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Hi, everybody! I have always found this webpage (and forums) very enjoyable and interesting. The first thing I would like to say is I’m Spanish, so I hope you can forgive my (for sure) numerous errors along my posts. I will try my best to communicate with you. ATMachine, you have brought up a very interesting topic here. Certainly I have found this post very interesting and mysterious. You have a great documentation. It’s incredible how you have brought up some things from almost lost archives or old magazines… But… while your documentation is impressive, your conclusions seem to be a little rush to me. I hope I don’t hurt your feelings. Don’t misunderstand me: I love the post and everything you have said. I would like it to be true… But, you know, there are some things that seems to be unlikely possible to me. I hope you don’t get bored with my long post. I will try to comment some things. The point that fails to me is generally the assumptions you make about some things. For example… A time-capsule archive? Why that and not other thing? One of Sherlock Holmes’ quotes I find more interesting is that in which he said that we have to make theories with the evidences we have. As he said, we can’t do the contrary. We can’t distort the facts to support our theories. What I’m trying to say is that I love the facts and data you have posted. But the conclusions or theories you have about them are as valid as other theories completely different as well. So… it’s hard to believe that many things LucasArts did (or even other companies did) is related with a secret project that has been hidden this whole time… Although you have some interesting points which are worth to be examined. I think there are some secrets and projects we didn’t know about in LucasArts indeed. But I don’t think everything is connected or something like that. I think that is something that happens in many companies. It’s normal. Do you know the “Resident Evil 1.5” matter? It was a previous version of the final Resident Evil 2 that Capcom discarded years ago and it didn’t come to the stores. Along many years, “Resident Evil 1.5” was nothing but an urban legend… But, one day, the pieces of that lost game appeared and we knew that the development of the game had been difficult and Capcom had to throw away a lot of the material to remake the game again and create the final version we saw in 1998. I bet there were a lot of beta versions or entire projects that were discarded in LucasArts those years, but is something normal that happens in many companies. I think they are isolated incidents and they are not connected to a secret project or something like that. But, hey, it’s just my opinion. I think there are a lot of things that seems to be logical to me. I don’t see any mystery on them. For example… when you mention the quote of Jhonathan Ackley talking about a “secret budget”. I don’t see any strange on this affirmation. I think he is talking about the company knowing that the project leaders were making their first game. So, the company didn’t entirely trust that they could be able of staying inside the planned budget… So, LucasArts had some extra money saved in case Ackely and Arhem (both supposedly inexperienced in leading a project) needed a little more because they weren’t able of doing a good maths about the needed money to create the game. Sorry about my bad English and explanations… I’m trying my best. I hope you can understand me. The same happens with the interesting story about Kit Williams and Masquerade. It’s a great story and a very interesting experiment but I don’t see why that proves that LucasArts was working in a secret project. The Gabriel Knight mysterious actor before Dead Erickson… I haven’t seen the original material. You gave us the link (thanks for that!) but I don’t know if I have to run the exe in DosBox or something? I don’t know how to see the original material to get some context of the situation. Anyway… Maybe it was a very early casting… Or just a little test with a random person. It seems to be a Gabriel closer to the original look of “Sins of the Fathers”. Pay attention to the short hair (more look alike to the first game than the Dean Erickson’s mane) and the black jacket (again, more similar to the one of the first game). Maybe they changed some little ideas at the early stages of the development. Nothing weird there. It would be interesting to know anything else about this first actor and his experience with Sierra, though. About Sierra doesn’t talking about that… it’s not strange. Companies are very shy about certain things. Sometimes they make the workers to sign legal stuff and they are not allowed to talk about the things that happen inside the company. It’s normal, I don’t see any conspiracy here. All your conclusions about George Lucas wanting to make different Star Wars movies from the ones we watched… It’s your theory, but we don’t have any proof of that. In fact, if you have read interviews with Lucas (or watched some videos) he is very happy with the result of the movies and the message of them. If he wanted to change something, he made the changes in the special editions. Although, as I said before, I think there are a lot of interesting points you have brought up and we should not discard. For example… It would be interesting (as I said before) to know more about the early actor on Gabriel Knight 2 (although, as I said, I don’t think he is related with any secret project or something like that). But it’s an interesting fact in its own. It should be investigated to know more about the video games history and the development of Gabriel Knight series. To know even more about The Dig development it would be very interesting to investigate more about what was the thing Brian Moriarty showed to people in that mysterious conference at the end of the video. Doesn’t anybody know about it? I guess he can’t talk about it because of legal reasons (Disney would own the rights of Loom, The Dig, etc, I guess), so… maybe we won’t know much more about that topic… But it would be very interesting to know about the things Brian showed… Or even to know more about that mysterious “meta-game” he was talking about. I wonder if anyone could arrange an interview and ask him about it. The same about Tim Schafer’s comments about “a secret library project” or something like that… I wonder if anyone could ask him about it in an interview or something. It would be very very interesting certainly. We need more proofs and data, because that “secret project” Schafer is commenting about could be anything (not necessarily your theory). Maybe it was even a normal game that never came out and was cancelled. Who knows… The best way of knowing more is asking him directly. The other assumptions you make seem to be too far-fetched to me, sorry. But, anyway, I have found this topic and your posts very interesting. I hope someone could shed more light in some areas.

