and comprehensive treatment of a studio that could have more classic games to its credit than any other. Smith gives almost all LucasArts games a mention, but spends most of his time on those titles that were either technological breakthroughs or titles that launched important studio franchises. This has the advantage of making "Rogue Leaders" encyclopedic without being an encyclopedia. This is not a blow-by-blow series of game reviews and sales figures; it is a corporate biography that gives you an understanding of how LucasArts works.


"We certainly assume that most readers will at least have a cursory familiarity with the games," says Smith. "It's worthwhile to put in context the sales success of a Star Wars: Rebel Assault because of how it changed some retail business practices, but it was far more interesting to recount how the technology and gameplay concept was built than to say [the game] was a 7 out of 10."

Those who want to read a gaming history for the nostalgia boost may be turned off by Smith's focus on the internal struggles between the game and film sides of the Lucas empires, or on the importance of the SCUMM development tool. But for anybody who is truly interested in how games get made and how a multimedia company struggles over how to best use its licenses, the book is a must-read. The shift from resistance to Star Wars games (to protect the canon) to a near-total embrace of them -- culminating in a stable of LucasArts titles that are almost all derived from Star Wars or Indiana Jones -- makes for compelling reading.


Smith sees little reason for concern in this new emphasis on licensed titles. "The last five years have been interesting for many game companies, with pressures to score hits. New IP [intellectual property] is a risk for any company, and LucasArts has certainly taken advantage of its licenses. It is [a problem] if the games aren't any good, and diminish or damage the core brand, but [Star Wars is] also a brand that has changed significantly in the age of the prequel trilogy."

But even if you aren't that interested in the inside story of how the studio has changed over the last 25 years, "Rogue Leaders" is full of fascinating slices of life in the game biz. Smith's nearly unfettered access to the LucasArts archives means that the book is full of concept art, internal memos and screenshots that make the history of gaming come alive. You'll find a storyboard for a Monkey Island adventure, a character sheet for Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire that compares characters to well-known Hollywood actors, and an early Lucasfilm memo that shows the birth of the games division. What parts of the Star Wars universe could they use in games? Can games be humorous? Significant? The documents and interviews are insight not only into one studio, but into the evolution of the industry itself.

Publisher Chronicle Books has a reputation for visually stunning books; it is also responsible for glossy tomes about Pixar movies and the history of movie posters. For Smith, it was the perfect publisher for this type of project. "With games being such a visual medium, and with the previously unseen resources coming available, we wanted to showcase concepts from the early days to the volume of ideas created for today's games."

Of course, you will pay for that artwork. The 60-dollar cover price is par for the course for a new game, and appropriate for a book this colorful. But the price will make sure that only the truly invested reader or Lucas fan will pick up "Rogue Leaders." This is a shame for those who browse, but if the alternative is a gaming history with blurry black-and-white screenshots and little value added, I recommend you pay the extra money. The appendix of logos for unreleased games never released brings pangs precisely because they are rendered in full color. The title "Star Wars: Rebel Scum" can only do so much, after all. No art is wasted here, and the lenticular cover is a little more value added.

This book could not have been written without the cooperation of LucasArts, and the generally positive tone of the book makes this an official history and not an expos?. "As with any company, there are probably some blemishes that didn't need picking at," says Smith. "I didn't dodge, and wasn't asked to avoid, any blemishes -- when you produce a bunch of games, you're going to get dogs. I talked to Hal Barwood about RTX Red Rock. And sure, I didn't spend a lot of time harping on about missteps of the Star Wars name with Rebellion or Force Commander, but they aren't completely ignored."


"Rogue Leaders" will be on bookshelves in a month's time, and should at least be browsed by anyone who has ever loved LucasArts. Few studios have made imprints on as many different genres, from adventure games to flight sims to role-playing games to first-person shooters. But browsing probably won't be enough. In a publishing industry chock-a-block with "Art of Warcraft" or "Art of Halo" books, "Rogue Leaders" is the real deal. It has style and substance.

Movie Note

LucasArts profitably turned Star Wars into games, but the latest game-to-movie translation has been less successful -- both as art and commerce. The "Max Payne" movie ruled the box office in its first weekend of release and then lost almost 60 percent of its gross in the second weekend. It now looks like it won't even make a profit, failing to recoup its production cost domestically, and flopping in the international market. The film is aggressively average -- dark and brooding, with almost nothing for the actors to do. You can guess every plot point from the moment Max enters the office building of a pharmaceutical company. "Max Payne" could have been hamstrung by the push for a PG-13 rating -- for all its stylish gun battles, the lack of blood or real violence undercuts whatever edgy darkness it is aiming for. Mark Wahlberg is dull and one-dimensional, Beau Bridges looks like he's in the wrong movie, and Mila Kunis is underutilized as a sidekick on her own mission of vengeance.