Leaderboard

Last year I started one of my patented never-going-to-be-finished™ art projects. The ingame artwork of Captain Dread's map gave me next to nothing for this, and the "high res" variant found in the MI2 Special Edition was ... insulting. So I sought out the original Purcell painting. Which had a different format and was even more confusing (but such is Dread). It did have all the intended detail though. It was shocking to see what was lost. The detail on the sea monsters was completely lost, they had to redraw the numbers completely to make them legible. And of course the format was wrong so they had to compress the whole art vertically. I guess sometimes after scanning, the digital cleanup crew back in the 90s still had a whole lot of work in front of them. 😬 So, like you said, nostalgia fanatics like myself have become attached to their own interpretation of less legible loose pixel collections. Then there's the fact that a whole lot of work was done on the backgrounds after scanning. AND then there's this tiny little problem that these backgrounds were painted in a ridiculously small format, I'd guess around 25 cm / 10 inch in width. The detail that we have thought to recognize in-game might have never been there. When the Monkey Island 2 Special Edition came out, I heard a lot of people asking "Why didn't they just take the original art and scanned it in high resolution?". I think we're dangerously close to several good answers to that. Where was I heading? Ah, yes. I think Rex is bringing back, intentionally, what was unintentional in 1990, this search for meaning in areas with less detail. It's a bold, a dangerous path, it will go wrong for many. But it also kind of makes us co-conspirators and accomplices in his crimes. I kind of like that. ✊

Not even ...

I'd say it's the holy grail of prop replicas, but...

Y'all waiting on Freelance Police while us olbies are waiting on Plunge Through Space... Edit: And now that I've read it, I am so happy we were able to connect with Steven Chen and have him answer some great questions. I wish him and his team luck with the VR work in the future.

We were able to retroactively include Lead Designer Steven Chen’s participation into the article. Here’s our new interview with him. Since he worked on Staff of Kings, we interrogated him a bit on that, too.

Maybe Return to Monkey Island might appear here? Probably not... but maybe?

It's got me mighty curious as to what Terrible Toybox was working on before, to everyone's disappointment, Ron pivoted to a Monkey Island game.