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As an aside, a discussion broke out on our Twitter about the topology of the island, and how exactly LeChuck gets his ship in and out of Hell. Someone suggested that it’s a ghost ship so it can just glide through the land, however the presence of Elaine on board somewhat defies the notion. Of course the ship could have fantastic powers that make its inhabitants ethereal temporarily. It was noted that the Monkey Head sits upon a large hill in MI1: You can see the same on the overhead map: So Hell might actually be a misinterpretation of Hill, as Remi put it. Anyway, if you look at the island it’s clearly developed around a line of volcanic activity, with what looks to have been an active volcano on the left end, and perhaps a budding volcano on the right which instead merely leads to the bowels of death. I did wonder if perhaps the left volcano also once featured a Monkey Head, long ago. We then got on to trying to figure out where LeChuck might take the ship, to travel at sea level through the island to Hill. Someone pointed out the water outlet at the bottom, where the ridge you get the oars from is. I then noticed this area of disturbed water with no obvious source unlike the other cracks and rivers across the island, where there may be a route in through the side of the former volcano, going right through the island. In fact, who’s to say LeChuck’s ship isn’t parked beneath the old volcano, and Guybrush gets there via the catacombs?

Guybrush Threepwood occupies a space in my brain similar to Gordon Freeman: he’s almost an empty vessel for my own thoughts and experiences, a theming around my cursor to help frame the choices imposed on me as a player by the game’s design, and not a character with a ton of hopes, dreams, hangups. Guybrush’s desires align closely with my own, especially in the early games that formed the foundation of the series. He wants to prove himself worthy of solving the mysteries of the game, to have a real pirate experience, to get to say the best comebacks, etc. He has more to him than that, sure, but he’s far more of a player vessel than Ben or Manny. Note he was conceived of as a guy named “guy.” I don’t think that’s a bad thing - I think the ability to see yourself in the game through him is part of what works about the Monkey Island formula. For that reason it’s never really bothered me that he changes shape and size. When Dom started voicing him in Curse, that was the hardest jump for me because suddenly my interiority had a voice, but now I’m used to it and welcome it - it’s almost like my interiority is now in audiobook form and has always had the same narrator doing a bang up job. To be clear, I think there is more to guybrush than that, but it’s stuff that gets revealed when he ends up (what I perceive as) off the mark in a story. For example in Escape I felt like Guybrush started becoming the butt of the joke not just to the people around him, but to the game itself. In the earlier games, the games seemed to be on his side more. In Escape and even Curse, the inciting incident is “Guybrush is a screw-up who everyone’s mad at,” where the player is tasked with cleaning up the player character’s mess as the goal of the game, but that wasn’t always the case. Eg at the start of Monkey Island 2, Bart and Fink are dismissive of everything Guybrush accomplished, but Guybrush will have none of it, insisting he’ll prove them wrong and repeat his success by finding Big Whoop. He then basically turns to the camera and says “we’ll do this together,” and you believe it.* So, Guybrush as a guy who perseveres in the face of impossible odds and a lack of faith from his peers seems like an actual character trait that you can say is part of who he is, and when people “get the character wrong” it’s because he strays from that template without reason. (But even then, part of why that’s who Guybrush is, is because it’s the way players are coming at the game.) * the game still does bring LeChuck back by Guybrush behaving like a goober outside the players control, when he shows Largo LeChuck’s beard, but it’s still not the inciting event for the story, it starts an ominous B thread slow cooking that doesn’t collide directly with you until the end of the story.

There is no law barring you from introducing someone to the Monkey Island series with the special editions. There just should be.

Aah, I'm here for these discussions. Love it! Was Dread steering the ship in that last image? 😄

It's also pretty cool to see pretty much all the islands from the Monkey Island games featured in the book Atlas of Imagined Places, and Melee was placed pretty close to Hispaniola, which makes the dominance of coniferous forests on the island even less far fetched (enlarge for greater detail):

