Aro-tron

The prologue did the impossible in threading the needle and turning the cliffhanger from Revenge into a new-user friendly tutorial section. I've just played Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo with my little kids, and that whole section had a Humongous vibe to it - albeit with plenty of gross touches that suggest a disturbing rot underneath the happy-go-lucky veneer. To suggest a layer of meta-commentary for whoever write the dissertation about the prologue: It's interesting to think about this section in light of the fact that the first thing Ron did after he wrote the end of LeChuck's Revenge was create a mini-universe of children's games with wide-eyed, optimistic protagonists who are cut from the same cloth as kid-Guybrush (this is really reinforced by the voice-acting). If you prepared for Return to MI not by playing through the Monkey Island series, but by playing all of the adventure games Ron Gilbert produced in chronological order, you would follow up LeChuck's Revenge immediately with Putt Putt, and then a dozen other kiddie adventures. The prologue of Return to Monkey Island then serves not just as a resolution to the ending of LeChuck's Revenge, but a bridge from the bright and happy world of Humongous.

The interview was great!! Peak Mojo content. And very cool of Ron to ask about the origins of Mojo. Both Ron and Dave seem like cool, down to earth guys. Interesting to hear his perspective on how the Monkey Island cult developed. I had somehow had this idea in my head that he had desperately wanted to make Monkey Island 3a ever since leaving LucasArts -- maybe because that's what *I* hoped he would do. But it seems like he didn't realise there was such a fan demand there until after he had finished at Humongous Entertainment.

I didn't think Kylo's arc in ROS made a lot of sense - or at least I don't remember the logic or emotional stakes of it, especially compared to his arcs in TFA and TLJ, which felt very clear to me. I think there was a missed opportunity to have a very big pivot for Kylo as a result of Luke defeating him at the end of TLJ. If you make that a moment that directly leads to either Kylo's destruction or redemption, it would have made the whole trilogy feel a lot more cohesive. Maybe his defeat lead to the First Order starting to lose faith in Kylo, and results in his power being reduced within the organization. This leads him to become even more desperate and reckless. Maybe Kylo becomes obsessed with getting revenge on Luke, not understanding that Luke become one with the Force. Maybe Luke continues to appear to him as a force ghost, eventually guides him back to some kind of redemption, as he had done for Vader.

Yeah, I agree. Those books/games/comics are all still available (not sure if the novels are still in print), which is cool. I'm just ambivalent about the drive to re-make Star Wars as this cohesive universe. In the wild and wooly pre-prequel trilogy days, Lucas licensed Star Wars to a bunch of different companies that expanded the universe in different ways, so there wasn't a cohesive plan. I don't think that was by design, in retrospect I feel that I liked that the old version didn't fit well together. Fans seemed more tolerant of each other at that time as well, because you just learned to roll with the contradictions of the franchise. More recently, it just seems like Star Wars has become something people argue about, and it doesn't feel fun any more. But I've also aged out of it. I only made it into a few episodes of the Mandelorian before I got bored, so I probably shouldn't even be on this thread ...

Yes, I think the EU canon had become pretty overstuffed and restrictive by the time Disney bought Lucasfilm, and I don't blame them for essentially just wiping it and starting over. I personally liked the improvised nature of the brand as it existed in the early '90s, but I'm not sure how long it could have continued to expand without imploding. I like the ideas of several tiers of canon that Lucasfilm developed, but I think having to classify stuff in that level of detail point to larger problems. If you look at superhero comics, they don't have the same compulsion to synthesize everything into the same timeline, or to classify whether something really 'counts' or not. It's all just stories. It's not a perfect approach, but it's certainly more flexible. I think I would be more receptive to a Han Solo prequel film if it were supposed to be a version Han Solo, rather than the definitive Han Solo. All the same, I think I liked Star Wars because I was a kid, and there wasn't much else like it at the time. I stopped caring as much after the prequels came out, and the book license moved from Bantam to Del Rey, and LucasArts started pumping out tie-in games that no longer told their own stories ... but that was also around the time that I learned to drive a car, and started thinking about going to college, etc. That all happened at the same time for me, so it's hard to say if the old way was truly better, of it I just liked it because it was what I had as a kid. The fact that it all started changing around the time that I stopped being a kid makes it easy to be nostalgic for. I imagine for people who were becoming adults right as the sequel trilogy came and the EU canon was ditched out feel similarly ambivalent about it all.

