Jake

The reason is I did that green swirly design before the game art was done so I didn’t really think about it. Then realized too late I should have done it.

Which AI tool are you using for this?

Anyway, I’ve always liked that the stairwell into the Bloody Lip is dark, and the characters get dark when walking through it. It’s a detail that immediately made Woodtick seem like a real place I was existing in with the characters.

I have to imagine LucasArts management was interested in reviving Monkey as a franchise and it was all at least partly strategic on their end, even if it came from seeing some unrelated opportunities and tying them together. But at Telltale, we didn’t feel like part of some strategy, we were just happy to be making a new Monkey game, and happy that LucasArts was interested in adventures and the IP enough again to be doing two projects at once.

My memory is too faint to be useful, sorry. I feel like LucasArts must have known about their own SE when they signed with Telltale, but I don’t feel like the Tales team really knew the SEs were a thing. (I feel like if we had, there would have been more synergy with the voice casting, eg not beating around the bush with whether Boen is in it, making sure we use the Curse voodoo lady actor, etc). My memory is that the SE came out after Tales, but that Tales was in preproduction before the SE was announced (and we didn’t really know about the SE or what it was until it was announced). I may be misremembering and we knew it all, and my memory has just eroded, but I don’t think so.

Yeah, when Tales was made it was Lucasfilm’s decision to rebrand and update the Monkey Island IP, and they wanted Tales to be part of that. Disney-era Lucasfilm seems to have decided the original logo was already doing a good job of representing the IP so the new logo has been re-binned (or reserved for the SEs).

👕 I beat #Mojole #90 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Most of the changes are, IMO, pretty minor. The details of many scenes have changed over what is now decades of revision, but the mood of the ride is fundamentally unchanged. Some recent updates have actually removed some of the movie content and reinstated some of the original audio, and even added some tiny setpiece details in line with the original 60s character designs and style: The dark hallway with the voice saying “dead men tell no tales” and audio of a scared pirate telling you you’ve seen too much and are cursed, was for a while replaced with a video projection of Davy Jones or Blackbeard, but those projector scenes have been removed, the original audio reinstated, and a small vignette added of a skeleton pirate turning into a real pirate as you pass in the boat, and it’s a wonderfully simple trick done with a mirror split down the middle: It directly precedes the reveal of the huge ship vs fort setpiece, a tiny transition moment as you leave the skeleton vignettes for the “real world.” With Pirates I think it’s easy to obsess over the details, and I understand when people have a favorite moment removed or swapped out for something else, but I think the overall tone of the ride is currently in really good shape.

Wow, that’s wild.

A few more pieces of Disneyland art: the map to Tom Sawyer’s Island, which has always been very evocative of the early Monkey Island maps (especially Monkey 2’s maps) and was @Trapezzoid recently re-shared in the Return thread. And some promotional imagery for the Swiss Family Treehouse attraction at Disneyland, which is very directly alluded to as a location on Booty Island in 2. Also, more generally, if you like the cartooney-with-a-very-slight-edge-of-menace vibe of Monkey Island’s pirates, it’s always worth looking through the galleries of original concept art for the Pirates of the Carribbean ride, all of which is excellent. Here are a couple: I know there is plenty outside Disney parks, but it’s something I’m familiar with!

In the unpopular opinions thread there was recently talk about the original vs the SE logos, and it had me start digging up logos from the Pirates of the Carribbean rides, and that took me down a number of rabbit holes until I ended up looking at posters for an old adventure movie (maybe a serial?) called “The Secret of Treasure Island.” I didn’t really know where to post it so I am making a new thread for cultural ephemera that is Monkey Island-ish. Note I’m not claiming these are things that are a confirmed direct influence on the game. Unless cited by a creator, that is impossible to assume, but I think it’s fun to find things that have been in the air, in the cultural consciousness, as predecessors operating in the same space, or things that in retrospect just “feel Monkey Island-ish.” First up are just a few of the logos used for the Pirates of the Carribbean rides (which are fun for how varied they are, and how they all seem “piratey” in different ways) and a couple posters and title cards for “The Secret of Treasure Island,” which while more crude than Monkey Island, are definitely evocative of the cover paintings for the first two games.

