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I started putting together a script to assemble the backgrounds. An example of the output: It'll take some work to put in place the logic for some of the more complex locations, but I'll be looking at it over the next week or so.

Two quasi-obscure jokes in CMI, especially for non-Americans: This is aboard the Sea Cucumber, which you may recall is the ship captained by an ape. The joke here is a reference to an old series of commercials by American Tourister, a luggage company. The durability of their product was advertised by depicting a suitcase thrown into a cage with an angry gorilla, which attempts to destroy it to no avail. It was an oft-parodied pop culture image -- this MST3K host segment being an example (look in the background). This line is triggered when you "Talk" to the pepper found by the Blood Island windmill. It's a catch-phrase from the NBC series Police Woman (1974-1978). Its titular heroine was Sgt. "Pepper" Anderson, who routinely went undercover on the orders of her superior, Bill Crowley. Dom's delivery is an impression of him. I think CMI in general is a little undersung when it comes to how stuffed full of tiny details it is. The first two games were made under circumstances that made it plausible to alter content up until the last minute, and the improvisatory possibilities were taken advantage of. CMI’s production required certain things to be locked down upfront, in particular the list of rooms, the puzzle chain, and the cutscene script. However, when it came to wiring the rooms, and thus writing all the interactive dialog (only like 90% of the game’s script), it seems that the programmers were given a similar kind of free reign and generous timeline for embedding jokes as they went, and it’s a huge part of the sense of density and polish that CMI boasts. Chuck Jordan and Chris Purvis deserve more credit than they probably usually get for serving a role similar to the one Tim and Dave did in 1990.

https://scummbar.com/game/the-curse-of-monkey-island/trivia What do you mean shameless plug? 😒

New DREAMM beta is up: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm New in 3.0b7: * Many improvements to GDI support, including proper support for bitmap brushes * Broader font support, including auto-generation of bold/italic fonts * Most SWSE screen savers run fine now, except that Poster Art crashes occasionally * Fixed bad memory leak that led to Windows crashes * Fixed detection of size updates, which should fix Jedi Knight/MotS user interface * Fixed Indy Desktop weirdness

And there it is: I've added two versions of Steve Purcell's cover art for "Herc's Adventures":

And today he covered Curse! I really can't say enough good things about Jimmy Maher. He makes this stuff so compelling, really weaving all these disparate strands into a cohesive narrative about not just how the industry grew and changed in its formative years, but why, and what each development meant. I sometimes disagree with his takes on individual games, but rarely with his reasoning for them.

The first LucasArts-dedicated article in a few years has turned up, this one about Jedi Knight.

Oh nice! That looks good. I'll be interested to see how it tackles the more complicated backgrounds. I am not smart enough to script, so I gave Dinky Explorer / Thimblemonkey a go and ripped some backgrounds and their elements. But it's probably even more difficult to put all those seperate elements & effects together. Started with LeShip, but kinda gave up half way through 😅 Pasting together screenshots is always an option as well. Perhaps a combination of both works best, to get rid of the characters while keeping most of the effects. I'll also play around with the aspect ratio to see what results that gives.

New DREAMM beta available: aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/ SWSE and SWChess Windows are unlocked but there are lots of problems, so don't bother reporting any bugs to me on these. SWSE also needs manual extraction from the installer. Many improvements Windows support, specifically 16-bit Windows: Can now load multiple 16-bit tasks together in the same address space Hooked up midiOut and 16-bit multimedia timer multimedia support Implemented many new GDI features, including support for non-solid brushes and binary ROPs Added support for owner-draw listboxes and better messages for 16-bit controls INI files are now read/written from actual INI files instead of using registry proxy 16-bit nametable resources now support type renaming as well New partially working "game": Star Wars Screen Entertainment (still crashes in spots but works partially) New non-working game: Star Wars Chess, Windows (loads fine but won't let you play) Indy Desktop/Yoda Stories now provide their own wavemix.ini configuration settings Disabled video options for DIG95 version of The Dig Fixed bug in GDI line drawing logic that sometimes caused a hang Fixed improper fault when fetching 80-bit floating point values from read-only segments Fixed crash when launching the DOS version of The Dig It's on the list of things to look at post-3.0. Hmmm, hoping to find a solution to this soon. Thanks for the report.

