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The new game absolutely has to be pixel art and if it's not it will be totally ruined! 😠 Oh no, wait... The new art looks really cool and is making me even more excited to play the game. Now that's a plot twist I wasn't expecting considering what a nostalgia-loving-change-o-phobe I am 😁 In other news... I've never been keen on Escape but your comments have made me look forward to playing it again and being open to enjoying it even more this time! 👍 Also, hello everyone 👋 I'm new and I've just read through this whole thread. Right, back to your interesting discussions.

Waiiiit I'm not just taking this at face value. There has to be a quiz about the thread first.

I really can't wait to see the Melee Town low street, with the clock tower over the archway. That was always my favourite "room" in the whole series

If they keep up the trend of 10 second clips, it'll be just enough time to show Guybrush looking at one item in his inventory 😜

Let's predict what we'll be shown on Monday. We've seen a chapter title screen, the new version of a familiar location so my guess is that the next one will show off something about how the UI works.

Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!

In honour of some recent rejoiners I also decided I'd go through the thread from the beginning, and may I just say this from page 5 is still on point.

Here you go. 😬

Imagine seeing the alley.

I think it will be Guybrush saying “I can’t pick that up.”

I predict that we’ll see Monkey Island. Or somewhere new. Or something else.

👕 I beat #Mojole #123 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 2/6 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Holy cow... kudos to you. And welcome.

The Wii was tales of MI’s target platform and it was really bare bones even by Telltale standards. There was no way all of Flotsam Town was going to fit in one scene, so it was split into two with a camera cut in the middle (between the courthouse and the glass blowers shop), which has a load delay the first time you visit it in any play session. It meant we could never present the town from a big wide shot like you see in the concept art.

Yes, it was one of the things I didn't like about Bill Tiller's art direction at the time. The world was never cartoony, it was always very grounded. Can you point me to where you found that image that you said was from the VGHF? I watched the whole thing live and have scanned their webpage... unless I'm going blind (which is definitely a possibility) I cannot see the image you claim came from there? https://gamehistory.org/monkeyisland/ And can we all just stop for a second and appreciate the utter beauty of this image... Look at those shadows, the gentle use of colour. It's GORGEOUS. I love Peter Chan's work. And it still looks beautiful with a limited palette.. Sigh

Yeah, it's really not much of a stretch to get from this.. to this

I love the artwork you’re referring to, but these assumptions are very farfetched. Different designers and project means different direction. Going by what you’re saying it’s a wonder The Dig and Full Throttle didn’t look like Looney Tunes cartoons.

There are a number of great points in there though I think you sort of misunderstood me. The only things I'm genuinely sad about is that - as you've said - I wasn't catered to and that it was kind of soul crushing to see the discourse on the internet about it. Even when it comes to the review on this very site I'm supposed to be a member of the Proud Boys for missing the old voice performance, I think that says everything. There's this belief that you're a secret bigot if you don't like the changes, for a while I cared about arguing against that but I don't engage nowadays. (To clarify: I 100% agree with the reasoning behind the changes and I think they are coming from a good place, I just don't agree with the changes themselves.) Is me wanting to be catered to entitlement? Sure, I think it absolutely is but I think that one of the biggest benefits to modern gaming is that smaller or bigger groups of people can be catered to. For example just today id Software has updated their Quake remaster to include accessibility options, that's crazy good and without current practices we might not even know that there's a need for these. As for adding the option being "easy" I'm sure it would take time and resources to implement something like that: they'd have to remaster the original recordings, figure out how to implement that from programming to UI design, roll it out in a patch etc. What I meant by saying it's easy was that the concerns that were very real in the past don't exist now: you don't have to fit on a disk, you don't have to be concerned about how file size relates to people's internet limitations that much etc. "The simple reality is that the game I'm nostalgic for still exists. I can still play it." - This is exactly why I didn't buy the remasters. I figured that the new voice is affecting my enjoyment so I'd rather just replay the originals if I get the itch. I might change my opinion on this, I might not. As for the "graphics changes are the same as any other" argument I strongly disagree with that but telling why would be way too lenghty for this already offtopic conversation so I'll just say that I like having options. Your favorite version of SoMI is the EGA version with speaker sounds? Mine is the Ultimate Talkie Edition which is a mix of the remaster and the VGA CD version, it is a fanmade version that was put together for people who wanted to play the SE with the new music and voice acting but with the VGA graphics. That's awesome if you ask me. And I will talk about only MI from now on, sorry for the derail.

