 Lucasfilm Games began to design Labyrinth : The Computer Game in 1985 . Company head George Lucas had requested a tie @-@ in video game for the movie of the same name , which was under production at Lucasfilm . As was common with Lucasfilm Games projects , Lucas himself provided very little direction to the team . Labyrinth was the first licensed game developed by the company : earlier products , such as Rescue on <unk> ! and The Eidolon , had been original intellectual properties . According to project leader David Fox , working with a license " frees you up in some ways and restricts you , too " . With their adaptation , the team was not pressured to reuse events and characters from the Labyrinth film ; but they " felt obligated " to follow the source material . Because they saw the film as an adventure story , they chose to set their adaptation in the adventure game genre . However , Fox disliked the genre 's then @-@ reliance on text parsers and syntax guessing , and so he created the word wheel menus as a replacement . They were meant to supply " a limited set of words that still let you do a lot of things " , in order to streamline the game without hampering the player 's freedom . The game 's visual design was shared by Lucasfilm 's Habitat , a massively multiplayer online game under production at the time . 