As a historian and president of a computer museum, I would absolutely love to have the tools for archival and preservation purposes. But, as a developer and gamer - there actually already are tools to make a brand new SCUMM game that can be played on floppy disks. ScummGEN already can create fully playable games in SCUMM that can be played in ScummVM on one of the many platforms it supports or with the Day of the Tentacle executable in DOS. I accidentally originally said I used ScummC above. It was actually made in ScummGEN. I tried to play around with ScummC to add the triangle puzzle to OpenQuest for SCUMM using a simplified routine I discovered when I converted OpenQuest to Wintermute, but I couldn't get it to compile. Here's the link for the very short playable game written in SCUMM that I alluded to above (note that it was created by the ScummGEN team - I just compiled it, added some missing elements, and fixed some bugs). If you're interested in seeing a SCUMM game created with publicly available tools, the game is here: https://jennibee.itch.io/indiana-jones-and-the-call-of-thunder The source code is also here, if you're interested: https://github.com/JenniBee/callofthunder I haven't personally tried Visionaire Studio, but I've heard good things about it, especially its robust and easy to use interface. If you're looking for something with a modern environment that's robust and easy to use, one engine that I have used and heartily recommend is Godot combined with the adventure game framework, Escoria, That engine and framework were used to create the awesome adventure game, The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy, and it's also the engine we used for the 2nd and 3rd place picks during the community prototype portion of Amnesia Fortnight 2017.

I guess one of the bigger things I did (literally) was using some machine learning models (via ESRGAN) to upscale all the CoMI backgrounds to 4x their size. All backgrounds can be found HERE, while I've posted several comparisons to the originals HERE. This is more of a proof of concept, because currently there's no way to use these inside the game (via ScummVM), plus all the sprites would need to be upscaled as well, which would be an enormous task on its own. Maybe I'll combine these with an offspring of the poster thread, in case someone wants to hang CoMI's backgrounds on their wall. And in the same vein I've also used ESRGAN (and further manual work) to clean-up and upscale the CoMI intro to HD resolution (while rebuilding the logo and credits): A side-by-side with the original cutscene can be found here:

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.

Both are really programming-intensive as they require at least a moderate amount of C language knowledge to use. They both are feature-rich in the games they can make though and feature most of the SCUMM functions. I never could get ScummC to compile using GCC for Windows. I primarily use macOS now, which is *nix based, so it might be fun to try to do it again on my current machine. In order to compile and use ScummGEN, I pored over the C source code in order to see how it actually functioned, which is admittedly not a skill that a lot of people who want to make SCUMM games would have. The actual scripting language is still SCUMM though, so once you go through the hard part of actually getting the compilers functioning properly, it's not a hard language to come to grips with.

Well, I for one love the Hit The Road soundtrack! Anyway, not sure if this kind of thing is exactly what was intended for this thread, but here's something I did for Art October:

Don't worry, that is absolutely on my to-do list.

You probably underestimate the nerdiness of Mojo readers. I think a book about Monkey Island with an amazing Purcell cover would be a must buy for many of us even if we knew everything that was in it. I really hope it does get translated into English.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure this book is particularly interesting for you or for the veterans of MixNMojo. You already know everything about everything there is to know about the series, adn the interviews that I have had may not have taught me much either. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to chat with all the LucasFilm / LucasArts alumni, and to write to try to find this atmosphere and ask myself this question : Why do we remember Monkey Island ? Regarding the translation of the book, I do not despair of convincing my editor to translate it into English. There is another language planned in the coming months, but unfortunately I cannot say more. Finally, it's true that Steve Purcell's drawing s fantastic. You cannot imagine the feeling I had when he accepter my proposal and especially when I saw the very first sketches... It was... amazing.

Ever since you've revealed that book I was hoping that one day we'll see an English translation. My French is way too rusty to be of any use here. On the upside, it gave us another Steve Purcell artwork (which I bought immediately!).

I'm not fond of the idea that one of my first post on the forum is an advertisting message, but I'm still very proud to have had the opportunity to write a humble essay on the Monkey Island series published last year in France. So if there are French-speaking fans of Guybrush's adventures ... https://www.amazon.fr/Monkey-Island-Nicolas-Deneschau/dp/2377840906/

Thanks for sharing Jake! I have to admit that besides the confinement due to COVID, your livestream also had some impact on me for wanting to bring The Legend of Monkey Island back from the dead. Speaking of which, while designing the website at some point I got too ambitious and wanted to create a Dark theme that would turn on automatically while Dark Mode was on. I even got to the point of creating the night version of the banner I used on the top, but then I realised it wasn’t worth the effort. I still think the banner turned quite alright though.