Jake

I don’t think anyone argued it would look like Day of the Tentacle, but that DOTT was an example of the sort of thing the art team was interested in doing, as opposed to just repeating themselves. Gilbert says almost exactly that in the blog before the part you quoted. “If I had stayed and done Monkey Island 3 it wouldn't have looked like Monkey Island 2. We would have kept pushing forward, and Day of the Tentacle is a good example of that.”

I’ve heard they’re making Loom 2 and 3 back to back! (Source)

This is probably sacrilege but when I played Thimbleweed the first thing I did was turn off the injokes using the in game setting. It felt weird to choose to see less content, but the developers put the checkbox there so I consider it fair game. There were still plenty of injokes even with the toggle flipped, but it felt more like an era appropriate level. That said, Thimbleweed Park is kind of about nostalgia, and fractally diving into itself, and being a LucasArts adventure game. eg the developers of the game appear in it as themselves, and characters can call the games hint line from within the game using working touch tone telephones that you have to dial by hand (amazing imo).

I don’t know the answer to this! Maybe he DID do an audition for zombie LeChuck and it wasn’t as strong? Or maybe the team was hoping Boen could be used just for those parts so it was cordoned off as a separate smaller role (which obviously didn’t happen at launch but wouldn’t surprise me as an attempt that was made by the team)? Honestly I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t involved in the casting really other than in the communal team pressure to get Boen back for episodes 4 and 5.

All time great easy-mode-only gag. A+++

I played Monkey Island 2 on easy mode first because other than quickly losing interest in Kings Quest V (understandable imo), it was my first adventure game. It still took me and my younger brother weeks and weeks and weeks to beat. I still remember the little differences like Largo just having some folded clothes that you can pick up, and some little incidental dialog here and there, but I agree there aren’t many additions. Because I played east first, and was 10-11 years old or something, my brother and friends and I were convinced we hadn’t seen the “real” ending. Or maybe more appropriately, I remember being suspicious of it and feeling like I hadn’t seen the whole thing. So we dove back in and played it on normal. And I remember we found it SUPER HARD. Especially putting the rat in the soup just took forever. My friend called the 900 number hint line with his parents permission, and when he called me to tell us the solution, we got to hurriedly tell him that MY BROTHER HAD JUST FIGURED IT OUT. His hint line time: wasted. I remember getting to the captain Kate stuff and feeling like the game was absolutely huge. Then we got to the end and it was exactly the same, and I remember all of us collectively saying “okay that’s what it is then.” Honestly, formative as hell haha.

I think this view discounts the existence of Game Pass. Double Fine’s medium size games seem like they’d be an awesome fit for that service.

It was always a mini CD, just packaged as a tiny record. Here's the original:

Yeah small self contained bubble communities of early internet had a lot going for them. They were only really interrelated by people consciously making an effort to do so, they had many soft bumps to entry (even something as simple as making a new account, or in the case of places like IRC channels, finding the webpage associated with them to begin with), and because of that I think people ended up getting to know each other more. Social media, for all its positives seems to mostly be predicated on introducing like-minded people to each other with no filters or speed bumps in the way. Those connections provoke unchecked radicalization of opinions, echo chambers, and drive bys. It's really easy for one to have a degenerate thought, type it into a social network search bar or post bar, and be introduced to anyone else who has typed that thought straight from their brain into a computer with nothing in between. Obviously pre-internet that was sorted by usually having to look someone in the face before saying the thought aloud and seeing what their reaction was. If you "try out" that thought on a good friend and they say "dude no, what the hell is that?" it's a hugely valuable data point for you, coming with context and trust built over the entire time you've known the person. In smaller early internet communities that was still somewhat possible to facilitate by the community memberships being relatively static where everyone knows each other, slow to grow, and hand-moderated - the personal connections, trust, context were still there. On social media there is literally no filter. Again, some positives to this exist, but the way social media short circuits all accumulated cultural checks, and thoughts go straight from your interiority to another's interiority unfiltered, is wild and makes bad things happen. You think something, and instead of getting to "test it out," your thought is immediately confirmed, you are told not only is it correct but also we have identified others who agree with you, maybe you want to form a community and even an identity around that thought. I think people who argue this is inherently good are often only arguing that because they like the high of a system that tells them they're right all the time. Again sorry for the long jag. That said, writing this all out further makes me believe Ron was correct to mostly leave social media for his own blog, and was right to close his blog when the world started intruding on it past his boundaries (if this is in fact what happened).

