With LucasArts' 1997 western-themed shooter, Outlaws, and its expansion, A Handful of Missions, set to get a shiny new remaster from Nightdive Studios later this month, Nightdive's Locke Vincent recently sat down to interview one of the game's original level designers, Kevin Schmitt, for the company's YouTube channel.
The conversation, which is now available to watch in full, covered a ton of interesting topics, such as how Schmitt originally started out at LucasArts and how the Outlaws team prepared ahead of developing the Western. However, for us, at least, it was his recollections of designing the Sawmill — one of the game's most notoriously challenging levels — that we personally found the most interesting story to listen to and the one we wanted to highlight here.
In case you haven't played Outlaws before or have somehow erased the trauma of the level from your memory, the sawmill is the fifth stage in the game, and, as the name suggests, takes place inside a large lumber mill. It is filled with various waterways, enemies, and hidden areas to find, and, in the past, it has been known to throw new players for a loop, with the main criticisms being its long length, confusing layout, and challenging puzzles.
These puzzles do start off relatively straightforward enough, with players having to find and turn a series of valves to open a series of gates and raise the water level in a main room to access the boss room. However, after finding the first few valves, things quickly get a bit more complicated, with players not only having to navigate a bunch of confusingly similar-looking rooms to find the remaining spigot, but also being tasked with performing some additional actions like collecting gears that need to be manually placed within the stage and shooting some pretty expertly camouflaged switches within a time limit, which at first glance appear to be just another piece of pretty set decoration.
Speaking to Schmitt, Vincent asked the level designer for his favourite level in the game, to which the former LucasArts level designer responded, "I have a love/hate relationship with the mill. They pushed me to make a very difficult puzzle level, and in that level are the water sluices where you’re going down the water, and you have to shoot the sluices to switch the gates.
"Looking back now, I probably wouldn’t do that again. But we delivered what we wanted. And so, we would put this to a test with the QA team, and if a lot of people had a problem with it, we would pull back on stuff. But that was one of those levels that had very strong love-it and very strong hate-it opinions, so we decided to keep it in. It was actually harder; we did bring it down a bit. We slowed the water speed down a bit, but playing it now, I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, why did I do that?’"
According to Shmitt, following the release of the game, he ended up seeing a lot of players complaining about the level and referring to it as a "Wall Mission" — essentially a wall that players hit where they decided to give up on playing the rest of the game.
Scanning magazines and any archived articles we could find, we tried to find some evidence of people referring to the stage in this way, to see if we could find where the term originated, but we didn't have much luck. Instead, what we did find was an old Usenet thread from the year of release, where someone claimed to be "completely stuck" on the level, and also some more contemporary reviews and videos on the game, which again mentioned the stage's difficulty, relative to the rest of its levels.
Asked later on in the video, whether he would go back and change anything about any of Outlaw's levels, the sawmill unsurprisingly came up once again, with the developer stating in reply to the prompt, "I’d probably cut those sluices down in half, and maybe have no skill switch-hitting or anything. I might still have them in there, but not like forcing you to hit [them] or something."
If you fancy taking on the level yourself, Outlaws + Handful of Missions: Remaster launches across Windows PC (Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and the Epic Game Store), PlayStation 4|5, Xbox One and Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on November 20th, 2025.