TimeGentleman

The feature on Iron Phoenix on this very site has him as Marcus: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Iron-Phoenix-The-Lost-Sequel-to-Fate-of-Atlantis/6 Also, it's got to be him, right? Looks just like him! You can also see the in-game sprite for Marcus on page 4 of that feature...

Bill Eaken says in his interview with this very site that "Towards the end of the project we were able to scan drawings. But I'm sure that was only about 10% of the backgrounds." So if they do still exist, there won't be that many of them and it sounds like they'd just be black and white pencil drawings. (Even within that interview, though, he also seems to say that they didn't use scanning at all, and Colette Michaud's "The Evolution of Lucasfilm Games: THE ART DEPARTMENT" article for The Adventurer also says that scanning only started with Monkey 2.)

A show-and-tell stream would be cool!

Legal battles, creative fallings out, torrid love affairs, a race to rescue the Telltale hard drives before the building they were stored in got demolished... Seriously, though, I guess what I was hoping would surface at some point would be a Double Fine style 10-20 min making of vid or a post-mortem GDC talk or something like that.

Good to get an interview - I was just trying to find behind the scenes material for these remasters the other day. I guess the release notes were pretty comprehensive and covered most of it, doesn't seem like there's too much juicy stuff to tell! As we've already discussed, it would be lovely to see TOMI (and W&G) get remastered but it sounds like they're up for doing new stuff as well and actually I think I'd be more excited if they said they were going to remaster Bone and then continue it with new episodes to cover the whole story! That'd be awesome. Or them developing a wholly new adventure game IP would also be great.

I doubt they did any of that, that's what I'm saying!

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I highly doubt Spielberg or Lucas have had an iota of creative input. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/sep/17/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-video-game-film-machinegames This is marketing speak for 'we sent some emails to a Lucasfilm address that never got passed on'.

George Broussard (Duke Nukem Forever guy, to be reductive) tweeted this earlier: What are people's thoughts? Bear in mind that he's specifically referring to the classic point and click adventure format - not genre hybrids or TWD style 'interactive narratives' or whatever. Just stop referencing Monkey Island and come up with a cool setting is his advice. I don't really think he's right, tbh. Some sub-genres (which I think we can call the classic PnC now) are just niche and that's that. Splatter horror, say, is a niche movie genre, it's got its fandom and it will keep going forever and making money as long as budgets are pitched correctly and the occasional great one comes out, but you're not going to be able to make a billion dollars with one. You've got to do something different with your PnC otherwise it could be the perfect game and every single review would still include the words "but it's still the exact gameplay that Lucasarts perfected 40 years ago". Removing in-jokes and coming up with a "wider appealing" setting isn't going to solve that.

Then again, it might get Skunkape the contract to remake Escape From Monkey Island to the same fidelity, which I'd love to see!

More pipe dreaming: I'd love to see Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures get a glow-up, get them looking even closer to the films. I wonder how close the Telltale engine could get. (If Skunkape did it really quickly they could get it done in time to tie in with the new W&G short coming this winter!)

This is out tomorrow! I know the website says Skunkape were created purely to remaster these three seasons of games, but I can't help but wonder if they'll go on to do something else...

It's interesting to see that a big change in the remaster is replacing some of the busier textures with much simpler ones. Like the brick wall, for instance. At the time, I remember the move to these kinds of textures being one of the elements that made the third season much better looking than the previous, but I can see how now, with higher definition assets, cleaner textures would actually work better. (I wonder if another part of their reasoning was to make all three seasons be closer visually.)

Wow, they did a great job! It really does look like a polished modern release. Will be interested to see comparison shots with the original... EDIT: in fact, some have been released! https://www.gamespress.com/en-GB/Sam-Max-The-Devils-Playhouse-Remastered-coming-Aug-14-to-PC-consoles

As far as I can tell from dev interviews, this is only true in the sense that most of it is first person but certain traversal sections are third person. It doesn't seem like there'll be an option to flip between them at any time.

Ahh, it's the 8th best Lucas adventure cover art!