Udvarnoky

And I'm seeing that it's a steal on eBay!

Were Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island the only games to get an official poster? Looking at scans of The Adventurer, I was shocked to find how many games got T-shirts. Nothing more stylish than a Night Shift tee.

Impressive stuff, guys! Jenni's collection reminded me of the existence of that ridiculous bargain-bin retail version of Sam & Max: Season 1 that only contained the first three episodes. Truly a noteworthy release in terms of sheer disdain for the customer, up there with Insecticide: Part One; And By The Way Part Two Is Never Coming.

I pointed that out only because it helps explain why Moriarty was, by his own admission, more or less oblivious to what was contained in the Forge designs. There could have simply been two independent pitches for Forge, rather than one being a reaction to another. It's not a huge cost on the management's part to tell 2-3 people, "Hey, spend a few weeks on a proposal and come pitch it to us." Both concepts for Forge seem to have been discarded before the project could achieve a real green light, which makes it wholly distinct from The Dig situation. It's possible Hal did indeed serve a brief, interim role on that project as Grossman did, but it's also possible the magazine just got the facts wrong. Has there ever been a secondary source on that? I specifically brought Hal up to Bill Eaken in an attempt to clear this up. He responded "Hmm, Hal may have taken over for a 'minute,' but I vaguely remember being told he never wanted it." So, nothing conclusive there, and I don't think the trivia of whether Hal had a turn at the wheel matters much, except possibly to reinforce that management had some trouble finding Moriarty's replacement before they settled on Clark.

I must say none of the broader conspiracy stuff being peddled really holds my interest, but maybe I can shed some modest light onto the confusion with Loom/The Dig. Moriarty has stated that while he had the basic ideas for two Loom sequels, he was too burnt out from the original game's production to actually pursue them. Following Loom he spent some time in the educational division working on an ill-fated Young Indiana Jones game(s). That division was in a physically separate office, or maybe even separate building, from the regular "games group," which is why Moriarty has no insight on the Forge designs that were kicked around -- he wasn't there to participate. And when he came back to the LucasArts building and took over The Dig, he apparently wasn't interested in digging them up. Interestingly, there seems to have been no less than two versions of Forge proposed. There's the one already mentioned, headed by Mike Ebert and Kalani Streicher (a duo that in the end never got the opportunity to design a SCUMM game, but ended up being instrumental in some 16-bit console classics), but there was also, apparently, an outline put together by Jenny Sward, Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle toward the end of Fate of Atlantis. Sward pitched it to no success, and Clark and Stemmle moved to Sam & Max Hit the Road. Moriarty not working on the Loom sequels was his own choice, though it's possibly one he came to regret in retrospect.

Both Joe Pinney and Aric Wilmunder were in fact project leads on Iron Phoenix. Wilmunder stepped in when Pinney abruptly left the studio. Wilmunder did in fact mention the original project lead in the article, when we quote him discussing how his first task was to elaborate on the design that Pinney left behind.

That's interesting that Landrou may have been pre-existing, but reading Eaken's comments again this doesn't really seem to contradict anything. He says Landrou was "an animation engine and not a game engine, so it had to be built into a game engine first, which meant a lot of time and money spent on just that." So the essential undertaking remains that they were building a new game engine to accommodate this animation system, as opposed to starting with a game engine (SCUMM) and beefing up its animating ability.

That assumes the programmers were the indicted parties. I ascertain the blame fell on Brian because the decision to build a new engine along with a new game came from him. In essence, he bit off more than he could chew, and it had a cascading effect on production that included palsied momentum on the tech pipeline. You can have a programming disaster without having a programmer disaster. The Falstein version isn't relevant in this regard because it was being made in SCUMM, and I don't think it got far along enough to even have the opportunity for major programming disasters. My impression is that full bore production was still on the horizon when the decision was made to shelve it. I would like to hear more. The year on the shelf is not puzzling when seen in the context Grossman provides of 1991ish LucasArts: It doesn't sound so unreasonable to me, nor does it seem out of the question to me that the importance company ascribed to The Dig might have fluctuated over time. Heck, maybe George Lucas just woke up one day and asked the studio president, "Hey, where are we at with that game idea of Steve's?" and the next day management re-prioritized The Dig right then and there. The driving forces behind these things can be a lot more prosaic and arbitrary than you seem prepared to consider. I would agree with you that we should take developer memories with a grain of salt, but not because of conspiratorial reasons, but simply because memories are unreliable or they themselves don't have the whole picture. People are perfectly capable of just being confused, or wrong, without there being some hidden agenda attached. If you're on the lookout for contradictions, you'll find plenty of them. But that doesn't mean there's a story.