Sure, and like I actually agree with what you say about CMI's guybrush and see my follow up post above, I would go as far to say there IS an argument that CMI's guybrush design changed too many things at once, so much so that I think that it had a disproportionate influence on all subsequent designs. The difference to me is that while CMI changed a lot of the character design, he still comes across in character as a somewhat weak, inept, but occasionally sly and witty character we recognise from the first. I don't think the Melee of EMI still comes across as the dark, rough-around-the-edges, quietly mysterious night-time island. It's just 'kinda generic caribbean island at night.' MI1 Melee was eerie at its best. Look at that cliff path leading to the governor's mansion and how the cliffs themselves loom over the house. There's a sense of scale there, and it matters. I don't think EMI Melee is eerie at all. That's why I say I got used to one change and not the other. But yes, moving on topic... My main hope for the new locations in ReMI is that they make me feel a way? I always remember how Melee made me feel, and how the feeling was different for all the other major locations. I think CMI was really good at this too. Plunder was a bit of a mishmash of previous Monkey Island locations, perhaps (maybe they felt they needed to create a familiar feeling by making it a kind of amalgam of all previous MI islands), but Blood island really manages to evoke that sentiment of an old place with a history that it past its prime and left with a lingering sadness. It pervades the whole island, not just the hotel, I think it's a really wonderful, evocative location. That's what I hope. I hope Brrr Muda's vibe is more than just a joke about a cold tropical island, and I hope that whatever Terror Island is, it has a feel of its own, that will be memorable. To me the places in an adventure game are almost as important as the characters. If I'm gonna be wandering around solving a puzzle in a place for any length of time, I want that place to stir something in me, and that if anything is why I feel so strongly about the paticulars of a location

Well, IMHO I have to disagree with this point. Changing a character model is pretty significant in my mind. Not that I'm against it at all, but when each game redesigns Guybrush, sure he's the same character, but each iteration adds to who that character really is. For example, I think that changing Guybrush's height (as in Curse) makes a huge difference, and not only do the new writers help form and flesh out who Guybrush is and the story he tells, but his image contributes to that as well. As does his voice, etc. We aren't just talking about a change in wardrobe, but a completely new look. With each game we've learned more about, redeveloped, and transformed who Guybrush really is, and I don't think that's ever been static. Each character model still holds the essences of the person we know as Guybrush, but it has also helped his personality grow. So from my point of view, changing Guybrush's height is way more drastic of a change than changing the forest (the background to the story) from pine to palms. Sure, it makes it feel different, but MI has never taken itself that seriously, or been that detail oriented with continuity (even between the first two games), so whether one artist wants to paint the background of Melee with pines, palms, or bamboo, I don't think its that relevant or as out of place of a change compared to other differences in the games that get much less attention.

My guess, which I'm keeping suitably vague, is that by the time we get to the end of Return to Monkey Island, we will understand how this game can coexist with a game in which the giant monkey head is part of a giant robot monkey and isn't even there anymore.

I’ve been enjoying Horizon Forbidden West, and man this music that plays in some old pre-apocalypse ruins made me think of the underground tunnels from MI2 (approx 0:45–2:15). 😆

Well, I guess they better do it now. Chop chop, Ron

I know we all tend to associate the Caribbean with palm trees, but there's a huge variety of vegetation all around the region. There are pine forests in the island of Hispaniola (shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba, for example. So even bearing mind it is a fictional location, nothing seems too far fetched to me in Melee Island in terms of vegetation. I would argue, perhaps, that the architecture might feel a bit too medieval or European. But the whole thing just oozes charm and atmosphere

They're ignoring the robot monkeys, I'm certain of it. Dave: We talked all about canon and these other games, and the fact that we liked them, and the audience liked them, and so we made it our point of philosophy to adhere to canon wherever possible, but with two caveats. One of which is, it’s actually kind of hard to keep track of everything that’s canon, and some of these other games don’t even agree with each other. So a little bit of paradox is necessary and probably healthy for us as creators and as human beings. And the other caveat is that too much canon can get in the way of the story you’re trying to tell, so we decided that we would adhere to canon unless it was going to get in the way, and we would ignore some minor details if we needed to. https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/ron-gilbert-dave-grossman-return-to-monkey-island There isn't much that can get more in the way of telling a good pirate story than giant monkey robots.

Heh. Maybe ron should just add a pixellate filter in graphics options. It's amazing how just by pixellating it, my gut reaction shifts from 'this is new and scary' to 'this is old and familiar'. (I love the art style if it wasn't already clear, but it's also very new and so it always feels a little odd at first, just like CMI did I suppose.)

I don't know what Guybrush we'll get, but I know that guy can RUN.

