KestrelPi

The other thing I forgot to respond to on this post is this. And like... maybe I shouldn't try to be Batman. But it's what I was saying before. I often wondered whether I was spending too much time responding to misguided comments on Double Fine's forums. And then I met Tim Schafer one day and was a bit too shy to explain exactly who I was on the forums, and he found out later on and sent me this: And I have to admit I was kind of bowled over, but since then I've always felt like going out of my way to speak up when I have the energy to, because you never know who might be looking and appreciating it from a distance and thinking 'I'm glad someone said it'. I think often times when you're a creator you feel like you can't wade into heated discussions, because of a need to keep a professional distance, so I guess it's nice when there's someone there to say the thing you really wanted to say.

Yeah, I felt the need to respond to that "corporate cash grab" comment myself, just because reading the full comment, I felt like the guy genuinely believed he was leaving constructive feedback. People forget that there are actually real people behind this, who maybe have friendships and working relationships with each other. So I did respond, biting my tongue enough not to get nasty but unable to conceal a little venom:

I feel more sorry for Rex than Ron on this one. I'm sure he must have anticipated it but I think no matter how much you do, it must sting a little to be a fan of something since forever, land an absolute dream gig of being able to work on it, putting your heart into your interpretation and then getting told by some people that you did it wrong or don't get it. I get that's just... the nature of this, but I still think it would be nice if people paused for 5 seconds before putting their words out into the world.

I posted this on Ron's blog but I think people here might be interested too, so: By the way, if anyone reading this wants to get more of a feel for Rex Crowle and how he thinks about developing a visual style for a game, he did a really interesting talk about this in the context of Knights and Bikes called "Overtaking nostalgia to create the fantasy of Knights & Bikes", which you can find online on twitch and places if you search for it. I was lucky enough to be present for this talk, and I've been following his career since. (Incidentally I really enjoy the thing he says about influences on visuals not having to be visual - I've been saying this for years, that it's never too early to engage a musician on a project - concept music can, in some ways, work just as well as concept visuals) No matter what you think about the tiny amount you've seen so far of Return, it's extremely clear to me that Rex is a guy who really thinks very deeply about developing a visual style, and was never going to just throw something together thoughtlessly, and that we're really going to need to see the whole thing to get the full effect. I think a lot of the themes that he was thinking about for K&B have overlap with Monkey Island, and I know he's a huge fan so believe me when I say he's one of us. He's exactly the kind person who would have been disk swapping Monkey Island on his Amiga 500, and who feels the atmosphere of Monkey Island in his bones. This project is very probably an absolute dream come true for him, and I hope one day to see a talk from him where he shows some of his working like he did with K&B.

If people have the energy to post positive/not agressive or flame-warry rebuttals to some of the comments, then it may well be appreciated. Back in the Double Fine Kickstarter days I pretty heavily posted on their forums, and spent quite a lot of time correcting folks' knee jerk responses to stuff and misinformation and... while I was mostly polite I was worried that I was adding to the noise and helping to maintain a bad atmosphere. But years later I learned that they knew my name in the office, and they really appreciated the time I took being a voice of reason. So later on I'll definitely be posting some encouraging words over on the site.

Man, that character just IS stan, to me.

Oh, I hope so! I think he did a good job. The original Stan from Curse and the Special Editions grew on me but I found it very jarring at first. His voice just seemed way too syrupy and slow for the fast-talking, hand-waving sprite I had imagined.

Given that Ron's entire plan for MI3 is Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there, I think it's likely that Stan is a favourite of Ron's, so I'd be somewhat surprised if he doesn't make it in just because of CMI, but it's not impossible. Out of the ones in the list my money's on 1) Voodoo Lady (maybe they just decided that the other games have taken this character as far as it goes, or they didn't want to touch the revelations from Tales, so found it easier just to sidestep the character 2) Stan (Has only been a fairly minor character in the games so far, after all) 3) Jojo the Monkey (would be the easiest one to get rid of without anyone caring. Jeez, EMI introduced a whole new character called Timmy the Monkey like we were supposed to know who that was, when Jojo was RIGHT THERE) The only reason that I don't think it's Jojo is that I don't think Ron would have been as likely to bother with this tease if that's all it was.

Yes, not to mention the possibility of some sort of time jump. But I think the situation of Stan being inside a coffin since MI2 and somehow getting transported to Blood Island and somehow not dying in the intervening time is already ridiculous enough that you could handwave ANY explanation for it. It would be a kind of fun joke payoff if we found out in ReMI that the coffin in CMI is actually a completely different coffin that he's ended up in for another, unrelated reason.

Re: TimeFly I'd really enjoy it if this is the sort of weirdness Return ends up dealing in.