I get this point, but I read that book as a kid and it was more like a weird creative writing challenge than at attempt at building out a cohesive lore. The stories were written by a bunch of different authors, and they each took their stories in wildly different directions in terms of tone and genre, and it didn't tie into anything else. It's not a classic by any means, but I can recall more details from the stories than I do from many of the main EU novels. I found it disconcertingly avant garde, and it didn't seem like anyone was monitoring the brand very closely. The wobbly continuity of Star Wars in the 90s had a charm to it that I don't associate with the brand any more. I had a book called 'The Essential Guide to Characters', which re-read a lot because it had a bunch of characters that came from outside the EU I was familiar with. There was stuff like the Ewoks cartoon series, the Marvel comic books, and a middle-grade chapter book series where the Emperor had a long-lost kid called ... Triclops. Just piles of stuff from a whole range of licencees who obviously never talked to each other. This book purported to reconcile all of it, but really just drew attention to the depth of imagination required in order to piece together how ramshackle and incongruent it all was. Here's the cover: Like, I love that Vader and Leia are just kind of buried in the background behind random aliens, and that C-3PO is from a comic book adaptation of the Droids cartoon series. Who's that lady in the front? I couldn't tell you, and I spent many afternoons sprawled on the floor reading this book. This was a thick black and white paperback with lots of drawings of the characters, and I think it had some things in common with a role-playing source book. To me, it made it feel like Star Wars was a weird world where anyone could add a character or a time period and mess around however they wanted to.

I guess my problem with the sequels is that most of the characters don't develop in particularly satisfying ways between movies. I like all the characters pretty well in TFA, and wanted to see them have another adventure. I think the characterisation of Poe and Finn is pretty thin, though, and this becomes a problem in later films. In TLJ, the scenes with Rey, Luke and Kylo are strong, and I also like the stuff with Poe as a deconstruction of the 'cocky rebel' trope. On the other hand, Finn's plot is weird. He doesn't seem like the same character as in the previous movie. ROS fails to do anything with the characters that felt meaningful to me, and doesn't pay off the interesting parts of TLJ. Rose could have been the 'Lando' of this trilogy, but she gets sidelined, which retroactively makes Finn's plot in TJI feel even more extraneous. Snoke being dispatched should have led to us seeing what would happen if Kylo took on an Emperor-like role, but they cart out Emperor instead, so we once again see Kylo being subservient to another Sith lord. Ho hum. I actually think Palpetine himself was creepy in a fun way, but he doesn't have a meaningful connection to the remaining characters. Having Rey be his granddaughter I guess is an attempt to give some purpose to his return, but there's no emotional heft to it, and it feels like a retcon. I don't really remember what Rey, Poe or Finn do in this film, except that they go on a mission that is boring. I think what they should have done with ROS is have a big time jump. TLJ had a real 'last adventure' feel to me, and I would have liked to have seen Episode 9 jump ahead like 10 or 15 years. That which would have mirrored the jump between Episode 1 and Episode 2, and let the first and last episodes in the saga feel like bookends. More importantly, it would have let us see what happens to these characters after they've processed the deaths and sacrifices of the OT characters, and how they shape the world in their absence. You could have had Kylo as a supreme bad guy (or, I dunno, a repentant outcast), and Rey mentoring some kind of new Jedi academy. Maybe Finn and Rose have a family. Maybe Poe's moved on to become a bureaucrat and hates it. Maybe Chewbacca is king of the Republic! Anything, just advance the characters in an interesting way.

