Leaderboard

No, we don't.

Howdy, fellow Monkey Island fans! I've been lurking this thread since page one and have thoroughly enjoyed all the discussion and speculation. Thanks for the fun. I just want to say that I am so unbelievably happy that we are getting another Monkey Island game. I've grown up with the series and they're my comfort games. I'm preaching to the choir here, but there's something so incredibly enchanting about every single aspect -- the writing, the voice acting, the music, the locations... I plan to retire to Plunder Island. I'm currently working my way back through the games (for the umpteenth time) and they never get old. There's always something new to discover or appreciate. I love them all. Yes, even Escape! And the fact that we're getting another entry in the series? Helmed by some of the original creators? It's honestly a dream come true. My heart was literally racing when I saw the announcement. I never thought this would happen. I cannot wait to play Return. It's a shining light in a maddening world. It makes me so sad to see that Ron isn't going to post about the game anymore and that he and the team are being personally attacked. What an ugly situation. I don't think anything is perfect, and there will be things I like and dislike about Return (hopefully much more to like!), but there's a way to kindly express your opinions. Or to just... not. Some things you can keep to yourself and/or not direct at the people creating the game. It reminds me of the pathetic 'outrage' following the Sam & Max remaster. Anyway, I'm just another internet rando, but if any of the team happen to read this, know that I appreciate all your hard work, I'm so excited to play Return, and thank you for keeping Monkey Island alive. Please don't let the vitriolic vocal minority get to you (easier said than done, I know). My life is greatly enriched because of the series and you are responsible for hours upon hours of joy. And now back to lurking!

Hmm, I think calling us an "echo chamber" is overstating it a bit. This isn't a political forum. We're not all incels. We're not planning the revolution or encouraging each other to commit terrible acts in the real world. We're a community that's come together about a video game series. Every community is made up of people with shared interests. And every community has a personality. And that's normal. The fact that this one is generally light on hostility is a good thing. And, to explore this a little further: Just because the collective personality here is generally good natured doesn't mean there's not differences of opinion, it just means we generally can't be bothered to get too bent out of shape about them. Plus when people do express contrasting opinions they're generally done with maturity and consideration, and the responses generally follow with logic and reason, and rarely personal insults. It seems strange that outsiders look into here, see there's not a lot of hostility or conflict, and deem it a negative thing. Personally I'm glad to have found a community of like minded people. Again, I see it as a good thing.

Well you all agreed with me that EMI was by far the best in the series so they may have a point…. 😂

I don't do social media (I haven't got Twitter etc) and I haven't used a forum in 15 years, but I signed up just now as I'm so angry seeing this (I have been following this forum from afar). Everything seems to get ruined these days, anytime I check comments on articles it's inevitable that some crazy folks are going mad about something. I thought Monkey Island fans would be better than this? Surely, they are of adult age but some of the things I've read are so disrespectful, even a child wouldn't say them. I wonder what goes on in the mind of some people, I can't fathom why anyone would want to sit there under a cloud of pure hatred and go on and on about the same thing. I actually feel quite sorry for them that they must live there lives in this way. I feel bad for Ron and team, I hope Rex doesn't take this to heart. Hopefully they know this is a minority of crazies with too much time and nothing better to do than attack (hell, people are still going nuts over the Last Jedi so it never ends). Ron cutting himself off is a shame as everyone misses out, but this is the way on social media, I guess those trolls will now be "happy" about their achievement. Anyway, add me to the list of "beyond excited", the trailer looked absolutely fantastic. It shows a lot without giving anything concrete away. I still can't believe it's happening, I played most of the Monkey Islands over Christmas. Each year I usually play part 1 & 2 and then wonder what "really" happened. This year I added Curse to my list and although I like the game I always felt it cheated a little bit, so starting in the carnival gives me goosebumps! *Apologies for the long rambling!

I am very appreciative of the Mojo team for putting out this tweet, it’s a great way to promote the positivity and adoration for this game!

