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Gosh. Imagine TOMI getting the same treatment! 🤤

Good bye, chunky Sam... 😞 Still, I'm thrilled for this!

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:

I seem to remember reading that MI2 sold more copies in its first month than MI1 sold altogether, so I don't think management there was disappointed with the sales. I also don't think anyone was "stopping" anyone from making MI3, either, I just don't think anyone had a strong idea for what they wanted to pitch. Plus I don't think Ron would have considered staying at LEC just to work on MI3 when he obviously was yearning to have more control with his own company. Setting up his own company with Shelley Day was likely far more important to him than coming up with a fully fleshed out idea for MI3. When I got to meet Ron in London a few years ago, he told me that he started work on MI2 before it had even been greenlit by management. ("It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is how he put it.) So going straight onto a THIRD Monkey Island game after that was probably the last thing he felt like doing, too. Finally, I think people make too much of MI2's ending. Bill Tiller (who admittedly isn't always the most reliable) says that it was always Ron's idea to end MI1 with his "child's dream" thing, but Tim and Dave managed to talk him out of it. When they got to MI2's ending they didn't know what to do, so they relented and let Ron have his mischievous ending... but then tacked on a few things so that someone could make a sequel. I really doubt that Ron had anything deeply or seriously planned for MI3. Maybe a couple of notions, but I think it's mostly a bit of mischievous myth-making, which is why he's never revealed it.

By all accounts the culture of the studio changed quite a bit as a product of the restructuring of the early 90s. Ron and Shelley Day were not the only people to leave the company around that time. Presumably they were just ready to strike out on their own and have stake in their own creations. As far as the motive behind making adventure games aimed at children, Ron told Mojo that "it gave me a way to do more games in a short amount of time and experiment with design issues." I think Ron saw which way the wind was blowing with adventure games in terms of growing budgets dooming them to become unsustainable, and the early Humongous years can be seen as sort of an antecedent to the digital revolution that would come. The internet was not an option yet, so games aimed at children, who didn't demand bleeding-edge graphics and 60 hours of gameplay, was sort of an alternative manifestation of the same idea Telltale popularized: make adventure games quickly and cheaply and thus profitably. The evolution is even more striking when you look at what the short-lived Hulabee, the successor of Humongous, was attempting. Ron was openly talking about downloadable adventures games by then, but the business fell apart before he could really prove what he set out to. But you look at the six-chapter Moop and Dreadly, and it's like Ron was predicting the future. Interestingly enough, Freelance Police (which would have entered development around this time) was itself conceived as a six-chapter adventure game, and the team had lobbied for digital distribution, which was too radical for the management at the time. (Ironically, the same management ultimately cancelled the game because of the cost of bringing an adventure game to retail.) Finally, Sam & Max: Season 1 demonstrated that this could work, but it's funny how different people were independently working toward the same conclusion in the years leading up to that.