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!

Whatever that is, it's not working!

About 4 hours left of this! And apologies for the tacky self-promotion, but I do recommend any LOTCG fans consider the collector's edition, it's got loads of exclusive content and no cheap fluff!

Ahh, I see, thanks!

Am I missing something? All but 14 of these are marked as sold out and don't seem to have any way to purchase them. Did all 21 pages of leftover stock sell out in the past six hours? (Thank you for the honourable mention regardless!)

I personally would have left the Rebel Assault II cover art off my non-adventure honourable mentions, for a reason you can probably guess from the rest of my list!

Oh yeah, I was going to give Outlaws and Dark Forces honourable mentions! Rebel Assault and Pipe Dream aren't in the Remasters thread so I didn't see them originally but looking at them now I agree, very effective too.

First off, a nod to Laserschwert's thread of remasters, the best place to go to peruse these posters. Okay, my personal ranking of the Lucas adventures' cover art. I'm not taking the logos/text into consideration when ranking, and I'm also forgiving any empty spaces in the composition designed to put said logos. 1) Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge Perfect. Absolutely stunning art. A great composition, wonderful use of light. Dramatic yet with notes of goofiness, matching the game. I spent a lot of money having Laserschwert's no-titles version of this printed on canvas and put in a big old frame so it looks like a lost 19th century painting. 2) Sam & Max Hit the Road Gorgeous. Stands alone as a great Sam & Max piece, and works great as box art as well. It gets in a bunch of the stuff from the game, acting as a kind of trailer to keep the player excited to progress, and there's so much detail in there to gaze at while stuck on a puzzle, without feeling too busy. The only thing I could possibly criticise it for is that it doesn't include a classic Sam & Max rat, but the jackalope makes a fine stand-in. 3) Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders I love the clean, bold cartoon style here. A lovely companion piece to Hit The Road. Great composition and use of colour, lots of lovely detail, and a cheeky evocation of the classic Luke & Leia pose. Better than the game, and I've probably spent more time on it too! 4) Day of the Tentacle This was a surprise to me, because I had assumed I'd be ranking it second. It's from my favourite game of all time, it's iconic, the linework and character art is delicious, it cleverly imitates Chuck Jones cell art by giving a slightly more painterly detailed look to the mansion in the background. The only thing that knocked this down a few places is that it's very simple and I suspect my love for it is more driven by nostalgic association than some of the other covers here. 5) The Curse of Monkey Island A really nice composition, very clean, matches the game well. Good use of colour. Guybrush looks a tiny bit off in the face, somehow? 6) Labyrinth Standing on the shoulders of the movie's artists, of course, but this is still a great fantasy painting and a smart choice to show restraint and simply portray a wide view of the labyrinth with an owl in the foreground rather than overworking it with a bunch of different elements. 7) The Dig The more I look at this, the more I like it. It really nails that Bob Peak 80s family sci-fi mystery movie vibe, which ties in nicely to the Spielberg association. It walks a fine line between mysteriously minimal and bland, but for me it lands on the former. 8 ) Loom Very similar strengths to The Dig, but I'm going to place this below because all the elements feel a bit cramped. 9) The Secret of Monkey Island I love Guybrush here, and obviously Purcell is a great artist, but the overall composition is just too vague for me. I assume it's intentionally evoking old adventure movie posters, but I'm personally just not a big fan of that 'slap all the things on there and call it a day' style. It took seeing Laserschwert's no-titles version for me to realise that there's three quarters of a crossbones in there! 10) Grim Fandango Remastered A lovely piece of art, and far superior to the original cover. It loses a few places due to being a little too busy, and (possibly due to it being all pencils, an admittedly classy and interesting move) feeling more like a limited edition A5 print than cover art. 11) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Perfect emulation of the Struzan style. Unfortunately, this means it has that typical Struzan muddled composition. It's better than Struzan's art for Infernal Machine, though! 12) Maniac Mansion I appreciate that it captures the cheapo 80s horror vibe quite well, but that also means that intentional or not it feels a little ugly and cheap to me! 13) Full Throttle While this is a cool image, it seems to be some kind of filter over 3D art. Whether I'm right about that or not, it feels like it is, which is the important thing. (The explosion also feels like a stock image.) It worked as a promotional image, it doesn't work as a piece of art, and that's a real shame when it's the cover for such a beautiful game. It's such a shame that they didn't use the Mignola-esque version of this by Peter Chan that we've seen elsewhere. 14) Full Throttle Remastered This might have overtaken the original, as I prefer the 2D art style, if it weren't for the utter lack of energy and the slightly off anatomy. They also did a reworking of the original as promotional art and it is miles better than both this and the original - an odd choice not to use it. 15) Escape from Monkey Island Some fairly cute bits and pieces of character art in here, but a muddled composition, a weird mish-mash of 2D and 3D, and Guybrush has a queasy Margaret Keane look about him. 16) Day Of The Tentacle Remastered This feels like perfectly adequate fan art achieved mostly by dragging around and tweaking existing assets. A lot of the characters look off-model, the linework is inconsistent, the composition is messy and the posing is odd. This puts the restraint and casual mastery of the original into stark contrast! 17) Grim Fandango Just a bunch of models slapped on a black background. So lazy! I think it's supposed to be evoking Casablanca et al, but for one thing I personally don't like a lot of those posters and for another they could have at least done a painted version in that style. This is clearly designed purely to shout "it's in 3D, this isn't your grandma's adventure game!" from the shelves. Particularly embarrassing next to the amazing wall mural artwork used on the CD slipcase. 18) Monkey Island 2 Special Edition Blasphemous, but one of the two versions in Laserschwert's thread (the one with the wider LeChuck eyes) is a better piece of art on its own terms than the SOMI:SE one so I'll count that one and put it here. (The other one is dreadful and would go second last.) 19) The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition An absolute sin. Like a microcosm of the SE itself. 20) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade The laziest possible option, and just in case it didn't have enough 'cynical corporate synergy' vibes, they put two versions of the IP's logo on it right next to each other! What do you all think? This is all subjective opinion, of course, and I'd be interested to hear how close others' are to mine. How do other related game covers compare (like Lucasarts non-adventures or non-Lucasarts adventures, say)?

As reported on this here site, a new HD mod has entered the arena, this one providing upscaled 4:3 backgrounds and (reportedly) working with the Steam version. https://hexagon.codes/grimhd

Yeah, but I couldn't find an existing thread about it here, and it just got a little internet buzz with that article, so I figured it was worth starting one.

https://www.eurogamer.net/monkey-island-creator-ron-gilbert-has-a-2d-pixel-art-game-in-the-works