I think if we're going to compare artwork then you have do it using the ORIGINAL versions of the games... namely the EGA version of SOMI. The VGA version already started to make moves away from the EGA artwork, which the original team were intimately involved with. Ron famously doesn't like the VGA portraits, for example. So you can't hold those up and say THIS is Monkey Island! It's actually the subsequent team's interpretation. So, if you ask me, anyone who wants to complain about the art style through out the series has to start here. Monkey 1 (1990) Monkey 2 (1991) Curse (1996) Escape (2001) Tales (2009) Return (2022)

My favorite shot has got to be the lookout on Melee. The colors are so gorgeous and the shapes feel so three dimensional while also closely adhering to this game’s style. It looks almost like a Pixar color script or something.

The 'original' fans in their 40s who in fact experienced The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990 as teens, those who want the "promised" pixel art back, may even be a minority. I think that a larger part of the vitriolic critics got their lasting bam-bam to the head with Curse of Monkey Island. They want CMI in HD (which wouldn't work, but that is an altogether different topic). And then there's yet another part of the critics who would "allow" any style, "JUST NOT THAT ONE". Most of those people, I guess, would ask from Return to Monkey Island exactly what you suggest. They want to return to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, and they seem to have the ultimate idea what stylistic choice Ron Gilbert should have made for them to find the path. Funny thing though: Rex' style, in my opinion, makes exactly that possible, for me at least. These tiny, puny games thrown together by a handful of people back then, they felt vast and grand. The secrets felt so plentiful and I was always the first person on earth to discover them (even when using a walkthrough). Every new scene could be any size, Guybrush could face any peril and challenge, and I would guide him out. No game today could render the same joy, that's the problem with adulthood. The latest Uncharted entries come close at tens and hundreds of millions of dollar budgets a pop. How are you doing that at a so much smaller budget, to an audience so used to big budget pizzaz? The ReMI art team approaches the impossible task from a multitude of directions: the color schemes are very similar to the original monkey island games, the backgrounds take a lot of almost forgotten keys from the earliest games, the contrasts are so strong, we have more expressive facial animation than ever before, and a lot of abstraction is reducing characters and backgrounds to their most recognizable, iconic forms. The alien and warped background compositions allow any scene, perspective, or exaggeration. This style does not limit RonDave in telling the story they want. Swordfight in a crow's nest? Spitting contest in a full to the brim amphitheatre? Labyrinth of doom in a fiery lava underworld? A monstrosity of a LeChuck ship that could easily house thousands? You try that in CMI's style, in Tales' style, in LeChuck's Revenge's style. It wouldn't look nearly as good as it would in ReMI's chosen style. This is the form that best serves the function.

In the negative reactions, I think there’s a lot of curdled nostalgia — folks who have wanted a ‘Ron Gilbert’s Money Island 3’ since they were eleven years old. That’s a lot of time to dream and ruminate, and the fact that while sections of the fandom didn’t regard one or more of the sequels as legitimate probably just fed into that utopian dream of a game that would fill the childhood void. The new game doesn’t look like the 1990s, though, and it’s not designed to hit other nostalgia buttons either (for example, a lush and romantic period piece, or a hand-drawn Disney cartoon). I think for those of us who moved on, and who want Monkey Island to move on, the new style is exciting, but for fans who want the game to return them to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, the style is a stark reminder that it’s not coming back. I do think there is an aspect of the style which is a little disarming initially — it’s fun, but it’s not cute, and Guybrush’s face in particular has a distancing effect that doesn’t immediately pull you in like the Purcell portraits do. So I think some fans will need to warm up to it, after they get over the shock of seeing something that doesn’t match their expectations. The more vitriolic voices are probably coming from people who are howling at the inability to regain their childhoods. I have a hard time not imagining deeply hurt, damaged people behind those keyboards. It’s sad, but they will eventually move in from spamming the comments and find other things to vent their existential disappointment in. Don’t let them get you down! There’s lots of other stuff to talk about There was a Monkey Island game I never played because I “the graphics” didn’t appeal to me, and I ended up ok.

I hope there will be, but I doubt it'll be through regular channels. LimitedRun will be the most likely party to release one! I'd really like a T-shirt that says: I ranted about the RtMI art style and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt.

