Jake

My memory of when Tales showed up at Telltale is, there was reluctance from a lot of people on the team to make the game, because the expectations were huge and it would be hard for Telltale to meet them given the smaller scope Telltale usually worked in, especially when we learned we would be targeting the Wii, which would shrink that scope even more. But once it became clear that the company would be making the game for sure, there were a bunch of people who threw in to give it their all and try to “do right” by the series as much as we could, and make the best game possible with the comparatively tiny space we had to work in. I think the games strengths and weaknesses all come from that desire.

This is just my recollection and may be off in some way, but: Dave worked on Tales but it was in a studio director role. So he was in story and design meetings but to my memory wasn’t a main writer on any chapter of the game, which is different from his role on Monkey 1, 2, or Return. As a design and writing lead at Telltale, Dave’s superpower was how good he was at quietly allowing people to do their own ideas and give them space, while also helping them push things into being the best version of those ideas. Dave was rarely a leader who would say “no, you should use my idea instead,” which is definitely one way you can run a team. So if anything, I’d say a perception of Dave being less involved is more, him being interested in making sure the people who were in the lead writer and designer seats on the episodes themselves were getting opportunities to talk about their work. With Return, it’s back to a tiny writers-designers room and he’s one of the only people in the seat, so it makes sense he’d be the one doing the talking. I’m very excited for that on Return - Dave was always great as a lead at Telltale, but it meant he wasn’t able to be in the nuts and bolts of the game as much as he is now.

What the fuck 👕 I beat #Mojole and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤💚🖤 💛💛💛💚🖤 🖤💛💛💛🖤 🖤🖤💚💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

“Beneath Monkey Island.” It’ll actually be a huge sellout, washed up pandering mess.

Yep, agreed. I think it’s fine to straight up hate something and wish it was something else, and to have strong opinions about what it should be. Its an opinion, a reaction one has, so it goes. But it’s just so rude to do that to Ron’s face while he’s still making the game. And its insufferably, delusionally entitled to take it farther and start rationalizing why Ron’s decisions don’t align with one’s own through basically conspiratorial thinking (“Disney made him do it” etc). I’m glad Ron turned off comments and came out with a response like this, but am sad he had to. I’m actually glad for almost the whole post - I think him clearing the air to this degree would have probably been necessary or healthy regardless of any fan reaction. And, him finally saying what his original starting point for MI3 was going to be, shows that he was truly in control of this new game to the point that he was able to move past that idea like one naturally does when making something; he’s not still clinging to it like it’s the uncompromised version he didn’t get to make or something. But I wish it hadn’t had to have the part about the fan comments at the very end, that bit is sad.

That Purcell quote is great and really interesting. To me, especially coupled with todays Grumpy Gamer blog post, it’s one more reminder that these things aren’t made from some grand master plan, but are really the result of the people making them at the time they are made.

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.