Early Fractal Based Games from Lucasfilm

Screenshots courtesy of Atarimania.

With the recent shutdown of iconic game developer LucasArts, I've been reminiscing on their earlier works from my Atari 800XL gaming days. While other bloggers have shared their first experiences playing the Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, my memories go further back to the mid-eighties, when LucasArts was known as Lucasfilm Games. Three titles from Lucasfilm that impacted me the most were Koronis Rift, The Eidolon and my personal favorite, Rescue on Fractalus!.

These releases were based on recently developed fractal technology pioneered by co-founder of Pixar Animation, Loren Carpenter. Loren famously showcased his fractal software in 1980 with an amazing two minute film at SIGGRAPH titled, Vol Libre, where he showed a virtual flyby through a naturally realistic, mountainous landscape. This technology was further enhanced for the Genesis Demo scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan two years later.

The Genesis Demo scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

As far as I'm aware, these early Atari titles were the first to allow a gamer to navigate in true 3D environments in real-time.

A Lucasfilm game developer shared an interesting story about George Lucas's involvement with the development of Rescue on Fractalus!. I have to agree with Lucas's desire to build tension into the game. The knock on the spacecraft door with an alien popping out in front of the screen always made me jump a bit.