Having been a long-time fan of LucasArts's greatest and most original games (The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, et al), it's somewhat disappointing to learn that I know more about the titles than the author. While it is wonderful to see glimpses of rare production art, design documents and concepts for unfinished games, it's also a shame that the original content is light and even sometimes incorrect.
Rogue Leaders typically spends two pages per game. That could be enough room if the type size and line-spacing was that of a normal book or magazine article, but unfortunately here it amounts to little more than 300 words per game for bigger titles, like 'Day of the Tentacle' or 'Sam & Max', and even less for games like 'Loom'.
Major milestones, like 'The Secret of Monkey Island' get a mere 500 words, which means anecdotes, like the fact that the designers had to help package the first printing of SOMI themselves in order to make the shipping deadline, are unfortunately missing.
The book doesn't really have much of a narrative, either, and instead favours segmenting each game into its own mini-article. There is some attempt at the beginning to tell the story of the companies origins, but this seems to quickly evaporate once the company gets going.
This segmentation really works against trying to weave LucasArts's growth into a coherent tale, and the book often feels a bit confused as to where to turn next. You'll read about Monkey Island 1 (1990), its sequel (1991), Loom (1990), Day of the Tentacle (1993) and then Fate of Atlantis (1992) -- in that order.
There are also mistakes to found here, too. For example, the author makes no distinction between the two VERY different Indiana Jones 'Action' and 'Adventure' games for Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis, printing design documents from both as if they belonged to the same game.
The lack of a strong narrative, added to the book's lightweight writing-style, means you never feel the highs and lows of the company's successes or failures. For example, after reading about the making of the early LucasArts title 'P.H.M Pegasus' and the split it caused within the company, you never find out if the game was successful or not.
As a companion to the recent exhaustive 'Making of...' Star Wars and Indiana Jones books, this is decidely a "lite" title, reading almost like a coffee-table book. Occassions when critical commentary is actually applied to the games is extremely rare, but its presence indicates that there could have been more.
Considering that articles of greater depth can be found for free on the internet, and considering this book's target audience is the die-hard fan, its light-weight style a very odd choice.
Why four stars, then? Simply because access to never-before-seen historical material, what there is of it, rises this book to the above-average. It's only a shame that Rob Smith wasn't able to create a definitive, exhaustive and authorative story of the life of LucasArts, because this most definitely is NOT it.
A quick note to adventure-game fans considering this book: Over a third is dedicated to the "golden age" of LucasArts, the rest focuses on the plethora of externally-developed Star Wars games.