My first experience with Star Wars was when I was like eleven. I remember wandering into the living room on a Saturday afternoon, and my dad had been channel surfing and landed on a cable-adjacent channel showing the first part of Return of the Jedi. There were the pig guard things, and Chewbacca, and it all looked old and weird and unlike anything I had seen before. My dad wandered off to mow the lawn and I guess I watched the rest of the movie. When I went to school the next week I was amazed that anyone else in my class had heard of it. I guess this was the sweet spot in the early/mid '90s when merchandising for the original films had finished up like a decade ago, and Lucas hadn't started gearing up to reinvigorate the IP. You could get the movies on VHS, and some kids who had older siblings had seen Star Wars toys in a box, or the attic or whatever, but that was about it. Lots of adults remembered the films fondly, but no one seemed to care deeply about them. I was like they were this fairy tale from the 1970s that kids from the '90s were discovering second-hand. That was fun! Then they re-released the films, and as I became a teenager, the novels, comics, merch, computer games, and finally the prequels became HUGE. I was the right age to main-line all of that for a couple of years, and enjoyed it a lot. Now there are several exhaustive universes of Star Wars stuff and it has become inescapable, and I feel grumpy about it. I've probably just out-grown it. But I also feel like Star Wars gets treated like some historical era to be studied now -- there are kids books about the event of the film which read like non-fiction, and I miss it feeling like a weird old fairy tale that grown-ups didn't take seriously.

I'm expecting to be somewhat disappointed, or I guess I should say that I'm tempering my expectations. I guess it's kind of like when a rock band reunites after 20+ years and decides to do another album together... it's very exciting and cathartic to get to have another go-round with something that you loved so long ago, but it's very unlikely to reach the highs of the original experience. The indications from the screenshots and marketing so far is that RtMI will mostly be 'playing the hits', and I like the idea of returning to Melee Island after several decades, etc. I'm going to be interested to play it and reflect on how times have changed, but I don't expect that it will be on par with the original games. That's all OK! If it's comparable in quality to Tales I will be happy.

Yes, I like that this is kind of the same scene as the one with the pirate leaders in MI, and that Guybrush's responses are mostly the same, but the context is quite different. In Secret, he was too young and naive, and in Return he's too old and out of touch. He's still trying to prove himself as a mighty pirate, and still unflappable about his ability to prove it. I think that's a fun way of kind of returning to and re-contextualizing the situation from the first game.

I had younger siblings who were just the right age for the HE! games while I was playing the later LucasArts adventures, so I got to play most of the Humongous titles even though they were slightly too young for me. It really is a shame that the company ended up being poorly managed once Ron and Shelly sold it, but I see that the titles have all been ported to the Switch recently, so I might see what my kids think about them.

Oooh that is a cool shirt Grossman has got on! I don't love Guybrush and Elaine being married, but I think I would like it less if they got divorced. The scenes between them in 3-5 are usually sweet and that relationship is a big part of the tone (and plots) of those games. There's also something that feels regressive about undoing the marriage of a character that most fans encountered as children. I really like that Ron seems to be accepting what has happened in his absence and rolling with it, rather than trying to live in an alternate 1993 before anyone else touched his toys.

I agree that the naming of the sprite doesn't really demonstrate narrative intent (although it would be fun if it did). It got me thinking though ... the dancing monkeys in the credit sequence of Revenge are very similar to the Jojo sprite from Secret. Is it the same sprite? Is it the same Monkey(s)? What if both of the dancing monkeys in Revenge are actually specific monkeys from Secret: the one who hangs on the idol's nose, and the one who dresses up as Elaine? What if THAT is the secret to Monkey Island?

Objection! This is madness! The debate is about the least number of monkeys, NOT monkey heads. As per the terms of engagement in this debate set by @Vainamoinen, monkey heads should be used to confirm the presence of a monkey, but note that a monkey can be confirmed by one or more live heads: Since this clearly establishes that a single monkey can have multiple heads, and therefore, the Three Headed Monkey counts as a single monkey. Since it clarifies that the head must be live to count, the Giant Monkey Head may not be counted. Otherwise, we would also have to include the Mad Monkey: (which I only now realize is meant to be one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz) Therefore! There are between three and five monkeys in Secret: -Smirk's training monkey -The Monkey Island monkey (Jojo) -The Three-headed monkey (three heads, one monkey) ?-The fake bride monkey that looks like Smirk's ?-The fake bride monkey that looks like Jojo I don't know if it's possible to determine whether the fake bride monkeys are meant to be the same monkeys from Guybrush's earlier adventures, or whether they are separate monkey of the same species. It seems reasonable that Smirk's monkey is the same, since it was already on Melee Island, but I'm not convinced about the Jojo lookalike. In any case, if there are only three monkeys in Secret, then it is tied with Revenge for the least number of monkeys ...

