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Jake

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Everything posted by Jake

  1. @m1ckey holy crap! Even in that beat up state, that poster is an incredible thing to see. I haven't ever seen such detailed shots of the LeChuck's Revenge box. Any chance you can get that scanned at high resolution?
  2. I too mourn the weird troll that is including a fan enraging item called "the Ultimate Insult" in a collectors edition, but I'm sure I'll welcome whatever comes next. @Laserschwert it sounds like the issue is not that the archival standards are low, but that covid has meant they are basically inaccessible.
  3. Seemed like the Ron event should get its own thread so i made one...
  4. This was mentioned in the archaeological discoveries thread but it probably deserves a thread of its own, so here we are. The Video Game History Foundation has launched a new preservation project, where they archive and investigate the source code and assets to games. More about that here! Their first Video Game Source Project is... The Secret of Monkey Island! They've apparently been digging through the source code and art from Monkey Island and will be discussing it live with Ron Gilbert during a ticketed event. (I'm going to just steal all their content and repost here): The Secrets Of Monkey Island: An Evening With Ron Gilbert (Tickets) Friday, October 30th 2020, 1PM-2:30PM PDT Discover secrets and never-before-seen content from The Secret of Monkey Island with Ron Gilbert and The Video Game History Foundation About this Event Iconic PC hit The Secret of Monkey Island turns 30 this October, and we're celebrating by diving deep into its creation with Ron Gilbert...and the game's original source code! Join us for an incredible afternoon of stories and secrets in the-making-of two classics: The Secret of Monkey Island, and The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. This livestream event features: Fireside chat with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, hosted by Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi Never-before-seen content, including deleted scenes and unused art Stories from the game's development Audience Q&A This is a virtual event that will take place via a livestream link with your ticket order. (The stream will be archived and available to view later with your ticket.) 100% of ticket sales go to support The Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. I figured we would want a thread to be able to talk about it while its happening, so here it is. I'm, uh, extremely excited to say the least.
  5. I can only find two of the Devils Playhouse posters in my files, and only 4x6 versions that were pack-ins for a retail release. I will keep digging but here are those in the meantime!
  6. I might have higher quality versions of these. Will dig around. This is just a painting Purcell has sold prints of in the past, not a poster associated with a game box or marketing. At what point are these just bootlegs?
  7. I'm also a big fan of Stan's theme. This is a rare arrangement found on the PS2 copy of Escape From Monkey Island. Ultimately they must have gone a different direction This guy must have learned it from the PC speaker version. Amazingly Resident Evil VII used the Stan theme for one of their central pieces of music And you know, I always love world of fish, a true classic
  8. Really good instrumentation in the Special Edition, I agree, but you haven't really enjoyed it until you play the older releases.
  9. Here’s a cover of The Office from Sam & Max Season One/Save The World: I always enjoy the Neskimos cover of Phatt Island the live one has a drunk guy who is mad they skipped to monkey island 2 https://m.soundcloud.com/neskimos/monkey-island-2-phatt-island-1 but they did a studio recording as well it seems.
  10. But Remi what do you REALLY think of Curse?
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Yeah, Sam & Max by way of Lethal Weapon or something.
  18. Here's the Office track on the Telltale Sam & Max OST.
  19. 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...
  20. Just saw this on the Sam and Max subreddit and... it’s pretty great.
  21. 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.
  22. I make no promises but I'll investigate.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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