The International House of Mojo

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that ever since Darrell Rodriguez took over LucasArts as its president, the company has been making great strides in a direction the Mojo-minded have a keen appreciation for.

Through Steam, the Virtual Console, and a Staff of Kings unlockable, the company has been making an effort to re-release its back catalog, something that they were notoriously bad at doing over the past decade and which we made no bones about our disdain for. With The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Tales of Monkey Island, they've shown that they're willing to not only acknowledge their old IP again, but rejuvenate it. And with Lucidity and whatever the hell Handsome Halibut is, they've assembled a small team specifically committed to making brand new IP. And perhaps most importantly and exciting, all of the above are meant to be taken as a sign of things to come:

You guys licensed out Monkey Island to Telltale. Is that a process that you think is going to be something you'll continue to do, license out things like Monkey Island for other people to work on if you're not interested in continuing that IP?

DR: Well, we also do the Special Edition ourselves.

That's true.

DR: We did the Special Edition on XBLA and on iPhone, and it did tremendously well. And on PC, it's on Steam. It did tremendously well. We did that internally. We had a great partnership with Telltale, and we hope to do something in the future with them. They're phenomenal partners. They get it. Will we do stuff like that in the future? Yeah, I mean, I'll look at all opportunities.

I'm a huge fan of the adventure genre, adventure games and also the classic LucasArts titles, and whatever way we can get out there for our rabid fanbase.

Do you ever the possibility of bringing back any of the older IP or is it all moving forward for you?

DR: That's what we did with Monkey Island, right? We brought it back and we reimagined Monkey Island with the Special Edition. We're working with Telltale on the Tales Of series. So, we kind of are bringing it back a little bit.

Sure, but in general, but do you see your IP as an opportunity for you? How do you make those decisions?

DR: Absolutely. If you look on Steam, we're doing a number of interesting bundles on Steam, and we'll continue to do that sort of thing because the fans want it. If you look at the blogs as well as all the emails and all the letters that we get, we're going to do what they want.

The Gamasutra interview the above snippet was taken from is mandatory reading, with other key points being the studio's promised commitment to growing internal development, as well as to the Indiana Jones franchise. But like I said, you'll already be reading about that.