Udvarnoky

This version wraps the trailer with a first-look type marketing piece.

I don't get the impression that they necessarily even wrote it -- more like they entertained it in the brainstorming stage. I agree that DIAL is holding up nicely. It's got some weight and exoticness to it, which feels like redemption after an inconsequential-feeling, stagebound installment.

Mangold has made comments to the effect that the existing scripts he looked at felt a little too safe and familiar for him, without a firm sense of identity. (To be fair, it doesn't even sound like the material was considered camera-ready yet.) I obviously can't judge a script I haven't read, but that's pretty in-line with what I'd expect the Spielberg/Koepp INDY 5 to be like. It sounds like Mangold and his writers started totally from the blank page, with the only residue from the earlier concept(s) being the involvement of Indy's goddaughter (who I wouldn't assume had the same function or personality as Helena in the produced version) and the idea of a prologue with a de-aged Indy. China could have been a cool setting, though. It's interesting that the story would have gone to Buenos Aires as well -- you'd think after an installment largely set in South America, they would have avoided that region to mix things up, but had they shot on location (and it sounds like might have been the plan, with Portugal being the stand-in) it could have been justified. DIAL was supposed to have a segment in India before pivoting to Morocco due to COVID levels -- had that worked out, it probably wouldn't have felt redundant to TEMPLE OF DOOM since an urban center would have been visually totally different from the second movie's settings. Anyway, the main reason I bumped the thread is that the movie arrived on disc earlier this month. Glad it made the cut before Disney inevitably abandons physical media.

I'm sure everyone here owns all the LucasArts adventure games fifty times over, but it's worth mentioning that they're all outrageously cheap on GOG right now: Maniac Mansion ($2.09) Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders ($2.09) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($2.09) Loom ($2.09) The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition ($3.49) Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: Special Edition ($3.49) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis ($2.09) Day of the Tentacle: Remastered ($2.99) Sam & Max Hit the Road ($2.09) Full Throttle: Remastered ($2.99) The Dig ($2.09) The Curse of Monkey Island ($2.44) Grim Fandango ($2.99) Escape from Monkey Island ($2.44) So you know, buy them all for your friends as a Christmas gift, then mysteriously find them archival filesets to actually play, through DREAMM.

Cressup's interview with Tim from earlier this year made time for the origin story of the Marmite photo, which fans know is Mojo's first trip to Double Fine in 2001. You see people, this lore still has currency.

Surely you're only pretending to be so innocent. Citations are a straight up cash business at Mojo, per a policy @Remi enacted sometime in the mid-aughts.

The stuff Ken Macklin volunteered is unbelievable. Here's the Gary Winnick concept art that Macklin is elaborating upon with that last piece:

A few relics: https://web.archive.org/web/20041210231155/https://www.bad-brain.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050405211655/http://www.people-net.com/index.jsp

Alright, Simon Jeffery next.

This new studio better lawyer up.

Amazing. Keep them coming. Let the record show that the Hit the Road piece is also a Paco Vink original, while the Grim artwork is by Colin Panetta. This is a reminder that we need to go back and clearly credit the artists behind these headers. They definitely got attribution at the time, but I think it was done inconsistently (in some cases they may be mentioned only in the original news post, long orphaned from the feature), and some of the features' finer details may not have survived the transition from Gabez's highly bespoke HTML to the BBCode era.

Yes, exactly. Wild stuff!

As you may know, the header art for our “Secret History” feature on The Curse of Monkey Island was done by the great @Paco (V), known intergalactically for his unfinished comic adaptation of the first game: Paco’s work was so on-point that it sometimes gets confused for official promotional imagery for Curse, and it has therefore turned up, without attribution, in all sorts of low-effort articles, such as: Curse of Monkey Island is the Only Pirate Game You Should Take Note of This Month (Gamespew, 03/29/18) Escape from Monkey Island hits GOG, gets bundle discount (AltChar, 06/19/18) Monkey Island Creator Debunks Myth About Guybrush's Name (TheGamer, 04/28/22) *Curse of Monkey Island designer reveals reasons for series' art style switch (Eurogamer, 05/05/22) Why Return To Monkey Island’s Art Style Is So Divisive (Screenrant, 07/06/22) All Monkey Island Games, Ranked (TheGamer, 12/28/22) **Steven Spielberg Almost Made This Video Game Movie Adaptation (Collider, 08/19/23) The Curse of Monkey Island System Requirements (Systemreqs) Where will Paco’s work turn up uncredited next? Let us know so we can grow the wall of shame. Sure, this is the definition of throwing stones from a glass house, but you gotta pass the time somehow. *credit added after some shaming from @Kroms **“Image via Lucasfilm Limited,” apparently