I basically agree we shouldn't dwell on this, but just quickly - I haven't, and didn't say Ron is misremembering - I in fact said he could well be right. I'm just saying that I think I wouldn't trust myself to remember what I made 30 (or 20, or even 10) years ago in any great detail, so while I'm happy to take the words we have as they are, I'm not quite ready to tie a bow on it and say 'okay, that's the final word on it, then', because creating stuff is usually a messy process in which details get lost in the shuffle. (I think this really is semantics) That video is interesting though and I don't think I've seen it before. It definitely suggests that that specific ending came very late, but I think it's compatible with my just general... hunch that they were circling around the themes that produced that ending for quite a while before that.

... Sigh. I don't know why we need to treat this like it's some sort of controversial thing to say. Look, I'm not saying it to say that they're unreliable (at least no more so than average) or don't know what they're talking about. I'm just stating the very uncontroversial fact that we can't take every statement someone says about something they made 30 years ago as gospel. I would say this about literally anyone, including myself. If that's how Ron remembers it, great! I can believe it. But not like...uncritically. We've already seen what feel like slightly contradictory accounts from people who were there at the time (see Noah's comments on the plan for Monkey Island 3). Heck, it's been a while since I listened but I seem to recall they didn't even agree on everything in the commentary in MI2SE! It's not rude to suggest there could be more to the story - it's just... acknowleding that human memory is extremely bad at this sort of thing, and last time I checked, they are all still human.

There is a Mojo one! But people very rarely talk on it. It surprises me a little, because I feel like Discord is the natural evolution of everything that little DALnet community was. So I created this new one SORT of as a joke. But also, if people like it enough, I'm not against making more of a modern version of what we did back then on DALnet.

You know, I've been thinking. All this is almost reminding me of the old days, but not QUITE. It's almost as if... What this discussion really needs is #monkey-island on DALnet but on Discord instead. ... ... https://discord.gg/HWc6nvWX

I mean... the safe choice is the monkey, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the Voodoo Lady.

Again, with a 30 year interval I'd take anyone's statements on what was and wasn't planned for the story with a grain of salt. I'm sure Ron isn't lying, of course, but it's at least interesting that on the one hand he remembers MI2's ending being a last minute kind of thing and on the other he talks about the anachronisms all being a part of some deeper significance explored in the sequel - before that sequel had even been announced. Now I know these two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive (and let's not forget the development time and marketing cycle for these games is much shorter than a modern game) but to me at least they're suggestive of a reality that is somewhere between 'MI2's ending was just decided right at the end out of nowhere' and 'We knew where we were going with this all along', and that the complications and nuances of how that ending came together are likely lost to time. One thing, though, this unused picture was only dated around the same time or at least not very long after most of the other ones we had, so this would have been about 2/3 of the way through production: Only a few months later the game would be released, after only a year of full production - and we're expecting people to recall with clarity exactly how it came together?

Thinking about it, while it could be that the Secret of Monkey Island is barely mentioned in MI2 because it's trivial and unimportant, it could also be that either: The revelations of MI2 so thoroughly trump it that it kinda seems pointless to address it at that stage The Secret of Monkey Island over the course of development morphed into something much bigger than just Monkey Island, and is related to the whole layers of reality stuff in a way that means it just doesn't quite make sense to refer to it as 'the secret of monkey island' so they stopped using those words for it. Essentially, Big Whoop is an expanded version of the secret, perhaps. Since Monkey Island ostensibly isn't featured in MI2, it just didn't make any sense to talk about its secret much in that game.

...

Ah this is the thing I was trying to find from years ago where I remembered someone saying the anachronisms were important to the story. I thought it said it had to do with the secret, but the most that reveals is that it has to do with *a* secret. Personally I think it's likely that if the secret is anything, it probably is at least *related* to the other mysterious stuff in the game. But if not, and they had to delve into one or the other, I think the stuff that MI2 started to flesh out is way more of an interesting direction to explore than some unknown secret.

Well it's like I said, I doubt any of them really remember how it all went in enough detail reliably relate it. Maybe what Noah remembers as a comment about the plan for Monkey Island 3 was actually just an offhand comment that he's thinking about how to make the secret more meaningful in the future. Maybe what Ron remembers as a very sparse and not at all fleshed out plan for MI3 actually existed in several detailed discussions, some of which Noah remembered better than he did. Maybe Ron didn't actually say that, but something similar enough to that that Noah remembers it that way. Maybe ... etc

Sure, but there's a difference between remembering the file extension to a DPaint brush and remembering the details of exactly in what order and how a plot point that might have changed back and forth several times during production came together. I can barely remember the meandering conversations I had about the plots of my game ideas last month. But I remember the music files I made on the amiga were .mod