It's hard to find extracted, but now that the installer is supported, it should be pretty easy to track down. Amazing! Got your DM, will try to make these all work soon. Yeah, it's hard to present this info nicely when you don't have a command line interface like MAME. I agree it would be nicer if it gave you some hints about what is not matching. Maybe I can add a button you can click to drop that info on the clipboard or something.

It’s amazing that 25+ years later there’s still new details that I am learning about this game.

New DREAMM beta is now available: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta New in 3.0b9: * Added support for Star Wars Screen Entertainment installers * Extended internal scripting language to auto-navigate the SWSE installer * Enabled key configuration for Dark Forces GOG (needs reinstall) and Dark Forces Demo * Improved behavior of minimized windows for Windows games * Improved system menu behavior for Windows games * Removed unsupported video options in Indy Fate Talkie * Removed unsupported audio options in Secret of Monkey Island CD * Fixed subtle memory corruption that led to crashes in Behind the Magic and Episode 1 Insider's Guide * Fixed crash in SWSE Posters module due to memory trashing * Fixed bug in FXAM that led to incorrect shadow effect in SWSE Rebel Clock * Completed internal reorg to help reduce crashes on quit in Windows games

Thanks to @Scummbuddy's beautiful scans, I've finally started work on this: It looks like the one above was a preliminary version of the art, with further additions and changes painted by Purcell after the fact: Eventually, I'll try to offer both versions.

For completeness sake I should probably work on that one as well, no matter how ugly it is. So, if you can get me a proper scan, go for it! Edit: Oof... one's worse than the other.

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Only seeing this now, any chance for proper 600dpi scans of that centerfold EMI poster? Might make for a worthy addition to the poster project.

Ahoy there, I also always liked this promotional image from Escape. It has a nice atmosphere, but I could never find a decent sized version somewhere online. I used some upscaling software and tried to clean up the image a little bit, best as I could. It's far from perfect but looks allright. Also boosted the colors up a little bit; thought I would share my experiment:

Was just looking through this thread and was surprised to see nobody has uploaded some of the Ghanaian LucasArts cover art yet...

👕 I beat #MojoleXtremiest #741 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 2/6 🖤🖤💛💛💛🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

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It's a hidden gem, basically Zombies Ate My Neighbors meets Greek mythology. We ought to publish a review some day.

DM sent, but it seems you haven't read it yet, and I'm also adding Japanese Yoda Stories and Screen Entertainment.

I want to bring some attention to Jimmy Maher’s superb and ongoing interactive entertainment chronicle at The Digital Antiquarian. Though the articles devoted to LucasArts represent only a selective fraction of his overall exploration of game history, they amount to a superior work of scholarship about our favorite subject, replete with rare photographs and can’t-be-found-anywhere-else anecdotes. I get the sense Maher’s achievement hasn’t been as trumpeted as it should have been, so as a public service here’s the full list of all the LucasArts-relevant pieces he’s published so far: A New Force in Games, Part 1: Fractal Dreamers July 10, 2015 A New Force in Games, Part 2: A Habitat in Cyberspace July 17, 2015 A New Force in Games, Part 3: SCUMM July 24, 2015 The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design (or, Why Ron Gilbert Hated Adventure Games) July 31, 2015 Loom (or, how Brian Moriarty Proved That Less is Sometimes More) February 18, 2017 Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) March 10, 2017 Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (or, Of Movies and Games and Whether the Twain Shall Meet) September 28, 2018 Day of the Tentacle June 7, 2019 Sam and Max Hit the Road June 21, 2019 The Second Coming of Star Wars February 5, 2021 Full Throttle July 2, 2021 The Dig July 23, 2021 Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe) April 5, 2024 The Curse of Monkey Island April 19, 2024

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Wow those are incredible. I mean, they are bad! But in a fun way. It’s rare to see games get the “bizarre off-model international movie poster” treatment, but its here in spades.