I am hopeful that the negativity will fade after people recalibrate their expectations. I think this was a sharp blast of emotion because the art is very different to what some longtime fans expected. I think the best thing to do is ignore the haters and just continue to discuss what is interesting about the game. Can you imagine the backlash about the MI2 ending if there had been social media in 1991??

Oh man. While we are saddened by the ugly wave of hateful comments, here and there are beautiful, hopeful shines of love that give me so much joy and hope! While haters rant, others create art. They make things. It's wonderful. 🥰

The EGA closeup portraits look really damn close to the box art for Monkey Island 1, and the way the Monkey Head and LeChuck’s ship look are also a close match. Monkey 1 and its box art do look very similar. The box art was drawn by one of the primary background and character artists on the game. It’s closer to a Struzan-style poster for a movie (imagining a heightened moment that doesn’t exist and/or a dreamlike collage), than to Mega Man (wildly and wholly unrelated), to me. I think the aftermarket VGA portraits have forever made the MI1 box and the game feel misaligned, but they aren’t. With Monkey 2 things start to separate more, for sure.

I've talked about this briefly before, but I think it's possible to make a case that when you remove all the technological distinctions, MI2's style has lots of things that are more in common with CMI than MI1. Obviously the biggest difference is in the characters themselves, but when you look at the backgrounds I already feel like MI2 was already halfway or more to getting to where CMI was going. If you take these 3 town shots, for example, and ignore that one of them is at night, and just look at how the buildings are drawn, and how the lines and shapes work: Yeah, I think a case can be made that even though CMI clearly takes it further, MI2 is already starting what it continues. in the way it uses lines and shapes. Funnily enough, while I think RMI is again a departure, I think that in some ways it's a departure back in the direction of MI1 - both styles have a fascination with conveying funky perspectives with straight lines, and although RMI exaggerates this a lot more, I think it's fairly apt given the return to Melee. (edit: or, to put it another way, perhaps one way of looking at RMI's style as far at the backgrounds go is that in terms of the way it uses shapes, it's sort of a combination if MI1's straight lines and wonky perspectives with MI2 and especially CMI's more cartoonish exagerration and foreground/background detail.)

Happy birthday. Welcome to the suck!

Yeah, give people a way to communicate with devs and suddenly everyone's an armchair producer. But it's not the first time I've seen this, I'm used to it by now. I think Tim Schafer probably had the right idea by saying from the start he wanted to make the game using Bagel's style, because then nobody could be shocked when the adventure game he made featured a style he hadn't really worked with before. But yes, quite clearly people have no idea of the effort that it takes to produce something of this quality. Even if they have their subjective opinion of whether the art style works for the game or not, as soon as they start to imply that it's cheap or low effort or easy to make or stuff like that they're just objectively wrong. The people I've seen most excited about this are other game devs and artists, and I think it's because they actually have some understanding of what's been achieved here, and in such a short time, all told.

Damn, that is depressing. I really dislike what fandom has become the last couple of years, and I think it shows just how unhappy a lot of people feel about the world and their place in it. If people were leading rich and fulfilling lives, they wouldn't need to ventilate so much hostility on someone else's product. It makes me sad for Ron, Rex and their team. But it also makes me sad for the people who ventilate such toxicity. They must truly feel unhappy with themselves.

Just dropped the last beta of DREAMM 1.0 for final testing: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/ At this point, all the key functionality is in. If there are any remaining issues you'd like to see fixed before 1.0 is final, this is your last chance! Version:1.0b6 • Add increase/decrease video size menu items and key shortcuts (Alt-+/-). • Display selection dialog if multiple games are detected. • Always hide mouse in full screen mode, even outside of game area. • Added support for Curse of Monkey Island demos. • Allow selection of Standard/Practice/Expert modes in Loom FM Towns. • Fix audio looping in FM Towns playback (specifically Indy Crusade water pouring). • FM Towns games now exit cleanly via Ctrl+C. • Reduced target MIPS and RAM size for earlier games; fixed FM Towns at 2MB. • Fix window sizing behavior when target size is larger than the monitor size.