I think Full Throttle and The Dig were bigger sellers to general audiences because they were marketed as serious takes on long-established genres: Full Throttle looked like an action title, and The Dig was a mysterious sci-fi epic. The Dig also had a really awesome, shiny box I agree that there are a lot of similarities between Myst, and I wonder if that was a conscious attempt by LucasArts to try to emulate some of the vibe that Cyan had captured, or whether it was just a coincidence. It's interesting to compare the two games, since The Dig sold well by adventure game standards (300,000) but Myst sold twenty times more (6,300,000 by 2000 according to wikipedia). I kind of feel like the sense of discovery that was so captivating in Myst (even if you never progressed in the story) just wasn't as pervasive in The Dig, partly because the interface was just a refined version of what Lucas and Sierra had already successfully established. I do remember being very critical of Myst back in the day, because its success coincided with the end of the adventure game renaissance, and I think some of the conventional wisdom was that Sierra had beat LucasArts at their own game and killed off 'true' adventure games. In retrospect, it was probably more the fact that Lucas was reorienting towards making Star Wars, and computer games as a whole had pivoted hard towards 3D. It's amazing today how much more diversity the kinds of games that get made, compared to the early 2000s. And to bring this discussion back to the topic at hand, I wonder what is the earliest point after Curse which a 2D Monkey Island game was a viable commercial prospect. Would it have been possible in 2009 in the style of something like Puzzle Agent?

I won't be disappointed if it's not in the game, and I don't expect that it's going to impact my enjoyment of the game one way or another (unless it's somehow very regressive), but I won't be surprised if they do something interesting with gender. Anyway, I want to be able to play it and not just speculate!

Total, complete speculation -- I would not be surprised if Captain Madison and/or the new 'hip' pirate leaders are at least somewhat queer. I think their what we've seen of them so far seem to lean that way. And considering that Ron, as grumpy as his persona may be, is probably is more sympathetic to nonbinary young folks than he is toward staunch traditionalists (like the Important Looking Pirates), I suspect that Captain Madison et al aren't going to be straight (ignore the pun) villains ... How long until this game comes out??

The bra joke was very confusing to me as a kid, and I’m not even sure it’s funny now. I think it would be interesting if Largo was trans*, but in my head canon that joke isn’t even in the game. 😌 (*I mean, sort of interesting, I guess … the queer evil sidekick is such an exhausting trope.)

Whoa, I didn’t even notice his lips in the screenshots. They’re unsettling! If LeChuck looks different on the magazine, how likely is it that those changes have also been applied to his sprite in the game?

This is very fun, because I have fond memories of when Curse of Monkey Island was on the cover of PC Gamer back in July 1997. The cover was similarly big scary shot of LeChuck, and I wonder if Rex's new cover is an homage to that. PC Gamer was a very big deal at the time (in my teenage mind at least), and I could hardly believe that something as niche as Monkey Island made the cover. (I think they also did a big cover feature on The Dig, and another issue had a handful of screenshots of Ron's long-gestating "Good and Evil" project that I spent way too long scrutinizing). I possibly spent more time re-playing the Curse demo that came with this issue than I did with the actual game, but I completely forgot that it came with full versions of Monkey Island 1 and 2! Does anyone recall which versions of the game were on the demo disc?