This is the part that I never got about people who don't like what the MI2 ending suggests: this idea that the adventure has to be real because if it's not real then what's the point? The way I see it the story and the adventure IS real even if it's only in Guybrush's head since we got to experience it and there's nothing more real than that. On the other hand Guybrush Threepwood is not real and we've known that from the moment we launched the first game so the thought experiment of "what if it's all in his head?" has no consequence. But hey, I was baffled at people who thought that Thimbleweed Park's ending was terrible "because nothing matters" too, meanwhile it did matter a lot to the game's characters and seeing them deal with the truth was the best part of the whole experience. As for how it can be both: it already is both, that's why CMI's need to explain it away was a really bad choice (though you can to interpret that as Guybrush desperately trying to keep the walls of the fantasy up and succeeding). Every single game in the series is constantly referencing the amusement park / circus theme if you pay attention to that stuff. On top of that it's also the best explanation to why the MI world is full of contemporary elements: because it's a child trying to imagine a world of pirates. On the other hand the story also works if you ignore all that stuff, for example you don't have to think it important that LeChuck dies with a bunch of amusement park noises at the end of ToMI if you don't want to, he just does that.

Noooo!! I absolutely LOVE Jim Cummings, but I just know his voice so well that I’d be completely put off by it. I’d hate to hear LeChuck and be able to hear “oh, this sounds like his Pete”, or “here he’s going into Monterey Jack territory” or “this has a touch of Tigger”. What I love about Earl Boen is that he wasn’t a very familiar voice actor to begin with. Jim Cummings voiced almost all of my youth!

I know I'm repeating myself, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. I have a strong feeling Ron didn't have a clue about that ending and didn't have any way to resolve it. I think he just did it and was going to worry about it later. And here is why I think that: Ron discussed difficult endings at PAX Australia in 2013 and he talked about them as if they were a thing unto themselves. Not an unfortunate side effect of not finishing a planned trilogy, but something you should aim for. See what you think of what he said here (emphasis added by me): I understand what Ron is saying, and I even agree with it. But I especially agree with: "You shouldn’t enrage your audience all the time just to enrage them." And I feel that's what he tried to do with Thimbleweed Park. It was like, "I know, the game just never resolves anything and just ends! That will be interesting!". I think the truth is more complicated than Ron believes: You can't just choose to polarise an audience, because you actually need to make them care first. (This is why Thimbleweed Park's ending didn't work for me, even as a shock. I didn't care. I didn't care about the world. I didn't care about the story. I didn't care about the characters. The only thing that could have made me care was a clever ending that tied everything together. I doubt I'll ever play it again -- I've tried and quit.) I understand the desire to provoke an audience, but it's not something that's easy to do well. And if you fail, you fail harder than if you tried to satisfy them. (And I don't mean "fail" in the cool, edgy way Ron is trying to romanticise -- I mean fail in the "leaves audience feeling meh" kind of way.) The worst way Ron could end Return to Monkey Island would be to try and "top" his ending for MI2. At this point it's become expected. "Oh gee, Guybrush is just series of computer signals in the computer I'm playing -- how meta!" or "Oh gee, Guybrush is a construct of the author and the audience -- how meta!" or "Oh gee, Guybrush is really the player wanting to be somewhere else, but why do I want to be somewhere else? What does that say about modern living? How meta!" I can also see the game attempting to walk a tightrope between "is this reality, or is it just a child's dream?" the entire time. Like that episode of Buffy from 20 years ago which did exactly that ("Normal Again") or that movie K-Pax. Right now I'd challenge Ron to give Return to Monkey Island a good story and satisfying ending. If Ron resisted the urge to try and provoke the audience and focussed instead on crafting a good story. That would surprise me. I think if you're deliberately trying to provoke ranty emails in 20 year's time, there's something disingenuous about that. With MI2 the ending truly came out of nowhere because that's how it was discovered: It just appeared one day and felt right to Ron. I think provocative endings have their place, but the truth is that once you've made the audience care what happens, it's easy to be provocative: Just don't give what they hope to see. Voila! A provocative ending. Unfortunately when such an ending is expected it's no longer provocative. This is just a long way of me saying: I love Monkey Island for the world, the characters and the story. I didn't love it just for the few minutes at the end of Monkey 2. So, you know, don't fuck this up, Ron! Watch Ron's whole keynote here: UPDATE: July 2022. I actually replayed THIMBLEWEED Park and completely revised my opinion of it, and its ending. In short: I found it completely different the second time around and LOVED it. I was as surprised as anyone. So my reservations about Gilbert and endings has totally changed. I think (well, hope) that he’ll give the Return a proper ending, rather than just one that will calculatedly divide fans. I’m far less worried, anyway!