If there's one good thing to be had from all the barrage of nasty stuff we all witnessed in the last few days, is how a great part of the community banded together in defense of a creator's right to fulfill his own creative vision. In a way, all this negative stuff might've ended creating even more goodwill for the game.

Plot twist: It's an illustrated book he made for his and Elaine's child.

My only complaint is that there's no release date

I'd like to now appreciate the trailer's rats, the squirrel, the bunnies, the snail, the parrot, the owl, the peacock (?), that other bird, and of course the bowl of chicks (not the deer head or the frozen eagle, of course).

Let's form a Mix N Mojo crew!!

Hear, hear! And happy birthday! We’re just about the same age. I’m astounded by how much influence my childhood has had over my interests as an adult, but I think the only way to keep that sense of joy and discovery really alive is to keep doing new things, experimenting and growing. I suppose that’s why this new Monkey Island feels exciting to me, while I would probably not want to play a pixelfied version …

Yes we do!

That's what humanity gets for creating a beautiful instrument of communication like the Internet, which not only connects us with the rest of the world but also connects the rest of the world with us (and that's where things go awry).

I foolishly thought that Monkey Island wouldn't attract those kinds of fans but this culture of commentary, ranging from a lack of tact and respect for the creators, to just extreme vitriol and abuse, seems to infect everything. It's depressing. It also irritates me (and it must be even more galling for Ron and the team) how so many seem to consider themselves experts in game dev nowadays, commenting on the budget or whatever in relation to the art style. Twitter and Mojo are both echo chambers of a sort (I know which one I prefer today), but surely the vast majority of people who Ron will want to reach with Return to Monkey Island are frequenting neither? I think this fresh art style will serve him very well in that regard, and I'm sure he won't lose sight of that even with the whining 'fans' clogging up his blog comments. Going to have another click around the new website and watch the trailer again to cheer myself up!

This may be an echo chamber, but it's a big one, and I think the one that is both most representative and most knowledgeable of what they speak. I don't think it's too big headed to say that. The people who built this community are the same people who helped, say, build tools allowing us to play the games easily, still. They're the same people who now work for the people who made those games we love, the same people who have actually now made Monkey Island games. If I trust any echo chamber to have a true sense of what the vibe is around this game, it's this one. And hey, if it is an echo chamber, I don't think it's one to an unhealthy degree - we disagree on stuff all the time, right?

Here's an idea, why don't we follow the artist on twitter to show our support? It's gotta be hard to be facing all this. username in twitter is rexbox

Honestly, I just hope Ron visits this forum. It would be great if he made a profile and shared updates here. I think he would really enjoy the comments here. Even if there are disagreements here, they are civil from what I can see and lend themselves to a good discussion.

Idk, it seems a bit tricky, since I doubt the team wants more notifications flooding their inboxes. But maybe we could all make a collaborative project or something to show our love and support? Idk.

Man, this whole thing is so devastating – to have the joy of sharing art sucked out of you has got to be one worst feelings ever. No one should have to go through the kind of vitriol the team is getting, and I hope Ron shutting down the comments will lessen that at least a little.

I don't want to get too deep into this but I hope they shy away from insult stuff a bit, if they're gonna make a reference. My interpretation of insult swordfighting in MI1 was that it was just swordfighting. It wasn't like a special form of swordfighting, it was just a framing device for making fights work in a format where they didn't want to have actual combat. They never actually call it 'insult swordfighting' in the game. It worked within the logic of the game, but the intent behind it wasn't that 'these are the rules of swordfighting in this world. CMI brought it back and I think it was fun to change it so that they had to rhyme at sea, but I also think it was the start of the games being weird about insult fighting. There's no reason why non-rhyming insults shouldnt be effective at sea, that sort of undermines the whole point of the insult being a way of throwing the opponent off guard. But I accepted it because I guess within the fiction you could have it that at sea the tradition of rhyming insults is so ingrained that even a brilliant insult that doesn't rhyme doesn't sting in the same way it usually would because it would be an embarrassing faux pas. Sure. Then EMI takes it several steps further. First Guybrush can't win against Ozzie because he can't understand the insults (why would you be insulted by an insult that makes no sense to you?) But also they start calling it 'insult arm wrestling' and 'insult swordfighting' and then get all metaphysical about it and introduce the idea of the ultimate insult which in my mind just goes WAY past what insulting was intended to represent in the first game. They calm it down a bit in Tales but it still gets talked about as 'insult swordfighting'. Maybe this is a peeve I and I alone have, but I have no time for making insults and insult swordfighting a 'thing' in the MI universe. It's just swordfighting! Insults are just a game mechanic! ...Ahem

