ThunderPeel2001

Wow. Brave move from Ronzo!

I wrong a big long reply to this, but I'll spare everyone and just say... I completely (but respectfully) disagree

Damn, Stan is so funny in SOMI. Whoever wrote his dialogue did a great job. He may have been coasting since this high point:

Yep, that's exactly it. And this clip from Used Cars, too. He's even got the same checked jacket:

There’s still so many ways Stan could be let out by Guybrush only to fall for the same trick twice and be locked up by him again. (And fix the continuity issue where Stan is never actually told Guybrush's name in the process.) As someone once said to me, that's the magic of writing: You're making it up! Classic example: Obi-Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father, only to be told in the next film he IS his father. You can write your way around anything. Yep, I felt the same. I get they were going for "stereotypical used car salesman" with they voice they picked, but he'd always been a Southern accented fast-talker in my mind. ("Howdy!") I mean his sprite literally can't stop moving. Even when he's listening, he's tapping his foot. His CMI voice was too lackadaisical for my liking. (And the manic arm-waving didn't work as well in high resolution animation.) Fans: We're never pleased!

Oh yeah! I can't believe I've never noticed that!

I prefer it that the inhabitants of hell find Stan too unbearable (presumably he tries to sell everyone something) and so instead send him back to earth... trapped in his coffin and unable to die again

There’s no reason Guybrush can’t talk to Stan in his coffin and decide to leave him there. There’s no reason Stan can’t be let out of his coffin only to be trapped again at the end of the game. When we thought the game might be set in Hell (per the I final MI3 plan) it also would have made sense that Stan was down there, after dying in his coffin. But was rejected by Hell for being too annoying (I like this idea). There’s so many ways a character and start in a location and end in the same location.

New: A very light interview with Ron and Dave (and Sid Meier) that doesn't add much new info: https://www.theage.com.au/technology/video-games/monkey-island-is-back-but-don-t-call-it-a-90s-throwback-game-20220505-p5airk.html

Assuming the title is accurate, has anyone considered why we might need to return to Monkey Island?

Ooh. What if, knowing that Earl Boen wasn't available, Ron and Dave wrote around LeChuck? Interesting thought! Shock twist: Jojo wants revenge.

(Sorry, I wrote far too much for such a small point. We don't really need to get into the weeds of this! But since I've written it, here it is: ) Of course I appreciate that we're all fallible and that human memory is unreliable, and yes there's nothing wrong with being critical, but when the default position is: I think that's a bit far. You may disagree, or maybe you think that was a bit far too, but I'll give you my reasoning why I think that: Outside of contemporary accounts/documents, the team's recollections are still the best sources we have, even with fallible human memory. Everything else is just speculation by people who weren't there. Unless we can directly contradict those memories with contemporary documented fact, then I think there isn't really any real reason to automatically doubt what anyone says. I appreciate that you've tried to dig up contemporary evidence to support your belief that Ron is misremembering: But this is only assumption on your part: We don't know how many versions Peter Chan went through of those other locations. The earliest dated sketches for MI2 are actually from February and March 91. The latest dated images we have are from late July/early August, with the tunnel image being among them. So as far as anyone can tell, it was one of the last ones to be produced... again as far as anyone can tell. We also really don't know much about the production schedules at LucasArts. How far in advance did Ron need to supply a completed story for the artists, animators, composers, programmers? How long did they spend in QA before going gold? As you're aware, they couldn't release patches back in those days, so production had to stop with plenty of time for QA to ensure the game was stable. We just don't know. We also don't know if those tunnels were originally going to be used as something else, possibly unrelated to that ending. (Interesting to note that "El Carlo" is mentioned on a June 25 sketch. I'm confused by that! When you started writing the story in late November 1990, and you still haven't figured out who your baddie is seven months later... or was that just Peter Chan getting confused and using an old character name? Who can say?) Plus, when you start discounting evidence, there's a danger of another human failure (that we're all guilty of): Picking and choosing facts to fit our narratives. You say Ron is misremembering in 2022 because it's 30 years ago. But that also means he was misremembering in 2013, when he said he could remember the exact moment he was lying in bed and the ending came to him. And this is from a man with boxes full of waterlogged documentation that we've only seen glimpses of. I agree that some of what we've heard reads very contradictorily (what was Ron referring to in that Adventurer interview??), but unless we have hard evidence to prove otherwise, those recollections are the best we have. I'd lean towards believing them, with a critical eye, than automatically assuming they're unlikely to be true. Or maybe this is just semantics.

Double post

I can see why Ron (and Dave) get so annoyed when fans tell them they've remembered things wrong (I remember Dave in particular on Twitter getting very irritated). It must be incredibly frustrating to have people who weren't there doubt what you tell them.

That was very interesting, although it was, of course cut.

Check out the Amiga thread. It doesn’t appear to be the case that it was an especially late addition. If anything it looks like they were trying to figure out how to do scene fades with the Amiga hardware.

