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I know I’m late to this, but I think it’s an interesting area. With regard to the CMI team’s perspective on MI2’s ambiguity: I always figured that literalizing its predecessor’s ending was more about making a judgment call not to disappoint what they perceived were the audience’s expectations (“What’s this soluble daydream hokum doing in my pirate game?”), rather than it necessarily representing a personal distaste or rejection of the innuendos Ron was making. Skirting that stuff may have in fact been partly out of respect, with the thinking being “Only Ron can wrap up whatever it is he was driving that, so we’ll just proceed from the escape hatch we were given instead of trying to divine intentions he himself might not have mapped out.” Which, by Ron’s own admission, he in fact hadn’t. Maybe I’m giving too much credit for forward-thinking here, but just look at the way, by intention or by accident, things worked out in the end: Ron was able to complete the statement he was making without having to pretend the other games didn’t exist. Those interim sequels successfully kept the bench warm for the creator’s eventual return -- they didn’t override Ron’s vision so much as postpone it, and it’s probably ungenerous to think this happened entirely by dumb luck. Every team brought their own tastes to the way they grappled with that shoddy seventeenth century electrical wiring, but it was grappled with. CMI seems to have the reputation of being the Monkey Island game that steers the clearest of the meta-angle that Ron was toiling in, but I think it’s a little underappreciated in this regard. It definitely carries the torch of the first two games in terms of perpetuating that surrealistic undercurrent, the anachronism/fourth wall jokes, and the near-constant theme park evocations. Both Plunder Island and Blood Island have plenty of Disneyland nods both subtle and overt, and of course the entire final act takes place at a danged theme park. The fact is, a game that truly flouted the weirdness of the series and insisted on being a pureblood, risk-adverse pirate adventure with an inflexibly straight face would not look like CMI. We know Ron wouldn’t have made CMI, but that game’s team was neither unconscious nor careless about recognizing the substructure going on in his games, in my opinion, and they made an earnest attempt to do that aspect justice. In the wake of Ron finally getting to have his say after thirty years, I actually find myself more impressed than ever with the ways the middle chapters walked that tricky line they were lumbered with.

But wait, there’s more!

I've finally got around to doing a full release of Thimbleweed Park Explorer, or as its now known Dinky Explorer. Thanks mainly to the hard work of one man reverse engineering machine Jan Frederick it now fully supports ReMI, including images, sounds and decompiling the scripts. It even allows patching of the weird.dink script to do things like enabling debug mode features. I'm looking forward to seeing people create their own patches and sharing them. More details and download here.

Hi! I’ve not posted here probably in 15+ years but it’s nice to come back and talk some MI. Having finally finished the game I’m just delighted by how wonderfully well this bookends and recontextualizes all of the MI games. The themes running through it were much stronger than I expected and on a meta level it just resonated a LOT. It’s an amazing design feat that not only does RTMI feel satisfying in itself, but it also manages to kind of rescramble and reinsert a whole bunch of stuff from the previous games in a way that’s incredibly pleasing (in part because some elements are left sufficiently ambigious). My head canon is having a great time right now. I do still have two reactions. By far my strongest one is that I love what it’s done on a higher level. On a lower level I guess not everything worked as well (at least not all of the time). It's not really the most important level of experience for me at this point, especially considering this game comes 13 years after the previous MI games, so I find the meta stuff delicious and accept it wholeheartedly, but I'm still thinking of the surface-level experience as well. RTMI being so much about looking back reminds me why I like the stories of earlier games which weren’t quite yet as layered in meaning. I enjoyed MI1 and MI2 precisely because they were stuck deeper inside their own little worlds (and, well, I was also a kid back then). In the early games it was nice that you got to inhabit a pirate story book that, while not taking itself at all seriously, did spend quite a bit of time with character and world-building. Slowly peeling that stuff back was really fun. I enjoyed Chapters 1 and 2 the most in this regard while exploring the world and getting to know LeChuck’s crew. In Chapter 4 it felt like the islands were too obviously thematic and in service of the puzzles. A lack of story/location detail made this chapter less interesting to me. It’s a pity as structurally it was the closest to MI2’s “Four Map Pieces” which is probably my favorite MI chapter. In RTMI the reward comes a lot more from the meta-narrative aspects than what’s inside this particular glass bottle itself. I don’t think that matters too much in the end though and I’m very happy this game exists. What it has to say is ultimately far more important and rewarding. If an MI7 ever gets made (which feels hugely optional) it could decide to focus on telling more of a stand alone story, though I would hope the meta elements are still at least acknowledged or hinted at. I must confess when the art style was first shown I had some doubts (I’ve been known historically to, uhh, have dumb kneejerk reactions to art styles 👀👀). It was more angular and DOTT-like than I’ve associated with MI but I very quickly warmed up to it and came to love it. It’s really really nice to play an MI game again and to be so wonderfully surprised. Thanks also to Dominic for doing such a wonderful job voicing Guybrush again

