How LucasArts mastered Twitter hype

Releasing a back catalogue on Steam is, admittedly, a huge deal for publishers. It’s opening up another source of income, and, best of all, so many of the users on the service will nostalgically lap it up through misty eyes. That especially applies if you’re LucasArts.

Sometime on Friday, the LucasArts Twitter feed started teasing some very exciting news for their ‘old school’ fans. Over the weekend, speculation ran rampant, with news sites guessing that it could be anything from another Monkey Island Special Edition to the frustratingly in-limbo, Free Radical-less Star Wars: Battlefront III.

They were all wrong. LucasArts instead announced that a ton of their back catalogue titles would be released on Steam, including the Indy graphic adventure Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, Republic Commando and the time-eating Star Wars: Battlefront II. We had hoped to get something on XBLA out of it, but hey, we’re still amazed that LucasArts managed to use Twitter to such a powerful degree.

Using Twitter in this way is, we suppose, no better than Kojima Productions’ irritating countdown page that preceded E3, but the fact that LucasArts managed to drum up such immense hype in a relatively tiny window is what strikes me as the most interesting development in the story

Twitter lets users interact with publishers, too – that’s why this situation is so unique. Fans could guess what the announcement would be, and LucasArts was directly listening. It’ll be interesting to see how other publishers experiment with Twitter in this casual way over the coming months.