Apparently for quite a while Tales Episode 4 was the longest game name on Steam and was used for testing. Eventually other games with longer names have displaced it.

TSoM12:Le’sR

If ron really did close his site because the comments became too gnarly, I’m glad he did because it’s his right, but it really bums me out that it came to that. That’s not an issue of arguing one’s case well or not, that’s people being purely impolite and dragging a fight about someone’s work right into their house. In real life you are told to “take it outside,” and I think that can and should apply here as well. Unfortunately I think some version of this is a very likely outcome. For many of the loudest upset people right now, it’s not an issue of the marketplace of ideas or some great debate, or even curiosity about what the makers of the game are up to or what their intentions are. It’s disappointment and an inability to walk away or take a break, festering as rage. For an unfortunate some, that inability to walk away will probably continue well after the game ships and for some within that group, will start manifesting as rationalizations and borderline conspiratorial thinking.

I think one thing the early internet - a place filled mostly with academics and engineers - misidentified is that not every expression if thought or declaration of preference is an invitation for a rhetorical debate. There isn’t always a “winner” to just preferring something to be some way. Or if there is, the fact that one comes across someone else expressing that preference online isn’t reason enough to engage them. I will say I’m not disagreeing with much of what you’re saying, but I would argue your lamentation for the death of romantic early internet debate culture is at least slightly misplaced*, because not everyone enjoyed or invited that in their life to begin with, but it was once pervasive and unavoidable, the “cost of doing business” of existing online is that people were out and about trying to debate you at every turn. Not ideal. Sucks, actually. I agree that peoples seemingly uncontrollable and compulsive unwillingness to walk away, or their desire to engage in bad faith debates as trolls, concern trolls, or other deliberate poisonings are all also terrible. But I also wish people had the restraint and wherewithal to just not engage at all, either because it may be unsure if the person posting is intending to engage with them, or just to save themselves some time. (this reply isn’t really a post about grumpygamer at all, apologies) * or: you simply preferred it, it was better for you, and that may not be true for others.

I think in interviews they’ve since clarified this to include all the games. From the Adventure Gamers interview: Like Murray, can we expect to see nods to Escape from Monkey Island and Tales of Monkey Island in this game? Ron: We very purposefully don’t do anything to invalidate any of the canon that’s happened in those games. We’re not saying any of those things didn’t happen, we don’t talk down to them at all. We embrace a lot of the things we liked in those games. So we were very, very careful about that. I remember some of those conversations Dave and I had, there was this kind of tendency to just throw everything out, let’s just start over. But the thing we finally came around to is, these are very beloved games. We didn’t make them, but there are still a lot of good things in those games, and we wanted to embrace those, not whisk them away. Dave: We talked all about canon and these other games, and the fact that we liked them, and the audience liked them, and so we made it our point of philosophy to adhere to canon wherever possible, but with two caveats. One of which is, it’s actually kind of hard to keep track of everything that’s canon, and some of these other games don’t even agree with each other. So a little bit of paradox is necessary and probably healthy for us as creators and as human beings. And the other caveat is that too much canon can get in the way of the story you’re trying to tell, so we decided that we would adhere to canon unless it was going to get in the way, and we would ignore some minor details if we needed to. Ron: Which I think the other games did as well. You have to be a little flexible in that stuff. You keep it where it’s convenient, and you ignore it where it’s convenient. Ron: Yeah, you don’t want to create paradoxes, you don’t want to do things that are so bad that people are like, “What the heck?” But I think the little things, you just have to let the story be what the story is. Dave: Canon’s kind of a modern idea, isn’t it? If you think about the old myths and things, nothing ever made sense from one story to the next in those. I blame comic books for our slavish adherence to canon.