I think the logo getting more explicitly piratey is a net negative. It makes the possibility space imagined when you look at the logo much smaller. The original is just so crisply designed. It implies a grand scale adventure, and a certain level of attention to detail, and even creative restraint, that you don’t often see in a logo design. When it’s paired with the cover art on the box, it makes the whole thing seem potentially larger than what is depicted. The SE logo knows exactly what it is - a slightly cartooney pirate story - and is worse off for it. I don’t think the On Stranger Tides comparison is apt. Even though it, like the SE logo, has some tattered edges, the Tides logo is still crisp and carries menace. The SE logo is using those visual wear “pirate” signifiers to be playful and disarming, to evoke expressive brushstrokes, etc. Not really the same to my eye.

This was a baffling round for me because of what went green when it did. Weird letters. 👕 I beat #Mojole #89 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤🖤💚🖤 💚🖤🖤💚💚 💚💚🖤💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

That’s awesome! Looks great.

It was such a sadness, being told we had to use the new logo for Tales. I was glad to see Return… return to the original.

It’s rough The later telltale games do away with pretending to be point and click at all, and the earlier telltale games ARE point and click, but this middle ground of fake-direct-control-but-in-a-point-and-click-world is so rough to go back to. Unfortunately it includes Tales of MI and Sam & Max Season 3, two of my favorite Telltale games. I think it’s inaccurate to call this a “telltale thing,” as it only truly happens in Tales of Monkey Island and was 100% due to size limitations of WiiWare games. In the Telltale Sam & Max games for example, the characters say what you pick with very few shortcuts taken (unless it’s a joke that your choice is subverted). Even the later Tales of MI chapters drop this, because it turned out to not save much space but created a notably bad experience. Telltale had plenty of cut corners but this wasn’t actually regularly one of them, it just really sticks out when it occurs, especially in Tales of MI chapter 1. I have no memory of it ending in a weird place, but agree it’s a sad arrangement. I think the music in Tales is under-appreciated because the actual final production of it is done so cheaply, but much of the composition and style of it is really good. The main theme, not as much. I replayed all of Tales last month and had the same reaction. Even when working on it I felt like the puzzles were a little lightweight but replaying it, they’re way more legit than I remember. The presence of jungle mazes is never ever my favorite, but maybe with those aside, I think time has been kind to Tales’ difficulty level. The reuse will always drive me crazy. It’s a thing that Telltale was known for (and was done because new character rigs and acting animation suites are actually very expensive to produce) but in Tales it went into absolute overdrive. The combination of the cast size needed for just the main characters, plus the Wii’s 40 megabyte limit for downloadable games, made it nasty. As you said Winslow is one of the more egregious ones. I don’t think it was known that he’d be a recurring character until the season was underway (but even if it was know, I don’t think he would have got a new model because we were out of both budget and disk space). Same, I was surprised on replay to be reminded of how much there was. Probably the most music interactivity in any Telltale game? I know the team worked hard to do it. There’s no formal interactive music tools in Telltale’s pipeline, or weren’t until post 2013 when I left, so instead gameplay programmers had to write their own music managers in LUA. That code got pretty advanced in Tales and Sam & Max S3, but was mostly gone by The Walking Dead, when music had devolved back down to largely being single loops or fire-and-forget stingers. I like that flotsam town’s music changes as you walk around, and then changes again when the pox blows in.

Haha thank you! I’ve always been here. I was on Mojo and these forums for years before working at telltale

(Moved some posts about anticipating the trailer to the trailer anticipation thread.)

👕 I beat #Mojole #87 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤💚🖤 💚💚💚💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

😬 Eep ook ack! I failed at #Mojole #86. 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚💚🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚🖤 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

That looks fantastic!

Guybrush talks to himself when alone and is 50% of most all conversations, so him having half-ish the script is probably the norm.

Loom speedrun 144fps uncapped let’s go

This looks awesome! The font you picked looks good but if you’re looking to mess around, you could try Post Antiqua Roman, which is the font used on the original disks and manual, if you want it to feel like an official piece of merchandise, though it might end up looking too “samey” in this context.