LucasArts Desktop Adventures

A long long time ago in the years 1996 and 1997, LucasArts released a set of miniature action-adventure games. Designed to be lightweight, bite-sized, and low on memory use, the Desktop Adventure games were created as alternatives to other "break games" like Solitaire, providing a little bit more adventure and excitement during those long boring hours in the office than your average card game ever could.

Themed after LucasFilm classics Indiana Jones and Star Wars, LucasArts' Desktop Adventures would take players on simplistic little adventures through familiar worlds randomly constructed from a set of pre-made levels (called "zones") with Yoda Stories featuring no fewer than 600 different zones!

The player would have to complete a new objective on a brand new map configuration every time they started the game, collecting items, solving puzzles, and fighting off foes along the way.

The games have a notoriously bad reputation, as many reviewers chose to judge them as full-fledged videogame experiences rather than the diversions they were meant to be. Others criticized the games' visuals, their simple 32x32-pixel bitmaps bearing the brunt of the ire of many gamers who were expecting quality on par with LucasArts' point-and-click adventure games. Some even harshly regard Yoda Stories as "the worst Star Wars game ever made".

While gameplay can certainly get very old very fast for most players, judged on their own merits these games can be delightful little time-killers. There's enough here to keep you busy for a long, long time if you let it, and the developers behind the Desktop Adventures clearly put plenty of heart into their creation.

This page exists as an archive of all things Desktop Adventure. Its goal is to provide methods of keeping these games playable as newer systems make them harder and harder to run, and to document and appreciate all the minute details in these itty-bitty bits of software I love so very, very much.