Your first significant task is to get inside the bar. Consider: after a rollicking credits sequence that plays out behind over-driven, grungy rock and roll, you gain control of your biker avatar outside a locked bar. What other approach could they possibly bring to a game about outlaw motorcycle gangs? They just want to have some loud, brash fun. One can sense throughout Full Throttle its makers’ restlessness with the traditional adventure form - their impatience with convoluted puzzles, bulging inventories, and all of the other adventure staples.

Action and attitude were increasingly in, complexity and cerebration more and more out. It’s easy - perhaps a bit too easy - to read LucasArts’s first post- DOOM adventure game as a sign of the changes that id Software’s shareware shooter wrought on the industry after its debut in December of 1993. Sadly, though, I’m not one of these people…

Many soon added it to the ranks of LucasArts’s most hallowed classics. This interactive biker movie had a personality very much its own. Yet it wasn’t just a retread of what had come before. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle, was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road, was merely very, very good.įollowing a quiet 1994 on the adventure front, LucasArts came roaring back in the spring of 1995 with Full Throttle, a game that seemed to have everything going for it: it was helmed by Tim Schafer, one of the two lead designers from Day of the Tentacle, and boasted many familiar names on the art and sound front as well. The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993.

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