Jake

I'm also a big fan of Stan's theme. This is a rare arrangement found on the PS2 copy of Escape From Monkey Island. Ultimately they must have gone a different direction This guy must have learned it from the PC speaker version. Amazingly Resident Evil VII used the Stan theme for one of their central pieces of music And you know, I always love world of fish, a true classic

Really good instrumentation in the Special Edition, I agree, but you haven't really enjoyed it until you play the older releases.

Here’s a cover of The Office from Sam & Max Season One/Save The World: I always enjoy the Neskimos cover of Phatt Island the live one has a drunk guy who is mad they skipped to monkey island 2 https://m.soundcloud.com/neskimos/monkey-island-2-phatt-island-1 but they did a studio recording as well it seems.

But Remi what do you REALLY think of Curse?

Maybe by the time of The Dig they supported tracking/kerned pairs, etc in SCUMM fonts. It would probably make regional localization and non-latin fonts easier.

Maybe what we see in these screenshots is the actual font that the in-game UI is based on, but the real font has more complex ligature data than the purely sprite-based version SCUMM supports.

I don't think it's that they refused a PDF on principle, but that they didn't have the tools to directly print a plate from a PDF, and they'd rather not do the printing and waxup themselves before they shot spreads with the camera, so they made us still do all that prep ourselves. It makes sense, was just weird in ~2002-3 to still be doing that.

Same. I was too young to work with any of this stuff when any optical process was involved, but caught the very tail end of it. So there were little relics of optical prepress around but mostly we just scanned it in. At the newspapers I worked on in the early-mid 00s, the "this used to be done very differently" showed up for just the last step: the people who operated the printing press still would refuse to accept a PDF, and instead required that all pages be delivered as full size printouts that were run through a waxer and pasted up on a gridded sheet, that they'd stand on an easel in their studio and shoot a plate of. It was really fun to have that one little "relic of the past" to some degree, but I was also very excited when they finally moved off requiring pasteup and just took a PDF via FTP. The mid 90s are probably my favorite era of tech for this reason - the mixed media stuff. Print design was a weird hybrid of digital and optical, and games were also in a huge transitionary period, moving from the pure pixel art of the 70s and 80s into something else, but not yet fully transitioned to high res or graphics card-driven imagery. So you get things like Monkey Island 2 up through Full Throttle, which are still honed at the pixel level in Deluxe Paint by people who are masters of the 320x200 canvas, but they're incorporating more and more techniques from anywhere they can find into their work. Starting with the hand painted backgrounds in MI2, up through the use of 3D combined with very traditional pencil-drawn full screen keyframe animation (which was converted into pixel art in dpaint when inked and colored!) sometimes used for sprites and sometimes used for FMV sequences and sometimes used for a hybrid of them. It's such a weird and cool era in both print and digital design.

I think you’re right on about a PC being used to overlay the fake UI. My guess is that they were done on whatever PC (or Mac, either way a 640x480 or higher res, print design focused computer) was used to set the rest of the type on the box, digitally, and inserted over the image. I don’t know why my gut says that the screenshots were printed optically (eg to slide) and then placed on the separation plates by hand at the prepress shop but that’s what it looks like to me. They have a strange glow to them that looks too crisp for being photographed off a monitor, but aren’t so crisp that they look perfectly digital. So they could be from a slide scanner - in the early 90s it was still common for entertainment companies to archive and release their marketing assets on sides, as they could be easily mailed to magazines and TV networks in a way that could reproduce very high resolution while also being durable to mail undamaged. (It was also how our junior high yearbook was built a couple years after this - we laid out all the type and background elements in pagemaker but left boxes with X’s through them where the prepress crew at the printer would properly scan, screen, and place our photos. So maybe I’m just seeing that process here because it’s one I know ) Happy to be wrong about any of this, btw. I think old print design is interesting, especially in this time when digital and analog pipelines were being mixed together out of necessity, and love trying to pick apart how people made things in this unique time.

My guess is that the ones on the white label box were what was originally printed to slide by the artists (whether captured as screenshots or exported as mock-ups from dpaint), and the stuff pasted over the top was added by the designer of the MI1 box maybe for readability. Since those changes weren’t on the slides themselves they weren’t available for the white label reprint. That doesn’t make the Spiffy shot any more guaranteed to be an in game screenshot to my eyes (it could still be dpaint image that already had big readable text suitable for a box on it which made it a good contender from marketing to get printed to slide) but it’s cool to learn about how the other images were manipulated for the original box.

Yeah, Sam & Max by way of Lethal Weapon or something.

Here's the Office track on the Telltale Sam & Max OST.

That's a good pull. The second image especially feels like it was direct inspiration for the final shot of MI1... and then got pushed even MORE towards that reference for the VGA repaint...

Just saw this on the Sam and Max subreddit and... it’s pretty great.

That big font again makes it look like digital concept art to me more than something that ever saw prime time, but who knows. I Still Want To Believe. It looks sort of like the copy protection/"Meanwhile" font, but isn't quite the same.