I know you say you don’t feel the same way anymore, but I actually agree with you here. I’d forgotten that feeling, but I think there IS something slightly less satisfying about playing through an extended flashback. (Although I’m not sure I even fully understand why.) Re: The MI2’s ending. Here’s my personal wish for how it could have been interpreted: Firstly, I have to say that I wish the voodoo power of Big Whoop had been a bigger part of the explanation. I love Curse, but making Big Whoop a literal theme park never felt right to me. My own personal pet explanation was that Guybrush accidentally unleashed the awesome voodoo power of Big Whoop when the chest broke: But it took a few minutes to fully permeate and twist reality. So the longer you’re playing the last section of MI2, the more Big Whoop is taking control. Accidentally unleashing Big Whoop near LeChuck had an unintended consequence: He was also pulled into this new disturbing voodoo reality. (This explains why LeChuck’s attempt to transport Guybrush into a dimension of pain doesn’t work — they’re both already in another dimension.) Big Whoop is, as the voodoo lady said, an incredible power. And it can be used to bend reality. But while everyone else treated that power with total respect. Possibly only carefully taking a fraction of it with each use. Guybrush accidentally unleashed the whole damn thing at once by clumsily smashing its container. All Guybrush wanted was to escape LeChuck. And maybe that subconsciously manifested in a desire to become a kid again: bring his parents back to life and feel safe. Except Guybrush being Guybrush, he fumbles the whole thing and takes LeChuck with him into this new twisted dimension and casts him as his brother. So my Monkey 3a would have involved both LeChuck and Guybrush trying to escape from (and undo) Big Whoop. LeChuck hating Guybrush even more for having forced him to endure this Big Whoop created reality. And Big Whoop’s reality would have kept getting weirder and nightmarish. (Think David Lynch.) It wouldn’t have just stayed in a theme park. It would have glitched and twisted. Maybe Guybrush’s parents would have become evil, trying to stop Guybrush and LeChuck escaping. And previously visited locations would appear randomly. And maybe Big Whoop world have kept slowly growing, sucking in everyone on Dinky, so that Elaine and then Herman would appear in that new world, too. Anyway, that’s my own personal interpretation/wish list: As soon as that chest broke, reality became perverted.

I don’t believe anyone IS saying it’s the “definitive explanation”. I was merely referring to one of the popular interpretations (which was possibly exacerbated by what looks like a bug in the Amiga version where Elaine’s SPELL comment didn’t appear). It’s unquestionable that MI2’s ending was divisive and that a lot of people hated it. (It certainly took me many years to grow to like it, and Ron himself says he STILL gets emails from people saying how much they hated it.) Side note: In a weird way I don’t know why we’re even discussing different interpretations anymore: Ron has apparently wholeheartedly embraced Curse’s detailed explanation. He has said they’ve been “very careful” not to contradict anything, so basically Curse’s “theme park of the dammed” is now Roncanon. I also think that the heightened emotions about Return are partially fuelled by people desperately wanting a Roncanon explanation to MI2’s confusing ending. (Which Ron has repeatedly stated he didn’t have a plan for.) “The muse visits when the work begins.”

Another Ron clarification on Twitter: So the "child's fantasy" ending isn't related to the anachronisms in MI1 -- at least in a pre-planned way, as the ending hadn't even been thought of until close to the end of production. And actually I just remembered that Ron talked about how the idea for the ending came about in his Pax Australia keynote -- which I can't believe I forgot during this whole conversation 🤦‍♂️.

Yeah, Dread's story always confused me. It was obviously a reference to the navigator's head... but then the description was off.

Tweet: "@grumpygamer True or false: MI2's ending was originally planned for MI1, but Tim and Dave talked Ron out of it" Reply: @grumpygamer: "False." This is what Bill Tiller originally said: As reported here: https://mixnmojo.com/news/On-this-day-16-years-ago-Bill-Tiller-revealed-the-secret-of-Monkey-Island

Wow. That's pretty incredible! Great find! Now I really want to ask him (and Dave) if there's any truth to the rumour that the "child's fantasy" was the original ending to MI1 until Tim and Dave talked him out of it!

That’s what I said a few pages back, however there’s been enough quotes from legitimate sources to make me accept that it can’t be true. However it’s interesting to me that I don’t think “the secret” was mentioned in MI2? (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) If there really was this ongoing mystery, then why not mention it in MI2? As for the anachronisms, I agree that they got too much for me, but in Escape before Tales. The first three MIs felt like a real pirate world first, and a jokey anachronism second. Which is how I like it. Blazing Saddles still feels like a western despite it ending with the characters going to modern cinema to watch how the film ends. It’s great when you can have your cake and eat it.

DOTT was aping an existing style. I don't think Rex Crowle was copying DOTT myself. Here's some interesting quotes from contemporary MI2 reviews about humour in video games. (Interesting to me, at least! The industry has changed so much...)

Ron and Dave have remarkable memories, if you ask me. They were setting the story straight on the "guybrush" DPaint filename not that long ago.