Okay, I'm totally late for this discussion, but first off: it's true, I _AM_ selling these fine leather jackets at a rather non-expencive price that you can find by integrating the dirichlet function defined as:
f(x) = 0 for all Rational x,
f(x) = 1 for all Irrational x.
The function is discontinuous everywhere (a.k.a. NOWHERE CONTINUOUS) and needs knowledge of Lebesgue-Stieltjes Integration, so don't break your heads over it if you don't get the joke: it's grad school level.
Concerning the smart-ass "abandonware" term. I hope that everyone here is familiar with copyright laws in the United States. Now, since Copyright is a claim to begin with, a company may protect it's intellectual property all they want, which means that you can not sell these fine leather jackets at any price, regardless of Lebesgue integrals.
What happened to LucasArts games is that they've been discontinued, the original team has been disassembled (Ron Gilbert was actually upset enough to quit after Monkey Island 2, details unknown). I say "TEAM" because it was, really, one big squad of closely related friends (kinda like Sierra On-Line's original super-star line-up that worked on most of their big games together) that continually pushed the envelope of (back then) revolutionary gaming. In other word, they've all been dissed hardcore, pardon the pun.
A memeber of ESA (safe to assume LucasArts) holds all the rights to distribution, marketing, porting, and updating of the old franchises, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and others. Considering their last few statements, it is not likely that any of the old franchises (including Monkey Island, one of the most successful names in adventure gaming, period) will ever be revisited. E3 2006 quote was "Bewitched and other movies have shown that revisiting old franchises turns up bad stuff, so we won't make another adventure game until at least 2016...", and despite the obvious "joke" nature of it, it's more likely to be true, or false, since they will NEVER make another adventure game.
The only piece of software that is somewhat "on the ropes" is Sam & Max Hit the Road, because they are based on characters of a very funny comicbook author Steve Purcell, who was kind enough to license his demonic creatures to TellTale Games, who will be unleashing a new SERIES of Sam & Max games this fall (
YES). (
http://www.telltalegames.com/samandmax/faq)
What's left of their legacy?
http://www.overstock.com/?page=proframe&prod_id=1532434
http://www.cdromshop.com/cdshop/desc/p.023272001544.html
http://www.5dollarsoftware.com/spqu6rowiins.html (NOT LUCAS ARTS BUT STILL A COOL SITE)
http://www.cdaccess.com/html/pc/monkeyis.htm
http://www.cdaccess.com/html/shared/fullth.htm
Now, I want you to compare the prices above with $150 MINIMUM that you would have to spend for a spiffy Space Quest Collection on Amazon Marketplace, nevermind the insanity of the prices for such stuff on Ebay. There are tons of guys who do not care about said games that wish to get rich off of them. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but I'm just telling you that you have a choice. If you are looking for Monkey Island Maddness, or Monkey Island 1 (with a CD soundtrack), or perhaps you want Day of the Tentacle ON THE CD... You may be shit out of luck, or shit out of money. I don't think we're even allowed discussing hacking the Nintendo DS firmware in order to play those games on it in here... But you do have a choice. You can PM me and tell me what you need, and I can (at the very least) tell you which copies of which games you can possibly afford. Because I kinda-sorta look into that sort of thing.
If you never played any of those games, your life is incomplete and I feel sorry for you, whoever you are.
