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I watched this movie recently and got some serious Guybrush vibes off Sean Flynn when he appeared in this short black waistcoat. Doesn't he look SO Curse of Monkey Island?! He also appears in a lace up shirt like in MI1. At the time I really wanted to point this out to someone...thanks to the forum, now I can! Yippee!

I'm guessing I'm not alone as someone who has made Mojo-adjacent content in the last few years and would like to share it. Maybe this thread can be a home for it? Anything you've made that you think Mojo Forums readers here might be interested in, but is small enough or old enough that it may not need its own thread, feel free to place it here! I'll start! Monkey Island 1 and 2 Livestream with Marius Winter and Dominic Armato A couple months ago, I did a complete playthrough of Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Twitch with Marius Winter (@Marius) and the voice of Guybrush Threepwood himself Dominic Armato (@Dmnkly). It was something Marius and I had been talking about doing for ages - we worked together at Telltale and both loved just talking about Monkey Island forever, and years later wanted an excuse to do that again - and having Dominic show up as a surprise guest made it even more special. If you want to watch the stream, you can watch the first video or view the whole collection of Monkey Island 1 and 2 (and a brief break to talk about Disneyland) here.

I’ve got an original MI1 poster, from when they were sold out of The Adventurer. (I bought it on eBay, I wasnt old or cool enough at the time to buy one for myself.) I also have all the different posters Telltale released, but they are not LEC posters!

Finally, the back side of the CD case.

I had Laser's MI2, Sam and Max, and Full Throttle on large canvases in my last apartment. Only picture I could find before they went up

I really like the article, you dont get articles like that anywhere else. I had Laser's Grim Fandango and MI2 posters printed in A1 and framed and they were glorious. I say had because I took them down when the room became a nursery, apparently a skeleton smoking a cigarette and a massive zombie pirate stabbing a voodoo doll arent suitable for little kids.

Oh. I forgot the third picture.

To be precise, it's a proposal with ideas for BOTH an adventure game and an action game, like with the Last Crusade adventure/action games.

You may have already seen it. But one of the studio's veterans, Kevin Schmitt, just released three photos of an Outlaws game design document. So far nothing very surprising, but if you look closely at the first photo. You will notice that the document is dated 1995 and that it is a .... adventure game based on the SCUMM engine! I really hope we will learn more

Since the development history of The Dig is undeniably a fun topic, I’d like to challenge a few assumptions you make in your original post, ATM. Let me start with this: People who hold an uncharitable view of the released game would tell you that’s just what happened. You suggest that it’s somehow suspicious or untoward that the company didn’t just rush the game out the door within months of Moriarty’s departure, but that strikes me as a drastic underestimation of the problems the project was facing. When he spoke to us for our retrospective on The Dig, Bill Eaken said bluntly of Moriarty’s version: “The programming was a complete disaster.” To tell you what you already know, Moriarty ambitiously insisted on introducing a brand-new engine for his version of The Dig, rather than tried-and-true SCUMM. The idea was that the team wanted to raise the bar on animation with The Dig, and the SCUMM engine as it existed at that time simply wasn’t up to the task. Moriarty’s solution was to devise a new animation system, possibly called Landrou, which was then built into a game engine, possibly called StoryDroid. (I say possibly because there’s always been some confusion/debate about the names of the new systems.) This bold decision was met with huge resistance from the team that maintained SCUMM (chief among them Aric Wilmunder, I have to assume), who felt it was foolhardy to develop a new engine from the ground-up when SCUMM was mature, demonstrated and stable, and what’s more could have been enhanced to meet the robust animation demands if the money and time being spent to establish unproven tech had been invested in SCUMM instead. Somehow, Moriarty got his way (with Eaken speculating that management just kind of shrugged and saw the debate as a rivalry between the art team, who were naturally dazzled by the opportunities of Landrou, and the programmers), but what happened in the end would seem to vindicate the dissenting view. I’m sure there was more to the project’s troubles than that, of course. More than one person has made note of the huge amount of pressure Moriarty was under, and it’s been noted that he was used to working with a tiny team, and perhaps became overwhelmed with scale of The Dig. Still, the decision to replace SCUMM seemed to be the fateful one that spelled disaster for the project. The programming side of things just never came together, and at a certain point it became undeniable even to the managers that for the longest time had been (again, per Eaken) dismissing warnings people had been delivering about the project as developer politics. Finally, they stepped in and put an end to it. So if anything, the fact that LucasArts went from that situation to shipping The Dig by the end of 1995 is a testament to the remarkable expedience of the team involved. You noted that Dave Grossman was briefly on the project between Moriarty and Clark; describing himself as a “hedge trimmer” who began the condensing of the design that Clark carried on with, he portrayed the project that Moriarty left as being in a “larval” stage. How are you going to ship a game that is in a “larval” stage in 1993, by the end of 1993? When you account for the fact that LEC didn’t find the replacement project leader right away, and that when they did he insisted (predictably) that he wanted to revert back to SCUMM, I would say it was a herculean task that they managed to release what they did, as quickly as they did. And this stubborn campaign to bring The Dig to a successful finish in spite of everything ("Three words -Spielberg, Spielberg, and Spielberg" is how Bill Tiller describes the motivation on the studio's part) might well have come at the cost of other, arguably more meritorious projects, like Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.

I find this fascinating, but there's no hard evidence here. Having worked on a real video game at a real video game company (one that even collaborated with LucasArts) I can assure you that stupid, weird decisions happen constantly, and despite how interesting things get, you do forget a shitload of information. So I'll stay in the skeptic camp for now and I'll hope you can convince me I was wrong 😉

Like @Jake pointed out, we did some really interesting and fun Monkey 1&2 streams with @Dmnkly. I'm really happy how they turned out. To me the point was to figure out why I am drawn to these two games so much, and better understand how they make me feel. I see both games from different angles now, and appreciate them even more today. Both of them don't feel like comedy games to me. They have tons of humor in them, but it's not the basement. I believe both games would still be great games if you remove the humor. Anyway, I would redo streaming both games again and again, because I am drawn back to the games forever. Thanks everyone for watching and participating in the chat!