They’ve got the replacement ready to go!

Guybrush and Elaine's son, Herman. Named after HT Marley! Also, man, poppa Guybrush. Wouldn't that be closure! "There were pirates when I was a boy..."

I didn’t even think of that before! Now I’m speculating even further about it.

I don’t want to talk about the art since so much is said about it but after having seen the trailer I wonder still about if Guybrush is a kid or not. Why there’s scrapbook with his name on it? So that all the games are his imagination and pages on the scrap book?

I love it all but I think my favorite part about it is Elaine. 😍

Took me a second, ngl. Very Monty Python of you 👍

I actually want to pick up on a point of discussion from earlier in the thread about the difference in art styles between MI1 and MI2. I can see the difference now, but at the time it did not register to me as a ‘new style’. I played the CD-ROM version of MI1, so the interface was the same, the character’s models looked basically the same, and I was a kid so I didn’t really think about it. The jump in style with MI3 was obviously a much larger one, and I think a lot of fans were wary about it before they played the game. It was hard to know what to expect, and I think there was a general sense of relief that it still felt like an adventure game despite the animated style. Curse threw down a gauntlet that the subsequent games struggled with. It was popular, so you couldn’t ignore it, but it’s hard to think of a character design that would be more challenging to translate to low-poly 3D animation. EMI tried, but I think in that game it was the technology that changed, rather than the overall visual approach to the world. It probably wasn’t as drastic enough of a change to my mind. Tales was a more successful adaptation of the Curse style, but feels like it’s set in the same visual world as MI3 and 4. In that sense, I think we have three main visual ‘eras’: -the original EGA Secret, the VGA remake, and Revenge. -Curse, Escape and Tales. -Return to Monkey Island! Both Curse and Return show a big reimagining of what the visual world of Monkey Island is, in ways that actually manage to cast the previous games in a new light. They aren’t total ruptures, of course, and they remain rooted in aspects of the earlier games, but the approach is different enough that it feels like a radical change.

I'm glad I don't *do* social media anymore (besides Mixnmojo), the occasional glimpse at the comments on Ron's blog has me convinced I made the right choice.

Fandoms have always been obnoxious. I'm glad the general thrust on Mojo is positive, and I'd try to direct some of that at Ron Gilbert and the team.

The sad reality is that in this day and age is much preferable for a creator to work on new properties than tackle an IP with decades of fandom piled up. I doubt Ron Gilbert will ever tackle Monkey Island ever again. And I don't blame him

I'm so pleased than every reservation I've had about Return to Monkey Island has completely evaporated since I completed my Thimbleweed Park playthrough (and realised it's actually a brilliant structured game with a satisfying and clever ending) and the trailer dropped (and showed me how great the game is going to look).

The numbers are about the same as the ones we got on Twitter. Take into account that some of the negative votes come from randos showing us snowflakes what's what, and I'd say the vast majority is a-OK with what we've seen so far.

All the negative muttering put me in mind of this classic Adventure Gamers article by Evan Dickens, called "We Already Hate Your Game," which I'll point out is now *20 years old*: https://adventuregamers.com/articles/amp/17539

No no, you got it all wrong. If you tilt your head slightly, you realize it‘s a hand giving a thumbs up.

What more could you want, man?

Not to resurrect a contentious issue that appears to have died down, but imma just say that I wouldn't get too hung up on trying to precisely nail down numbering/timeline/etc. I think it is elegantly handled.