Yeah, it's a very distinctive sequence, one of my favourites (also incidentally really easy to play on a guitar with barre chords: just start anywhere and do a bar chord with an Am shape, then go one fret down, bar chord with E major shape, one fret down again, Am shape, and so on, just moving down one fret at a time and switching between the Am and E shapes.) It's a very unsettled sort of sound, and perhaps that's because you're alternating between a minor chord, and then a major chord with a root a tritone below the previous chord, and so harmonically you're really quite off piste from the start. It might just be that I'm not as steeped in music theory as I need to be to do a quick analysis of this but I'm not even sure how you would functionally describe that second chord... it's clearly setting up the following chord, but in relation to the I chord it's the... secondary dominant of the 7th chord of the harmonic minor scale? Maybe someone more fluent in music theory can help me figure out what's happening functionally here, I'm likely overcomplicating. Anyway theory is for working things out later, the point is that it's very distinctive sound because you've got this chromatic (semitone) through line with makes it really easy to follow, but then these big unsettling tritone jumps in the root, it's an ideal device for creating this kind of mysterious, uncomfortable feeling. I think it's a gorgeous sound and I love to use it.

What other games does your cousin like? Are you introducing them to Monkey Island because of your own nostalgia, or because it's a game that fits your cousins tastes? Theres nothing wrong with trying to broaden their taste, of course. But they're gonna have their own tastes, and it wouldn't be fair to impose on them. So ask with an open mind, and take no for an answer. Don't be pushy if they refuse. Its OK if they don't want to play it. In terms of graphics, just show your cousin some screens and ask what graphics they want to use. Its for their sake after all. Do play a version with voice acting, though. Unless your cousin just really hates voice acting for some reason. The VO work really elevates the dialogue. You could also just slip a bunch of your retro games on their PC as a gift and see if they go for it. Why not give them a copy of your entire retro collection, even. If they want it, of course. I got some of my games as a kid from hand me downs, and I didn't mind that.

Actually, that's what I always thought. Even though the monkey head entrance is towards the East, I always assumed LeChuck's ship was beneath the volcano.

I've met a former co-worker's son last weekend. This dude, at 11 years old, is making instructional youtube videos for Minecraft, I kid you not. He was asking his father once what software he uses for video editing. He got the name, made the research himself, and now edits his videos himself. We got him talking about streamers and streaming, youtubers and youtubing, and we couldn't stop him, literally couldn't stop him until his dad sent him to bed. During the few waking hours he doesn't spend on his PC, he's playing his Switch in the living room. So I say to him: "I'm looking forward to Return to Monkey Island! It's also coming out on the Switch apparently." Shrugs. 😔

Great work! Not sure if this would be an appropriate place to share "bugs," but I found that DREAMM doesn't know what to do with my "Classic Adventures" compilation versions of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. The Classic Adventures installer produces an EXE, but it runs from a BAT file. I thought it was weird 25 years ago, and I think it's weird now. Apparently so does DREAMM, ha

Nobody wants to see that thing again, so why would they try and build a conceit to bring it back?

Yeah, I think that's a good solution. Some of the pieces certainly work better this way on CD than when they are separated in small parts (also thematically). The track list you created also makes sense to me - and I like LeChuck's theme at the end of the first CD with Jojo. I would also definitely be in favour for a suite of "Woodtick". I had also built it as a suite for my soundtrack, but divided it into separate tracks so that you I can skip directly to one of the versions – but you're still able to listen to the full suite. But of course there mustn't be a pause between tracks then. The suite from the official soundtrack is okaaaay, but I think it really has some poor transitions, e.g. here at 8:48: The version of@Laserschwert is already much better, but still I prefer mine regarding the composition and transitions – but maybe it's just because I listened to mine much too often. Also mine could easily be combined to one big track (not that it really matters for the listening experience). In the end, the is the iMUSE Track und should be perfect. I agree with you here too. And "Kate" and "Stan" are two separate pieces, so I don't know why they were put together here. As for "Kate" I would try to make a nice suite out of it, yes. I would also miss the part without flute and steel drums... True! I like this suite on the OST! It sounds more like a suite than mine, I think...

I smell a hell of a puzzle chain, or rather puzzle shish kebap, coming up, and I really want to stir that soup again.

Thanks! I really wouldn’t advise to use it without any logo though. A good example are the sails. Some start very sharp at the bottom and get totally blurry suddenly, because of the different picture quality of the material I found. And some of the ropes disappear in midair…🙃 Then in the sky I just put in some clouds of a CMI background as a filler. I think it works quite well, but depending on the use one had to really put more work in this (which I was too lazy at some point, tbh 😅). But as I said: with a logo on and for digital use it’s totally fine, I think.