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Just watched this interesting video about the history of SOMI speedrunning, and thought I may as well make a topic in case anyone else has any fun stuff to share. The only other one I could think of off the top of my head is this one of Double Fine staff inviting a speedrunner to their studio to show them some strats:

It's true! You can use the dog insult straight away in the swordfighting bit if you get him to say this. This whole piece of conversation acts as a bit of a primer to the insult swordfighting concept, really. You can either "defeat" the troll with an insult he has no comeback for, "lose" with "Oh yeah?" (which ends the conversation) or end up with a middle result, where he gives you the insult above. It has no impact on how you get past him, of course!

What, you're too good to open ScummVM yourself now? Got to get your minions to do your dirty work? 😡 Well, luckily for you it's been a long time since I played Passport to Adventure, and I was intrigued! The other doors do work as shortcuts, apart from the one that gets you onto the town walls and the one housing the mysterious rubber chicken shoppe. Which is awesome, and a thing I'd totally forgotten happens! Super cool.

I love the way bright sunny daylight looks in Monkey Island 2. The way the light bounces and reflects is so satisfying and warm. Phatt Island town especially looks so good in its original painting. There’s also a little tiny hint of Day of the Tentacle in the “Library” sign.

MI2's art is scanned and digitized kind of poorly IMO. The retouches are minimal, they left in a lot of grain and smudginess. By DOTT and Sam & Max their process got a lot cleaner. Those games' paintings are totally repixeled over with solid colors and handpicked palettes, using the scanned artwork as more of a guide layer for the final pixel art.

I do think a lot about the unintentional side effect of low res art. Obviously the artists would have wanted their art scanned and rendered in the game in the highest resolution available, but at the time that was pretty low, but that had the side effect of us as players imagining more details than were there, and mentally inserting a sort of 'graininess' to the art that was quite unintentional, and growing attached to that. Of course, I'm not saying that's the ONLY difference between the old art and this stuff, but I do think it's interesting that as soon as I pixelate the art, my brain adjusts and goes 'yes, that's an adventure game background like how I remember'

I posted this sketch before but thought I'd share it here too. I tried to predict what Guybrush would look like based on Rex's previous art. I'm probably way off, but fun to guess. 😁