Even though George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, the actual offices have remained at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in The Presidio -- a park in San Francisco. As Lucas owns those facilities, Disney has actually been paying George rent for that space despite owning the assets held there.
With the conglomerate undergoing a period of COVID related belt-tightening, rumor has it that Disney is finally ready to relocate all those assets to their home turf in Burbank.
The move down south for Lucasfilm apparently has been the plan for years. It is unknown what has been the delay in getting them down to Burbank. The goal was to have all of their divisions at convenient proximity to Disney headquarters. With that, they cut down distance and they no longer have to pay Lucas rent.
Why do we care? Well, presumably this means that the Lucasfilm archives are destined to make a six hour road trip, and as elTee's illuminating interview with Limited Run Games revealed, the original assets related to the old adventure games have not necessarily been digitized. And I'm not making judgments, mind you. It's hard to ask a supposedly state-of-the-art studio to make time over a thirty year period to digitally bank Monkey Island key art when there's a hundred other things to do. Those Baby Yodas aren't going to stack themselves.
I'm just asking everyone to join me in a collective prayer that they, you know, have the straps on the flat bed fastened tight as they load it up with irreplaceable diskettes of source code or Ken Macklin artwork for The Dig. And you know, that they throw a tarp over it if the weather forecast looks dicey. Things like that.
Source: LRM Online
ThunderPeel2001
Agh. Like that time Universal burned all the negatives and outtakes from their back catalogue to “make space” in their warehouses.
The one thing that gives me a little bit of hope is that Lucasfilm still exists as its own entity, even though it's owned by Disney, and the creative teams there still seem interested in keeping that old stuff around. I hope.
If Disney stops renting the property from Lucas I'm sure he'll keep that around, possibly even turning it into a museum of sorts, since he's been working on something like that for the last couple of years. I can imagine the archives staying there when all the production facilities move out. They'll never get rid of the mountains of Star Wars stuff (and other ILM-related movies), which hopefully means they'll have no reason to throw out the more obscure project archives either.
That's my optimistic take at least. This was inevitable, but still feels weirdly sad. It always seemed like the perfect workplace, especially when hearing Purcell etc talking about the early days.