Isn't the fact that they've brought back Neil Ross kind of a reference to MI3? Wally really only had a cameo in that game anyway... In terms of time travel and multiple versions of Guybrush, etc, I am very much hoping the game doesn't self-referentially frame the other games as a kind of multiverse, or spend a lot of time revisiting the earlier games. I expect the game won't all take place in the same chronological time frame (if it is indeed starting where MI2 left off, and then jumping years ahead at some point), but I realllly don't want it to be about time travel. It's already going to be a nostalgia trip, for better or for worse. The narrative of Monkey Island 2, in a lot of ways, was about the impossibility of reliving past glories - Guybrush is searching for a treasure that just seems arbitrarily bigger than his last adventure, but no one's particularly impressed by him anymore, his spark with Elaine is gone, etc. This kind of cuts against the actual experience of the game, which actually is bigger and more technologically advanced than Monkey Island 1, which gives it a nice frisson. I think if the Monkey 2 really just rehashed Monkey 1 (ie you start on Melee Island and have to complete a second set of trials), it would have felt like a cynical cash-grab. Instead, we get Guybrush and the other characters call the adventure as a kind of cynical rehash, while the game itself does all kinds of new and interesting things, and it all feels kind of exciting. I think this trick of lampshading the desperation of sequels gets harder the longer the gap is between sequels for a whole bunch of reasons. The theme of longing for an idealised, simpler past is kind of funny in Monkey Island 2 because it's been like two years between the games. There hadn't really been time to get nostalgic about the first game yet, and here they were making a sequel that was chiding itself for being too nostalgic. For Return, that subtext is unavoidable. I played Monkey Island 1 when I was in fourth grade, and Monkey Island 2 when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I think it affected me because they both felt slightly too 'grown up' to me at the time. Now I feel like Monkey Island 1 is kind of superficially about growing up, in that Guybrush wants to be a pirate, and doing that means meeting other people's weird expectations for what a pirate does, and learning how to navigate the rules of the pirate world. In Monkey Island 2 is more about the struggle to become mature -- Guybrush has already become a pirate, and no one cares. So he decides to become a better pirate -- but how? Compared to Monkey Island 1, a lot of the puzzles are about tricking people and bending the rules. Instead of insult sword-fighting, which you learn through repetition, you have the spitting contest, where you have to cheat in about four different ways at the same time. Monkey Island 2 tries really hard not to repeat itself, and in fact seems to be trying to caution the players from living in the past. The moment at the end where you are able to inexplicably revisit the alleyway on Melee Island felt so evocative and creepy to me, I think because it wasn't just a throw-back Easter Egg, but because it ties into that theme of the impossibility of going backward. I remember feeling desperately like I wanted to go back and explore the town again and find something that would help me defeat LeChuck, and so frustrated that there was no way to do that. You had to go back into the tunnels and face him -- Monkey 2 style. In that sense, I suppose the weird ending of Monkey 2 makes sense on a thematic level - if the game is about the futility of trying to recover the glory of past adventures, what's more appropriate than being shown the horror of what that means when taken to the extreme? Instead of maturing, learning and triumphing over the past, you end up regressed, infantalised, and trapped in the past. (This is a digression, but: in narrative terms, I don't think that ending fires on all cylinders because elements of it feel arbitrary - it's like, are we now supposed to care about Guybrush's childhood, or who his parents are? I don't think those things are important to the character, and I will be surprised if Return dwells on those things in any substantial way. It's also an ending that doesn't feel connected to anything the player does. On a conceptual, dream-like level I think it DOES work, but as the ending to an adventure game, which is narratively driven by the actions of the player-character, it doesn't feel totally earned. You defeat LeChuck and then just kind of watch as weird things start happening.) All of this is to say that I fully expect Return to deal with the past *as a concept*, but I'm hoping the story looks more to the future, and asks questions about how we can live and grow regardless of whatever past failures or triumphs we may have had...

I like the voice, and it’s interesting that they’ve gone kind of in the opposite direction of where I think some of us were speculating. LeChuck doesn’t sound older or more weary here to me. Hardly seems like a ‘darker’ version of the character. I like that he’s being portrayed as a boring old boss droning on and on, though! Most of all, I just want to reach inside these clips and turn on the setting to make the dialogue text float above their heads!

