Jake

Correct choice made

YES

The EGA closeup portraits look really damn close to the box art for Monkey Island 1, and the way the Monkey Head and LeChuck’s ship look are also a close match. Monkey 1 and its box art do look very similar. The box art was drawn by one of the primary background and character artists on the game. It’s closer to a Struzan-style poster for a movie (imagining a heightened moment that doesn’t exist and/or a dreamlike collage), than to Mega Man (wildly and wholly unrelated), to me. I think the aftermarket VGA portraits have forever made the MI1 box and the game feel misaligned, but they aren’t. With Monkey 2 things start to separate more, for sure.

This is a cool example. Good stuff. If you arrange these in a line as CMI, MI2, MI1, Phatt Island town is literally a gradient transition, starting on the right with an angular building that pokes out off its foundation like Melee town, and ending on the left with swoopy expressive lines.

Devolver also does some physical releases through a different limited run-style company. I hope someone does one.

I have to remember “if this was 1996, instead of exploding all over the comments section, these people would have seen these images in PC gamer, said ‘oh well,’ and gone about their lives,” and try to make myself do the same when I see the comments.

Yeah, there’s no such thing as a Steam exclusivity window.

“Monkey Island One” - Xbox style. I made those zoom-outs! It was something I’d had in my head for years as something I wanted Monkey Island to try, especially if it ever went full 3D. I loved the maps in Monkey Island 2 especially, how you could see tiny Guybrush on them, and he’d walk under and over parts of the canopy cover. It felt somehow like I was there, very easy to imagine actually walking through the island as the one or two pixels that said “Guybrush” slowly traversed the screen. I thought literally flying up through the clouds from the game scene to the map could potentially accentuate that feeling. (Unfortunately Tales had basically no budget for the maps so they look pretty cheap, especially Flotsam, but I’m glad I got to try the effect.) Given ReMI’s scrapbook vibes I don’t expect the exact same feeling from the maps (no game but 2 has given me that feeling to be honest, even Curse which also had the helicopter view for its map screens) but I’m sure they’ll be beautifully made.

Once they say Marius’ animation they had to release the trailer to stay relevant.

If people want a spoiler free anticipation thread we can add one, but I’m not sure how much use it’ll get.

I think it’s safe to assume that’s a bombastic track whipped up just for the trailer. Love hearing a new version of the theme though.

The new website is so good.

These are clearly deeply early, they look like layout passes bounced straight out of Maya (3D animation program) as a playblast preview.

When I finally got glasses a decade ago I was deeply upset that I could see the pixels in theatrical screenings. What a ripoff!

The story was always supposed to have a sea monster eat you in the third episode (mermaids and sea monsters were seemingly always part of the story because of the overall “edge of the map” theme), but I am responsible for it being a manatee. I said the words “giant manatee” in a story meeting basically as a joke, and then it got a ton of traction and I learned my lesson of never contributing an idea you yourself don’t like because you might be forced to live with it. I think it turned out well even though it’s on the goofy side, the writers came up with some of my favorite set pieces and writing within that constraint, and we took it upon ourselves to try and make the appearance of the manatee as scary as possible at the end of 2 start of 3, but there’s no changing it being a manatee. There’s lots of fun concept art of the sea monster in all sorts of forms, ranging from giant terrifying angler fish to lovable borderline-plush manatee, and we landed somewhere in the middle.