I am not affiliated but helped capture some of the content that was in the stream, and this is one that didn’t make the cut. There isn’t a huge trove of this stuff unfortunately, but that one is really notable and this seemed like a good time to share it.

It came from when the excavating was happening but wasn’t released. This is New Content exclusive to this thread.

Not to sidetrack too far or anything, but when they lightly re-themed the island around POTC, they gave out new maps inspired by this one, and I've had it up on my wall since visiting. In my mind, Monkey Island has always felt like its set in that whole corner of Disneyland. Not just Pirates of the Caribbean, but as you said Tom Sawyer's Island, and also The Haunted Mansion, the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, New Orleans Square, the Jungle Cruise and Adventureland as a whole, even the sailing ship Columbia docks right there. It's all visible from right outside the entrance to Pirates. It's also easily my favorite part of the park, and the part that I think is the most evocative and imagination-stirring in general.

It’s clear we’ve been fed very little when very very hungry. People commenting on the lighting choices of one image, or the presence or absence of grit in brush strokes when you zoom in. It’s not bad stuff to talk about, but I’m really really excited for when the full meal arrives. Even if the effect in aggregate isn’t to everyone’s taste, there will be so many more (and much more interesting) things to talk about.

May I humbly ask that this conversation end now? I am reading the same few people swirl around the same points now for many many posts. Anyone reading from the outside can clearly see where everyone recently involved in this thread stands on the broad points and many of the specific nuances of their points, and none of you are going to change each other’s minds.

Monkey Island 1 and 2 both are pretty grounded architecturally, and then push the style of the rendering to exaggerated fisheye perspectives. Curse takes that and starts applying it to the architecture itself. In Plunder Island, the buildings start stacking vertically and haphazardly, so that the architecture is getting increasingly implausible in support of the visual style. It's only a tiny step in that direction really, but I think it's notable. (I dont think this is a bad thing! It's just interesting to watch happen across those 3 games.)

Yeah it is probably that*, but the buildings on the left are in a different style that definitely seems to be trending into the DOTT zone. Someone was interested in exploring more abstract shapes. To my eyes it almost looks like an evolution of the wonky perspective of Melee in Monkey Island 1, but seen through the lens of the Monkey 2 artists (who went on to do backgrounds for DOTT and Hit the Road). It really does evoke some of the reference art posted earlier in the thread, but with a different end result than we got in DOTT. Ultimately Monkey Island 2 ended up looking like the right side of the image, but it’s clear that less realistic approaches to representing the world of the game were being considered even during (what appears to be) the transition time between Monkey 1 and 2. * (originally known as Crooked Island in those early days I believe)

I think it’s a safe bet that “Monkey 3,” had that been made right after 2 instead of DOTT, would have pushed into a more stylized space, but what exactly that space is can never be known. It is clear from everything they did afterwards, the LucasArts art department was interested in pushing the limits into more stylized spaces. They also seemed uninterested in repeating themselves. It’s unlikely that Monkey 3 would have tried to look like a Chuck Jones cartoon, but it’s very unlikely it would have looked like “more Monkey Island 2.” Everything they did afterwards pushed for more illustrative and bigger characters for example. (Except The Dig but that doesn’t count because it started production before all of its contemporaries.) Again that doesn’t mean a Monkey 3 definitely would have shared that, but the odds are decent it would have at least been explored. This image was recovered as part of the VGHF dive into the Monkey Island 1 and 2 source, and nobody was able to divine what it means or what it’s from so please don’t draw conclusions. It’s NOT from any Monkey 3 project. Its impossible to say what it was for beyond a quick style exercise. It was actually found in the source files for Monkey 1, and the reason for that is hard to know (it could have just been a filing mistake, or not?) but it shows that even during production of Monkey Island 1 and 2, the artists were starting to explore pushing into more stylized looks. It really does feel like once scanning paintings was added to their repertoire, the sky was the limit on style exploration.

I thought the way hints worked in Thimbleweed Park was really good.

That was a great interview.

Nice!