When environment artist Karen Purdy updated her online portfolio, it was the hitherto unseen Freelance Police stuff that got stirred up that made the front page. But she did work on early Telltale titles as well, and what she shares from those are pretty interesting/rare in their own right. Was that teddy bear on the Myra! talk show set even in the final game? https://karenspurdy.artstation.com/projects/XBDR9D

Valuable stuff. Stemmle is candid and the questions are good. It’s always interesting how Dan Connors seems to be about the only person on the team who doesn’t characterize the cancellation as a total surprise. Mike must be right when he guesses that as the producer he had a little more exposure to the upper management’s perspective than the rest of the team. Your interview with Dan was also the first I’ve heard anyone suggest that Jim Ward may have had a say on the fate of the game before he was formally sworn in as studio president in April 2004.

The crime scene hadn't been picked quite clean: https://mixnmojo.com/news/Sam-and-Max-2s-grave-disturbed-again-stray-bone-fragments-collected

Am I the only one who thinks Larry is referencing Randy Breen in all but name when he talks about the manager who disapproved of his version of Full Throttle 2? He's too professional to call him out, but it's gotta be.

In an old article I tried to argue that CMI, EMI and TMI do a pretty conscientious job of keeping the theme park innuendos of the first two games perpetuated.

I don't believe Ron's intention at the time ran much deeper than the impishness of doing a Monty Python and the Holy Grail ending. I hardly doubt he had "thoughts" for where he might have gone from there, and it is intriguing how that rug pull encourages you to re-examine the games' fourth wall humor as if it was conscious foreshadowing, but I think by and large he just liked the idea of a wild swerve to be answered for only when/if the time came to do so.

Keep up the good work, Daniel. That you're "banking" all these developer memories is something posterity is going to be grateful for.

I'm always struck by how superior the CGM cover is to the actual box art while still conforming to the art direction of the game. The design they went with is fine, but feels a little too Disney.

Concept artist Adam Brockbank shared some illustrations he did for Spielberg's unproduced version of Indy 5.

Keep watching your cholesterol, as the game has achieved a status of "midway".

I spent a lot more of the review on Skull than I set out to because, having made the decision not to use spoilers, it became the most useful way to articulate my general response to Dial by contrast. Skull and Dial are kindred sequels, because they’re both up against the same challenge: How do you tell a story about an aged Indy that necessarily puts the character outside of the era he was designed to operate in? How the two movies deal with this problem is highly revealing. The decisive difference is that Dial comes off as a movie that knows what it wants to be about. We can attack the screenplay, but it at least feels like it has one. Skull feels like they shot a story outline that happens to have dialog in it. I find it highly objectionable because it is in essence incomplete material. The truth is I can talk all day about individual things in Skull I admire, and individual things in Dial I consider defective, but that’s all just exercise. There’s an aggregate effect with a movie, where it either works for you or it does not. I walked out of Dial satisfied, while I walked out of Skull deflated, and that’s going to color my whole perspective, as it ought to. I also decided that I needed to divulge where I was coming from walking into Dial to explain why I might have been prepared to forgive a lot, because where I was coming from is inescapably informed by the last installment. Though I’m negative on Skull, there’s a narrative around that movie based primarily on internet talking points (aliens, Shia LaBeouf, whatever) that I don’t want anything to do with. In short, the reasons you’re “supposed” to dislike Skull are largely unrecognizable to me. I personally dislike Skull because I find it to be an inert, unshaped bore filmed by somebody who didn’t want to leave the country and desperately wanted you to know how addicted they are to Classic Softs and mist machines. Already we’re hearing how it’s “illogical” to tolerate Dial’s zanier choices as some sort of hypocrisy due to common complaints against Skull. (Oh, if only outlandishness was Skull’s problem!) The CGI “fakery” I see in a similar light – I’ll commiserate with anybody who thinks Dial is too VFX heavy. But the fact is that Skull looked fake even when it was real – that’s how gratuitous the issue was. I just can’t overstate how lethal the aesthetic of that movie was for me, and how much of a rebound Dial managed to be on this score, even shot digitally and despite the fact that it features a goddamned machine-learned Indy (and obviously so at that) for twenty-five minutes. So in the end I gave a lot of ink to my actual problems with Skull (as opposed to what the received wisdom says) to try to orient the reader to the areas where I was going to be particularly susceptible to some redemption. Already it’s looking like my perspective is one of the more generous ones, and hopefully all the knocking on Skull served the purpose of contextualizing that rather just reading as gratuitous.

Anthony Ingruber makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it-cameo in the movie as "Dutch Bidder" at the Hotel L’Atlantique auction. He was recruited as a double for Ford in the 1944 sequence, and I guess they couldn't resist working him in somehow. There he is on the far left, in a shot that was in the first trailer: