Niemandswasser

And today he covered Curse! I really can't say enough good things about Jimmy Maher. He makes this stuff so compelling, really weaving all these disparate strands into a cohesive narrative about not just how the industry grew and changed in its formative years, but why, and what each development meant. I sometimes disagree with his takes on individual games, but rarely with his reasoning for them.

There was a 3 year gap between CMI and EMI, which feels like no time at all now but seemed agonizingly long back then. As I recall it was that gap, with its long dearth of any new information, that birthed THE CONSPIRACY.

I don't think anyone here is saying they want MI to remain a niche thing only adventure gamers know about. If they were saying that, they're in for a terrible shock--MI has been a well-known, highly-regarded part of video game history for a while now. I remember a PC Gamer headline from years before ReMI was a blink in anyone's eye that said "Ron Gilbert wants Disney to call him about Monkey Island"--no explanation who Ron was or context for MI, but the assumption that most people reading PC Gamer knew those things well enough to click a link without any other context. You mention that a whole generation of kids might have been turned on to point and clicks if an MI movie had been made in the late 90s--kids were well aware of Monkey Island in the '90s. I went to school with plenty of kids who'd played the games, and I've met plenty more adults who aren't Mojo-posting fans but who have fond memories of playing in their youths. Obviously it wasn't a huge, zeitgeist-shaping cultural touchstone, but it wasn't Bud Tucker in: Double Trouble, either. But even if that wasn't the case, I'm not worried about public perceptions of Monkey Island changing. I don't care what the public thinks--if I did I wouldn't have bought Eurotrip on Blu-ray. What I don't want is to get to a point where "new Monkey Island" doesn't mean anything except a label and the presence of some copyrightable iconography. That trajectory feels more possible to me this week than it did before. Again, nobody is saying this. Just because something can't be exploited for billions doesn't mean it can't or won't be exploited for all it's worth.

I don't want something just because it looks like Monkey Island. I don't need an RPG exploring "series lore" because that has less than nothing to do with why I like the games we have--they've always, always made up the rules as they go along. I don't want a comedy series about Stan because there's no reason on Earth you could convince me that needs to exist--that's so far divorced from anything to do with why the games work that at that point, just make something new and have done with it. I don't want more Monkey Island just to have it. I'm grateful for what I have and am more than happy to never get more if the only motivating principle for it was "can we move this merch." None of what you just argued against has anything to do with what I said. Obviously it's not going to be as big as Star Wars or Indy--I brought those up to respond to AGH's point about them. What I said is that I expect MI to be exploited as a marketable property for as long as the people holding the levers know they can get money out of it, which is...demonstrably happening, right now. I'm not worrying about it--I'm observing it. This doesn't mean "we get a fun new game by people with unique creative voices every couple of years." It means "they slap the branding on unrelated corners of the market where they figure it can do some low-cost work for them." The reason Mojo went so hard against the glut of LEC-produced Star Wars titles in the early '00s wasn't that the community hated Star Wars--games like X-Wing and Jedi Knight were as well-beloved here in their day as the graphic adventures. It was that so much of it was being shoveled out the door with little thought behind it except that people would pay for the logo. And the reason that happened is because people *did.* Obviously Monkey Island is a much smaller thing--and if you honestly believe I was arguing otherwise I apologize for apparently giving the impression that I was in the middle of a complete psychotic break--but we're already at "a Monkey Island-branded add-on to an unrelated MMO," and that sure feels more like Super Bombad Racing than TIE Fighter to me.

Yes. This is something I actively do not want.

The problem is that with each commercial success this becomes, essentially, inevitable. There's no scenario in which Disney et al could or would have made Star Wars, Indy or anything else with the same care or passion as under Lucasfilm. They bought Lucasfilm because they were pretty sure they could use its stuff to make a lot of money, and they felt--correctly--that people would spend billions for anything released under those labels, regardless of artistry, craftsmanship, or care. That was, from the beginning, the *only* reason new movies were made, and when they were...people spent billions on them. Everything else--all the arguing, the screaming, the dumbass demands to remove things from canon (as if that was a label that had ever meant anything to begin with)--was incidental. All they had to do was make something that was basically watchable and had all the right signifiers to get people into the theater, and the result was billions of dollars. Why would they go out of their way to do anything more than that? I'm glad ReMI got made. I really like it! But I'm pretty sure the only reason Disney's answer to Ron finally went from "no" to "yes" is because post-Thimbleweed they (correctly, again) figured they could outsource the heavy lifting to his team for a pretty low cost, and in return they'd get a test balloon to show them whether something they already owned had the legs to become a long-term exploitable property. They have their answer, and here we are. They're not putting the monkey back in their pocket now. EDIT: left out a key phrase

I have a sneaking suspicion the overlap between the two groups is more significant than one would hope

I have a feeling that now Disney has been made aware there's an active audience for this particular thing they own, we're going to have more and more Monkey Island "content" shoved down our throats in perpetuity, until we find ourselves longing for the days when we only got one of these every few years to a decade and each one meant something. If you don't believe me, I invite you to Google "Disney's entire business model for the past 15 years or so"

I wouldn't hold my breath...

It's important to remember that a Rotten Tomatoes score isn't an objective measure of quality but a metric of prevailing critical sentiment in a given moment. No more than that.

I've been able to start, but I'm coordinating times where I can play with someone else so it's slow going. I'd say I'm probably only halfway through.

Nah, the rat is fine. There's clearly no burner on under the pot, and when you look at it after putting the rat in there Guybrush first says it appears to be doing the backstroke. If you look a while later he says that it seems to have left (after leaving some hair behind).

It's definitely Bob. Besides having an identical outfit/appearance and voice actor, Dave Grossman confirmed it on the MI Monday when the crew sequence was revealed.

That's basically what I figured--I was just curious if the game ever addresses it in any way (possibly in the Writers' Cut), since it's a new nickname for an old character seemingly presented rather suddenly and without comment. I just wanted to make sure I hadn't missed something somewhere. (Not that it matters in literally any measurable way.)

Currently on part 2, and I absolutely need to know if I'm only able to play an hour or two a day and I don't want to spend the next however-long tearing the game apart for an answer that never comes. I just want my life back.