Jake

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.

I make no promises but I'll investigate.

Sure, I got it. I found a place in Seattle that does high quality large format scans, and have written them about scanning game posters. Hopefully they say yes. Assuming they do, I’ll bring it by once it shows up.

I bet Spiffy was a dpaint file on Purcell’s PC and never made it anywhere else, beyond being copied to a floppy disk for marketing to put on the box. There’s no evidence of that closeup anywhere else.

To be more clear, I believe that the version of 301 that shipped does technically have nutrispecs included, but they can only be unlocked via online connectivity to the ARG that was never completed. So there is code in 301 waiting to hear something from a website that was never built outside those initial API hooks. Changing it to being "simply" unlocked would have required a patch, which was decided to be not worth the cost and risk of introducing new bugs and doing a new QA cycle for a new build.

NutriSpecs were held back because of a web game the marketing team was working on which was supposed to reveal them, but that marketing stuff got canceled. Only the little youtube trailer that unveiled them got released, but the rest of it never happened. Those guys were really bummed out that they weren't able to build all of it, to my memory, but I wasn't doing a lot of marketing on season 3 so I don't know the exact reason why they got shelved. I had hoped NutriSpecs would get patched back in for the DVD release (and I think I said as much on here or the TTG forums at the time) but that didn't happen, I think because Telltale was traditionally very conservative about patching for fear it'd introduce new bugs.

I’ve written a few posts in here saying the theory is bullshit - because it is - but deleted them because just saying that alone didn’t seem like it would be enough. I thought just saying “this is BS” would be less helpful than what I ultimately did say. But apparently I was wrong, as you only quoted the last sentence of my reply to try and throw it back at me, but didn’t engage with any of the substance of the post. Multiple people have already said in this thread what I would have said myself: Game development (and making commercial entertainment in general) is a messy process. I’ve never been on a project that was guided precisely by some master hand, aiming to reach a long agreed on goal. That’s just not how it has ever worked. As you make something, the act of making changes it. Your goals change. You learn and refine what the strengths of tour project are as you make it. Anyone who chases the same perfect goal from beginning to end without adjusting as they go will make a bad game, film, whatever. This applies at the studio level too: Different teams are not ideological entities but are closer to porous buckets in the loose shape of the games they are working on, with different team members pouring from one bucket to another as the different games need different resources over the course of their development. If there is a master hand at work here it is only management trying their damndest to keep things held together enough to ship, to make sure games have enough people on them at the right time to literally be content complete, get QA, etc. The idea that there is some big philosophy from the top down is almost impossible to imagine, since all the work that actually goes into what makes the games what they are happens bottom up, from the hands and minds of the people making the games. Marketing and PR messaging sent out to the fans and investors tries it’s best to tell the story of designers’ visions and to map the games along some meaningful trajectory or company goal, but that is the work that is truly reactionary - responding to the games the teams are creating (through some combination of initial goals, re-assessed goals, technical and financial limitations and of course the makeup of the people on the team itself) and trying to craft a message of meaning and intent behind it. That my posting in here to tell you you’re wrong somehow “confirms” anything to you other than you being wrong, should be evidence enough to people reading this thread that it is in fact a conspiracy theory.

AT it’s just as likely that you are making up a read behind those photos as the author of that Twitter account is. Like in the Outlaws thread you basically made up that the document was for two separate games (I guess citing Last Crusade as precedence, despite the action game not being an in house project in that case), and then continued to pile evidence on top of that as if it was true, and repeatedly challenged people who might claim otherwise - with no additional evidence other than how well it fits into your theory, which is not actually evidence. You cannot both invent the foundation yourself, and refute other people citing flaws in the foundation, without additional hard evidence that strengthens that foundation itself. (How well it enhances other ideas further downstream from that foundation is not further evidence of the validity of that foundation, that’s not how it works.) Your pattern seems to be: Create a hypothesis/foundation and then declare “if that is true, it gives new meaning to all these other things,” which is often very interesting and lets us see previously unrelated things in a new and possibly-interconnected light, but if your foundation is also your hypothesis you absolutely have to be more graciously accepting of challenges to the hypothesis. Indy could just as easily be questioning the snake might be real, and given his pattern of fearing snakes it’s more likely what is happening than his entire character being misrepresented by him being “revenant” to a snake. But that would disrupt your own ideas downstream of that hypothesis so you give it no credence, despite like you it being posted by a fan. Your arguments will forever be weak if you take this defensive approach. It seems like you are more interested in building up your own theories than pursuing the truth.

I have no idea how to scan a poster this big, but in the meantime here are some crappy photos (its hard to shoot it well through the glass).

I’ve got an original MI1 poster, from when they were sold out of The Adventurer. (I bought it on eBay, I wasnt old or cool enough at the time to buy one for myself.) I also have all the different posters Telltale released, but they are not LEC posters!

Wow that map!

The old forum is archived as read-only. It's dead and buried and should stay that way! But it's always there for reference.

I'm guessing I'm not alone as someone who has made Mojo-adjacent content in the last few years and would like to share it. Maybe this thread can be a home for it? Anything you've made that you think Mojo Forums readers here might be interested in, but is small enough or old enough that it may not need its own thread, feel free to place it here! I'll start! Monkey Island 1 and 2 Livestream with Marius Winter and Dominic Armato A couple months ago, I did a complete playthrough of Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Twitch with Marius Winter (@Marius) and the voice of Guybrush Threepwood himself Dominic Armato (@Dmnkly). It was something Marius and I had been talking about doing for ages - we worked together at Telltale and both loved just talking about Monkey Island forever, and years later wanted an excuse to do that again - and having Dominic show up as a surprise guest made it even more special. If you want to watch the stream, you can watch the first video or view the whole collection of Monkey Island 1 and 2 (and a brief break to talk about Disneyland) here.

That painting of the pirate reading the insult book reminds me of the concept art for the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. It’s honestly very in line with Monkey 1 and 2, and 3 - you can see how all those games pulled from this same source material in different ways. Cartooney and fun mixed with scary and weird, inviting but creepy all at once. lots more of it here: https://www.themeparkreview.com/parks/photo.php?pageid=235&linkid=6881&pageno=2

It’s awesome that your poster restorations are being used by Limited Run, but disappointing that they don’t have access to the originals! Are they lost? Should I be saving this discussion for the return of the poster thread?