That's great! I confirm that Grim Fandango works perfectly now! This is incredible ^_^

I think I can also be a help here too.

Hi all ! Following the "hot" discussion last month on the thread "Project Big boxes", I decided to create a small website called Big Box Love to share my work on some bigboxes restoration. https://www.bigboxlove.eu You'll find manuals, logos, big boxes in TIFF file and more. I mainly share 600 to 1200DPI PNG , JPG and Tif files. Be gentle, I'm not a designer and I don't have the skills of @Laserschwert but its my contribution to the preservation of those wonderful years of gaming ! My first idea was to share it as a Pack.ly ready-to-print file but the raised their price and I didn't find a easy way to flatten all layers in one so I decided to share TIF files for the boxes. But my first work was on manuals restoration and I'll keep adding more medias. Positive feedbacks are appreciated so I can improve the website according to your ideas and my time. Hope you'll enjoy it ! Have a nice day ! PS: Nearly finished the golden axe poster and heretic box restoration . Stay tuned !

I think that looks good. Going by assumption, it'd be hard to perfectly put together the backgrounds from assets because of the dynamic light sources, etc. I was going to look at doing it programmatically -- minus aforementioned complexities -- but haven't gotten around to it yet.

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I confirm MOTS and JK work pas menus now.

After 2000, many LucasGames were just developed externally, by Raven or the Collective, or worse console-only games. As a true part of LucasGames portfolio, I would be more enthusiastic to see Secret Weapon of Normandy made by Totally Games.

My conversation with Ken Macklin is now available on Spotify (with video) / Apple Podcasts / Castbox / Amazon Music! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/danielalbu As always, you can watch it on YouTube, if you wish: https://youtu.be/EUA_xe1WL0A?si=naWZopi97Vi4PUY-

Free keys: H7ICK-RGT4G-WVAW8 FEI9F-EDFYA-WFFZ0 GQHDQ-ZV0LW-C4NEY FPH4K-A5JRC-TG4QJ FZ5R9-FD042-CQ5X5 HCZFZ-QWCY3-JH55Q Please say if you've redeemed them.

Thank you! I just took the last one, Spy Fox in: Dry Cereal 🙂 The kids will love it!

The larger ones contain a readme file along with the game files. That seems to be the only difference. And the folders contain the same game files as the zips. There's no secret director's cuts that I can discern!

My conversation with Michael Land is now available on Spotify (with video) / Apple Podcasts / Castbox / Amazon Music! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/danielalbu You can also watch it on YouTube, if you wish: https://youtu.be/uHqAG8CLblA?si=YkrUV5fD8q2trGHF

I checked it out and I can confirm that I'm also experiencing the whole "debug mode" thing with Grim Fandango in the latest beta version. I found this website, which has some information about the game's debug mode, in case it can be of assistance: https://tcrf.net/Grim_Fandango

Thanks, Aaron. I can't solve the problem even deleting REGISTRY.REG. I don't know if it's only an issue of mine or not. I have even uninstalled the last stable version. I have checked the AppData directory (and the subdirectories named 'Local', 'LocalLow' and 'Roaming') and deleted the 'aarongiles' folder. With everything clean, I have installed DREAMM 3.0b4. Then, the program asked me to search the folder with the games and everything went allright, Grim was installed. But the game keeps being in debug mode. I have push Shift + P and Manny jumps to the end of the game, the Act 4, near the fountain that is like an ashtray. I don't know if I have to delete any other file in any other directory or if it's something that only happens in my computer.

Here's a compilation of most of the logos and typography I've recreated in high-res over the years. It's always fun re-building these things or researching which fonts were used for taglines or subtitles.

I hope it "confuses"

And you guys thought the question was settled.