It might be to do with that! It just feels... awfully specific to me, in that it seems to be referring to some specific mystery about guybrush and the world he's in. I mean sure, the voodoo lady says a bunch of mysterious stuff, but nearly all of it is either a specific prediction about what's going to happen ('The cannibals are helping you... or eating you'), stuff that's fairly vague and unhelpful ('you will learn things better left unlearned' and all that)... but then there's this line, the last thing she says to you, which is pretty directly saying to guybrush that there's some spooky secret he's going to learn about himself and his world. I don't care how haphazardly the story might have been put together, I just don't personally believe they put a line in like that as a stinger for literally no reason other than to sound mysterious. If that rumour you mentioned is true, that could explain it, yes. I'd also SORTA like to ask Ron and Dave about this rumour too... but it's been 30 years and I bet THEY don't even properly remember, and I'm not sure it'd be easy to get reliable information about it now. Brains have a way of tidying this sort of thing up over and making the story of how things came about a bit neater than it actually was. It might be lost to time.

Yeah, I definitely would say that a lot of the ideas in MI2 sort of gave additional context to and built on the things that MI1 started. But my main take away from that is that MI1 did start them. I don't think (and I don't think anyone is saying) that I was imagining the seeds of that being there all along, it's just that while they were making MI1 they weren't necessarily sure about what those seeds would grow into. But then there's the bits that give me pause, like: When the Voodoo Lady says in MI1 "Not of LeChuck... of yourself and what you will find. What you will find out about yourself and your world. It will terrify you." Why did they include this line? Sure, it's creepy, and mysterious as Monkey Island is sometimes wont to be, but it sounds more like a line from MI2 than MI1. Nobody else ever really says anything else like this in the first game and it never comes up again, and doesn't seem to get addressed in any way. And it's not a comic line, it's played totally straight. So why is it there? Was it from some leftover plot point that got dropped and they forgot to get rid of the line? Was it hinting at some direction they already wanted to take the story in in 2? Was it there for no apparent reason? Well, I can't say for sure, but I like to believe it's there for a reason, and that they were already thinking about the layers of reality in Monkey Island long before MI2 -- but that they perhaps hadn't settled on what direction to take it at that point. As for whether or not this has anything to do with the secret, I'm not so sure they're seperate questions. They might be, but I seem to remember back in the 90s when they were a bit more talkative and nobody knew never to say anything on the internet we heard from at least one person involved that the secret is a real thing and it was in some way related to the various anachronisms seen in the game. I wish I could find a source on that... I guess I just didn't expect to be discussing it in a forum 25 years later.

Yes, I don't think everyone has forgotten the context at all. I was there. Sure, I was ten, but I was there, I remember what video games were like and I remember the exact moment I first saw Monkey Island and realised it was different to other things I'd seen. But I actually think that it cheapens things somewhat to assert that just because they started out throwing things in just because they found them funny or weird or for no particular reason at all, that's how they continued thinking about it and that's the context in which we ought to think about it. As someone who has made a couple of games, as I understand it the creative process often goes something like this: you start out by chucking some ideas out. After a while you start to notice how certain ideas within it relate to each other and strengthen each other and those ideas coalesce into larger ideas, which themselves create other ideas, and this process is what makes a piece of work cohere, feel like a piece of work rather than a loose jumble of ideas. Sure, it might be rock and roll, but this happens in rock and roll too. Because for all they were just throwing out ideas, they were also playing by rules. There's an internal logic to the game that only gets broken in specific ways, and even the ways in which it breaks its own rules are kind of its own bit of internal logic. They might not have verbalised it or given it a name or consciously understood every bit of it, but Monkey Island has a specific sort of language it talks, and you can tell when it's it, and when it isn't it - just like you can tell when something is and isn't rock and roll. So I think when people enthusiastically talk about things like the secret, and clues, and deep lore, they're not necessarily talking about stuff that was written in a design doc or carved in stone or whatever. They're just suggesting that by the end of MI2, the creators at least SEEMED to have a notion of what all these nuggets had coalesced into, and speculating on the explanation that best fits what's there.

I think taken individually you could say these bits were just their sense of humour. But it's not just that. It's the particular way they employ anachronisms, the series of jokes which, taken individually seem like they're just goofy but taken together seem to add up to a bit more than that because they're all pulling in a certain direction. (the t shirts, the way the pirates say things like 'Have Fun on Melee Island', the way a bunch of stuff is trademarked, the reference to pirate lingo being 'how they talked back then', the way the melee island treasure is described on its sign, the references the voodoo lady makes to discovering things about yourself and your world that never seem to get addressed in the first game) Now, even if these and more had all been just random goofs they clearly later decided there was enough meat on those bones to turn it into a whole surprise ending for MI2, and I don't know... I don't care how goofy you think your pirate game is, I don't think that you choose to end it that way just as a gag. But in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter if the ending of MI2 was something they'd had an idea about early on in the design of MI, or whether it came late, or whether it emerged gradually from things that started out as jokes. The important thing is that there's enough in both games for it to FEEL like this is where things were going all along, enough that we can genuinely speculate on it.