They demonstrated repeatedly that the label “cartoon-comedy graphic adventure” could encompass a broader spectrum of aesthetics than one might first assume. As one might expect of the gaming subsidiary of Lucasfilm, LucasArt’s audiovisual people were among the best in the industry. Although I’m the farthest thing from a member of the cult of Harley Davidson - I’m one of those tree huggers who wonders why it’s even legal to noise-pollute like some of those things to do - I can recognize and enjoy a well-done pastiche when I see one, and Full Throttle definitely qualifies.Ĭertainly none of this game’s faults are failures of presentation. The story plays out as a series of boisterous set-pieces, a (somewhat) interactive Mad Max mixed with liberal lashings of The Wild One. When the Polecats get drawn into Ripburger’s web, Ben has to find a way to stop him in order to save his gang, his favorite model of motorcycle, and the free-wheeling lifestyle he loves. The plot hinges on Corley Motors, the last manufacturer of real motorcycles in the country - for the moment, anyway: a scheming vice president named Adrian Ripburger is plotting to seize control of the company from old Malcolm Corley and start making minivans instead. It’s a fantastic, bizarre, wild, larger-than-life environment.” And indeed, everything and everyone in this game are nothing if not larger than life. “The reason bikers leaped out at me is that they have a whole world associated with them,” said Schafer in a contemporary interview, “but it’s not a commonplace environment. You play Ben, a stoic tough guy of few words in the Clint Eastwood mold, the leader of a biker gang who call themselves the Polecats. Full Throttle takes place in the deserts of the American Southwest during a vaguely dystopian future - albeit not, Tim Schafer has always been at pains to insist, a post-apocalyptic one. Full Throttle is a balm for anyone who’s ever seethed with frustration at being told by an adventure game that “violence isn’t the answer to this one.” In this game, violence - flagrant, simple-minded, completely non-proportional violence - very often is the answer.īut let’s review the full premise of the game before we go further. Nevertheless, the overly adventure-indoctrinated among you may well spend quite some time trying to be clever before you realize that the solution to this first “puzzle” is simply to kick the door in. Experimenting with the controls, you discover that you have just three verb icons at your disposal: a skull (which encompasses eyes for seeing and a mouth for talking), a raised fist, and a leather boot. 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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