Hi all, Juste update the back with some in-game images I've taken. I think it's the final version ! Next step: printing the box !

👕 I beat #Mojole #244 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 💚🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💛💛💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I don't care what the group wants 😉 Outlaws might be one of the next projects.

Well, it only hit me today listening to the song playing while reading Guybrush's journal, that it's the music from Secret, Part II: The Journey! And I just marveled at how well they did that. It's a recap of all of Guybrush's journeys up to this point, so what tune could be more fitting? Well played, Land. Well played.

What I also really like about this is, that it even canonizes various fangames, e.g. The Devil's Triangle (I don't know if anybody here has played it too, or if there is even still a way to find them these days). There were some that I played and enjoyed tremendously back in the day, which try to fill in the gaps between e.g. MI1 and MI2 (how did Guybrush end up with all this money and how did he split up with Elaine?). Hypothetically somebody, or really, multiple independent people, could make fangames with the goal of ticking all the boxes on Ron's "If I made another Monkey Island" blog post. And all of them are kind of canonized by Return to Monkey Island, since they are all possible stories that Guybrush could have made up in the theme park, that he daydreamed about, that he told Boybrush, that Boybrush is reenacting, or that might just have actually happened, and it's up to a fan to pick and choose what stories they like best. Monkey Island is no longer a series of games with a strict canon, with Return it entered the realm of mythology, where you can make up all sorts of stories featuring the Gods and explore their core personalities and interactions from so many different angles, that it doesn't matter what the canon is, you're simply using mythical characters of legend to tell a good story, or explore some scenario that nobody might have thought of before, and some fans might elevate to the status of "plausible enough to be canon" and others might simply get a good story out of it regardless. What sours this a bit is that I am quite sure Disney is quite likely to crack down on such fangames than the old Lucasfilm would have been back in the day ;_;

Very cool interview from her once again! My thoughts: - The long visit from Stan is starting to have an impact on Ron's style to dress. - I like that Ron cleared up about the ending and the amusement park thing (even though I was pretty sure that's exactly what happened). - I like even better that Ron told a bit about how the beginning of ReMI came about. Since its release, I had always wondered if he had such a resolution in mind all along (the ending being subtly altered and re-enacted by child-Guybrush or other children) , since it was so important for him to start with it. I'm quite surprised that the resolution only came about in the process of ReMI and I think it's beautiful! It shows how open Ron is to "dead ends" and how optimistic he is that a good resolution will eventually come (good lesson for me). AND it shows that the two of them are just very good storytellers. - What I like best is how Ron (once again) raves about his team and especially about Dave. You can really tell that this game (and probably the others as well) is very much about teamwork for him. Till ReMI, I often had the impression that he was very stubborn with his ideas and their execution. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all. - The original original Monkey Island (realization of being in an amusement park and a showdown with the proprietor would have been veeeery different - and interesting! But I'm glad they went with another direction.