I can’t recall the interview that’s from but I asked some of the other Mojo folks and they backed me up. To my memory it was a random pirate who ended up looking George-like, then that rumor started and was canonized in the Special Edition… but again, I can’t remember the source of this story.

Of course there was not a 100% set in stone story but there has to be a blue print, a skeleton of the story. Elaine marrying Guybrush would invalidate it.

A story that’s never told cannot be ruïned. 😉

Hi, everybody! In the first place I would like to be sorry for my bad English (I'm Spanish). I will try my best. Pardon me if I make many mistakes. The most important thing is to share my happiness with you since a new Monkey Island game has been announced (and Ron is back!). I think this is an echo in the history of video games and graphic adventures. Fans have been waiting this moment since 30 years or more... I can't believe it yet... But it's great. I'm not very fond of the art style (I wouldn't like Guybrush was very alike to Animal Crossing characters), but... maybe even with that art style everything could work if the atmosphere was right (as many of you have stated before). But it's amazing that Ron is going to make his "Monkey 3" at last. I still remember the interviews with him many years ago, when people asked him about "the secret of Monkey Island". I remember very fondly the long nights reading forums and posts about theories and analysis of the game. The ending of Monkey Island 2 was such a great moment in the history of video games and it had many heads blown up XD. I have replayed the first two games many times, trying to figure out the secret or looking for more clues. Back in the day, reading the clues in Ron's interviews was amazing, it made you to think about the secret a lot. I specially liked to thing about the anachronisms, since Ron Gilbert stated that they were important and hid a secret in the games. I hope we have an answer for good, we deserve it after 30 years pondering this great mystery. I a gree with everybody here about the special/creepy/mysterious atmosphere of the first two games. I love Monkey 3 and 4 (Tales not so much, but I liked it), but there is something definitely different about the first two adventures. There is something weird and magical at the same time. I haven't felt anything similar with the others Monkey Island, just with the first two. It's just that, what you were saying, a creepy feeling below the Monkey head... That kind of thing is amazing. I remember that, when I played the games for the first time, I felt very uncomfortable at Mr. Rogers house... And that skeleton on the bath with that music. Even the tunnel inside the waterfall of Phatt Island made me feel nervous. It was a great feeling of mystery, as if something were lurking in the dark along the whole game. It's difficult to explain. And, of course, the great and unique ending of Monkey 2 has a brilliant feeling and atmosphere. For me, the soundtrack in this point is absolutely outstanding. I'm still trying to figure out why a elevator would lend you to the lonely alley of Mëlée Island... Too many questions. I love the comments on this post. I love the comments about Monkey 2 feeling depressing because Ron wanted to tell us something. If you remember, Guybrush lost even all his treasures at the beginning of the game. It's as if almost everything in Monkey 2 was a dark and a depressing version of what we lived in Monkey 1... Who knows. Anyway, I would like to write more things, but I'm a mess with English and my brain is steaming right now. Take care and I hope everybody enjoy this new Monkey Island game. I'm looking forward it!

Gonna be honest, if this helps bringing back adventure games to a more important place in the games industry, I'll be happy. But I don't think the series needs to be resurrected more than this. Sure, a new MI is always fantastic, but milking it more is probably not a good idea once Ron reveals everything. I'm hoping more for, say, a Maniac Mansion 3 after RMI. I just don't think Monkey Island 15 would be a good idea, it's not Final Fantasy. Or maybe spin-offs of the MI series, or even spin-offs from Grim Fandango (NOT sequels) or a Full Throttle 2. Just no more "pure" MI sequels unless Ron really wants to make more, that'd be different obviously.

I get what people say about CMI, and I understand the sentiment. But that game gets a pass from me because of everything it puts to the table. The art style, animation, cinematography, atmosphere, humour, voice acting (which was a first), music and everything was so top notch, not to mention it had to start from the point where Ron left it, (which must've been really hard). CMI has the disadvantage of not being made by the original creator, but makes up for it in all other fields. EMI... not so much.

I've got it! The game begins with a cutscene. Guybrush is at the Big Whoop carnival. He becomes lost. The Voodoo Lady appears, telling him he has the option to turn left or turn right. His choice in this moment will change his destiny. "And... what happens if I turn left?" "You'll find the Big Whoop dodgems. Be careful! I hear one of them is not securely fastened!" ... "Uh huh. And what if I turn right?" "Who knows..." ... "Sounds cool! I'll take it!" The game begins.