TimeGentleman

I'm not sure what use that site would be to anyone as it just seems to be reposts of Laserschwert's work from 8-10 years ago.

Really weird how scanning tools in 1991 changed ships around so much.

Just watched this interesting video about the history of SOMI speedrunning, and thought I may as well make a topic in case anyone else has any fun stuff to share. The only other one I could think of off the top of my head is this one of Double Fine staff inviting a speedrunner to their studio to show them some strats:

Ah, it's unlisted! Thanks KP!

Have you got a link to the actual video, please? Thought it might be on this channel but can't see it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXp8hFquoN6KLwCubmVlIkQ/videos

I know, I was joking What multiverse stuff was there in Escape? Because there isn't any in the picture I posted!

Here's something that many of you may not have realised: Monkey Island has always been explicitly set in a multiverse. 'Prime' Guybrush often meets and interacts with alternate universe versions of himself. Here are a just a few instances:

I suspect that he was more comfortable doing that because the in-game art was (outside of UI etc) 3D so he wasn't really stepping on anyone's toes. EDIT: ah, here's where I got the COMI thing from: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-12-The-Curse-of-Monkey-Island/5

Re. a Purcell poster, iirc he was actually offered the job of doing the poster art for COMI and turned it down because he felt it would be awkward/unfair when his art wasn't in the game. So I suspect even if they went to him for ReMI that he would turn it down. Maybe he could do an alternate version for a physical edition, or something...

Why do you say that, out of interest? Because more care and effort was put in than most logo localizations?

I've worked it out:

Well anyway, here's a 2015 post-mortem of the first Loom with Brian Moriarty. At the end he says there are three companies he'd trust to make the sequel - Telltale, Double Fine, and Wadjet Eye Games.

I think that further illustrates the problem with making any definitive claims about the creators' intentions, the meaning of a lot of stuff in the games, etc. Ron has just recently said that the only thing he had planned for MI3 was 'Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there', which would seem to contradict that statement by Noah. If we assume both to be true, then we need to reinterpret Ron's statement as meaning that the hell thing was the only idea he had for a story beat, but he did also have ideas of what revelations would be made along the way. It seems that sometimes we may not even realise that there's ambiguity in their statements to be interpreted. I think that until the day comes (if ever) that Ron announces 'this was the final Monkey Island game I'm ever going to make, and here is exactly what everything meant in all my MI games', they are going to maintain that Lynchian ambiguity.

Just a tiny note that isn't really relevant to any of the discussion here: by and large, these 50s animated shorts (such as What's Opera, Doc?) were made for theatrical release, as household television sets were not yet the norm. This continued into the mid-60s, although by 1960 most American households had televisions so cartoons like Mr Magoo's Christmas Special started to be created for that medium instead.

Not sure if you've seen this already, but this is a good site: http://amr.abime.net/amr_search.php?search=The+Secret+of+Monkey+Island&mag_id=0&action=Find

There are two separate things being talked about here: the concept of "the secret of Monkey IslandTM " and the layers of reality in the two games. I think, like I said before, that the soMITM as discussed in the first game (and used as its title) was a generic adventure concept that covered the island's magical concealment and the monkey head portal etc. It feels to me like in that first game the post-modern stuff was purely for humour, but that in the second game they decided to roll it into the story. The Voodoo Lady says: "Big Whoop isn't just a treasure. It contains the secret to another world. Find that world and you'll be able to escape LeChuck forever." And then of course there's the fairground ending. Exactly how literally Gilbert et al intended this all to be taken is left fairly ambiguous, but they certainly intertwined it into the fabric of the story to some extent. To me, the fact that they created Big Whoop and connected it to the reality-bending, rather than returning to the location of Monkey Island and tying it all into that, supports the idea that the soMITM isn't that important and the continued questioning about it is a running joke. But you know what? The whole thing is intentionally ambiguous, and while we can all have our own theories about how important any given aspect is or what it means, there's no way to be sure unless Ron & Dave lay it all out for us in ReMI. Personally, I don't think they will - I suspect they'll answer a couple of things and ask five more!

Yep, costal cartilage, same as we do:

Yeah, it feels to me like the 'secret' of Monkey island was just a generic adventure title meant to refer to how it's difficult to get to, the monkey head portal etc. And then in the second one whenever anyone asks what is the secret of monkey island, that's just a running joke about how the title is no longer really relevant. But that got picked up on by fans (and subsequent games, but to what extent they're in on the joke I'm not sure) as a legit mystery.

Another Ron & Dave interview: https://www.ign.com/articles/return-to-monkey-island-ron-gilbert-dave-grossman-how-it-became-reality-monkey-island-3

I think it was statements like "we can say with a reasonable security that if Ahern and Chan had worked on Monkey 3 in 93/94, following their research and the trend of those years, they would have chosen the same, deformed and expressionist style" and the argument that therefore a 1993 Monkey Island 3 would have looked just like RtMI does, that muddied the waters a little. But yeah I think we're all in agreement that a 1993 MI3 would have moved the style on somehow, quite possibly in a more stylised direction, and that not having the exact same art style as MI2 is not some betrayal on Ron's part. Re. Ron and Tim, not that I know them or anything, but I'd be surprised if they'd fallen out over the Microsoft purchase. Surely Ron knows this is the nature of the business and that unless he had a contract with Double Fine saying he owned the IP then something like this was always a possibility. It feels more like a general grumpiness on the state of the industry and how, much like in the comics biz, creators generally don't get to retain rights or even get residuals etc. It didn't stop him making another MI with Lucasfilm Games.

Yeah, that's the £150 one I linked to an unboxing of! (He links to it in his pinned comment.)

Yeah, the main thing that would hold me back is how amazing that diary seems to be for only £40 (make sure you've got 'prop replica' style selected). 235 pages of content, plus 24 impressive inserts, themed packaging, and it's all hand-aged..! Plus they have 'made in the USA' logos, but they're based in China, they don't have a Facebook or Instagram (the links just take you to those sites' homepage) and there are only two reviews for it which are both dated in the last couple of days, and in the video on one of those reviews all the inserts look massive, which is a bit odd. If I could find a reddit thread or something with some reviews that didn't feel astroturfed, I might be tempted to risk the £40+p&p..! edit: I did find this while googling around! https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/537089950/make-your-own-grail-diary-200-high And also this unwrapping of a pre-made one (also from etsy, but it's £150): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgKh1WHUDA They all seem to be working with very similar material, maybe kittiway bought that pdf pack and are willing to make it up for people on the cheap, I dunno...

Andy Kelly ignored my reply to that tweet, asking if he had secret news. So I'm taking that as a super-double-confirmation!

Just as a point of information, yes, Tim has said that if they had only gotten around the $400K mark they were planning on making a low-fi SCUMM/Flash-like adventure game. (Also, I should point out that the budget for FT was over $1mil in 1995 money, so at $300K - iirc they planned for 25% of the money to go on the doc - it wouldn't even have been in the FT range!) As for if Tim will make another PnC, I feel like maybe he might decide to do something interesting with them again, but it won't be for a good 5-10 years.

Somehow I had not noticed the acronym at all on the main site, but I just came back here via the front page and noticed it immediately - it's all over the place! I thought it was just a quirk of Thrik's that was getting picked up on! Okay, I'm onboard, but I think we're going to have to start referring to the others as SeMI, SeMI 2 LeCh, CuMI, EscMI and TaMI for consistency's sake. Back on-topic, though, I wonder if ReMI is going to have any iMuse-y cleverness around its music tech. It'd be great to have high quality music but with really nice SeMI 2 style transitions and stuff.