Pew Pew Laser Blog

Literally Not Enough Room.

Wired's Game|Life reported on the feasibility of LucasArts' porting their classic adventure games, such as Maniac Mansion, to the Nintendo DS. Says assistant producer Jeffrey Gullett:

"The cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures. There's literally not enough room on those carts to put the games out."

I cannot abide such obvious idiocy. Here are the facts:

• LucasArts' Classic Adventures ships on 7 high density floppy disks. This compilation includes Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken, Loom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Secret of Monkey Island. That's 5 games, with Maniac Mansion probably taking the LEAST disk space, on about 10 megabytes of space.
• The entire Monkey Island CD, which contains Monkey Island 1 and Monkey Island 2 and a demo of Monkey Island 3 with video and voice, contains only 120 megabytes of data.
• The classic LucasArts CD-ROMS games, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Sam & Max Hit the Road, each fit on one old fashioned 650MB disc.
• The Nintendo DS game cards support capacity up to 256 megabytes.

Clearly Maniac Mansion and the first Monkey Islands will fit on a DS game card. Things like Sam & Max might be too big, but I bet the voice data could be trimmed or significantly compressed to fit. Perhaps Mr. Gullett was indeed considering the situation literally, like so:

Well, yes, clearly those don't fit in a DS.

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