Oof, I forgot what a bad hand the Han/Leia relationship was dealt in the sequels. Hmmm. I can only imagine what an ‘unpopular opinions’ thread about Star Wars would look like. 😵‍💫 I think the way Ron abandoned the MI3a dream in favour of a sequel that honours the previous games is an admirable act of generosity and open-heartedness. It makes this franchise feel far healthier (and more fun) than a ‘splintered timeline/let’s return to 1994’ approach would have been. I’m glad that he’s uniting rather dividing. I don’t really want to see him split Guybrush and Elaine, and I hope he gives us some depth to their relationship. Along those lines, my unpopular opinion is that I think I would like to see Ahern & Ackley take a stab at MI7 if it ever gets made. History has been kind to Curse, and I would like to see what their approach to the genre would be after decades designing stuff for the Disney theme parks 😎

I think this is probably right, but both of those scenes seem like pastiches of romantic scenes to me, rather than filled with genuine emotion. The escalating plunderbunny teams of endearment scene is hilarious i think because of contrived and goofy the dialogue is, while the characters themselves don’t really emote at all visually, all while the music swells. I haven’t played it in the SE, but I would think the lines would come off awkward when spoken, they seem like they’re made for the player to read aloud on their own, while cracking up more each time (but maybe that’s just my own experience of them). I can buy Ron’s interpretation of that scene, where Elaine, a little older and wiser, is just messing around acting out a scene she’s seen in soap operas, while Guybrush is totally confused, but plays along with it, assuming she is sincere and kind of trying to impress her.

I recently read through a lot of the original design pitch for Curse, which originally was Ahern and Ackley originally proposed to be a MUCH longer game (I've attached it in case any of you haven't read it and are curious), and I was struck by how much of the game was thematically tied to the idea of weddings as cursed or fraught. Some of this made it to the finished version -- most obviously there is the doomed Goodsoup engagement. The pitch also includes a different puzzle with the theater, where Guybrush has to act out Romeo & Juliet, "pledging his undying devotion to a hook-armed pirate in drag". Most notably the overall arc of the game is that the Voodoo Lady has given Guybrush a number of tasks that he must complete in order to "destroy what remains of LeChuck's wedding plans", which includes visiting the wedding reception (which is somehow still in-progress four years later), returning a bunch of LeChuck and Elaine's wedding gifts, and visiting the 'Tree of Life' to crossing out where LeChuck has carved "LeChuck + Elaine". There are some interesting ideas in there, but the plotting is ropey because it feels weird to have to undo all of these things about a wedding that didn't actually take place. Maybe they could have finagled it into working -- like maybe the voodoo magic spell is set up so that it takes effect once Elaine puts the ring on, for example. I think they made the right choices in simplifying the game. This next spurious bit of psychoanalysis is probably totally wrong, but the original outline suggested to me that least one of the designers was working out a lot of MARRIAGE ANXIETY. I mean, they probably weren't, but the subtext of this version of Curse would have been a lot meatier. It make marriage as an institution seem kind of creepy, and has at least four iterations of cursed engagements: Guybrush and Elaine, LeChuck and Elaine, Romeo and Juliet (as performed by Guybrush), and the Goodsoups. The original pitch does not end with a successful wedding (although it calls for a romantic musical number). After everything Guybrush has to go through in this longer, rather darker, version of Monkey Island 3, I think it could have ended with both him and Elaine deciding that marriage was waaaay too much commitment (and voodoo), and parting ways.... maybe something like: Elaine: After the way my last engagement ended? I'm not looking for any more attachments right now. Guybrush: Funny, I was thinking the same thing... It could be played as glib on the surface, but with a tragic undertone. I don't think it would have been the crowd-pleasing ending that matched the overall tone of Curse, but it would have been hewed closer to the tone of the first two games, which undercut their expected climaxes. It would have also avoided saddling the subsequent games with a happily-married protagonist, while setting up a potential plot element for the next game (which Curse doesn't really do). Anyway, I'll be interested in seeing what Ron does with their relationship. ...and thank you for reading my dissertation on the theme of marriage in an unproduced version of a computer game I first played when I was in middle school. 1995 08 29 Curse of Monkey Island.compressed.pdf