Since the development history of The Dig is undeniably a fun topic, I’d like to challenge a few assumptions you make in your original post, ATM. Let me start with this: People who hold an uncharitable view of the released game would tell you that’s just what happened. You suggest that it’s somehow suspicious or untoward that the company didn’t just rush the game out the door within months of Moriarty’s departure, but that strikes me as a drastic underestimation of the problems the project was facing. When he spoke to us for our retrospective on The Dig, Bill Eaken said bluntly of Moriarty’s version: “The programming was a complete disaster.” To tell you what you already know, Moriarty ambitiously insisted on introducing a brand-new engine for his version of The Dig, rather than tried-and-true SCUMM. The idea was that the team wanted to raise the bar on animation with The Dig, and the SCUMM engine as it existed at that time simply wasn’t up to the task. Moriarty’s solution was to devise a new animation system, possibly called Landrou, which was then built into a game engine, possibly called StoryDroid. (I say possibly because there’s always been some confusion/debate about the names of the new systems.) This bold decision was met with huge resistance from the team that maintained SCUMM (chief among them Aric Wilmunder, I have to assume), who felt it was foolhardy to develop a new engine from the ground-up when SCUMM was mature, demonstrated and stable, and what’s more could have been enhanced to meet the robust animation demands if the money and time being spent to establish unproven tech had been invested in SCUMM instead. Somehow, Moriarty got his way (with Eaken speculating that management just kind of shrugged and saw the debate as a rivalry between the art team, who were naturally dazzled by the opportunities of Landrou, and the programmers), but what happened in the end would seem to vindicate the dissenting view. I’m sure there was more to the project’s troubles than that, of course. More than one person has made note of the huge amount of pressure Moriarty was under, and it’s been noted that he was used to working with a tiny team, and perhaps became overwhelmed with scale of The Dig. Still, the decision to replace SCUMM seemed to be the fateful one that spelled disaster for the project. The programming side of things just never came together, and at a certain point it became undeniable even to the managers that for the longest time had been (again, per Eaken) dismissing warnings people had been delivering about the project as developer politics. Finally, they stepped in and put an end to it. So if anything, the fact that LucasArts went from that situation to shipping The Dig by the end of 1995 is a testament to the remarkable expedience of the team involved. You noted that Dave Grossman was briefly on the project between Moriarty and Clark; describing himself as a “hedge trimmer” who began the condensing of the design that Clark carried on with, he portrayed the project that Moriarty left as being in a “larval” stage. How are you going to ship a game that is in a “larval” stage in 1993, by the end of 1993? When you account for the fact that LEC didn’t find the replacement project leader right away, and that when they did he insisted (predictably) that he wanted to revert back to SCUMM, I would say it was a herculean task that they managed to release what they did, as quickly as they did. And this stubborn campaign to bring The Dig to a successful finish in spite of everything ("Three words -Spielberg, Spielberg, and Spielberg" is how Bill Tiller describes the motivation on the studio's part) might well have come at the cost of other, arguably more meritorious projects, like Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.

ATM, I think you've invented a bold new genre: game development fan fiction! I got a kick out of it.

It isn't uncommon for Mojo-relevant titles to turn up online at insanely inexpensive prices, and I thought it would be good to have a catch-all thread to point such deals out, as I always felt these items to be a bit desperate in the context of the front page. Today's bargain: Atari's U.S. retail release of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space for PC is currently selling on Amazon for $1.79. That's less than the shipping! Buy in bulk and make it a door prize at that office party that might have happened in a pre-pandemic world! https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0032CRP2Y/

Repeating things that I have previously said nearly verbatim is classic me. The distinction between whatever I've got and Alzheimer's is largely clerical at this point.

It is just amazing to me how we have four Sam & Max adventure games that are all at minimum good. Not a harvest anyone would have predicted in 2004.

ThunderPeel may be thinking of a confusing remark Brian Moriarty made during the Q&A at the end of one of his Loom post-mortems. (By the way, if you have not seen that presentation, you need to check it out -- Brian traveled with it for a little while there in the 2015 arena, so you will find multiple versions of it online. The one I saw all the way through was the GDC one, and I can't recommend it highly enough.) At the end of the one he gave at EVA 2015 in Argentina, he was asked how "talks" had gone with any of the game studios he had previously indicated an interest in collaborating with on further Loom projects. Here is what he said. I am dubious of the situation he portrays -- not because I think he is lying, but because he seems to have gotten the information second hand, and it doesn't really jive with anything that has reached public knowledge. This video is already five years old, and neither then nor since has there been a whiff of any other studio but Double Fine obtaining (with Sony's help) licenses to develop projects with LucasArts adventure game IP, and Tim has made it pretty clear that he was only interested in revisiting the titles he himself had a project leader role on. Obviously, I have no privileged information either, but I suspect Brian was never really able to get in touch with the right people except through a level of abstraction, and was relying on whatever came back to him over a game of bureaucratic telephone. So I take whatever information he was fed with a grain of salt. Who really knows though. When it comes to further remasters, I respect Tim's position but nevertheless wish there was some way he could have exploited the inroads he must have made with Lucasfilm to help the designers of other LEC games do something similar, even if it was outside Double Fine. If Moriarty is keen on doing more Loom you would think Double Fine could have put him in the same room with the people he needed to talk to. But maybe it isn't that easy.

Before Wilmunder opened the vault, devotees of the The SCUMM Bar (and who isn't?) enjoyed knowledge of this scrapped storyline for CMI when Jonathan Ackley touched on it in an interview way back in 2003: How did you come up with the storyline for CMI? Did the ending to Monkey 2 prove a challenge to get around? First we wrote an incredibly convoluted story about Elaine being turned into a ship's mast-head. You had to change her back before the fiery demon LeChuck burned her down. A lot of great special-effects a la the "Gone With The Wind" burning of Atlanta scene. We also had a number of puzzles involving Guybrush attempting to return the wedding gifts given to LeChuck for the monster's undead wedding to Elaine. It would've been spectacular, but when we looked at it again, we decided the story was somewhat hollow. We reworked the story until all the puzzles revolved around Guybrush overcoming his own ineptitude and saving the one person who loves him despite his idiocy. The emotional stakes for Guybrush became even higher and the story fell into place. As to the end of Monkey 2 - that's the real curse of Monkey Island.

Was anything going on?

The implication that Lucasfilm would be easier to play ball with than NuTelltale strikes me as odd, but who knows what other factors are at play.

At some point we want to get the Mixnmojo Games Database rebuilt, and exhaustive galleries of packaging art would be a big part of that. Just throwing that out there because if we've got people with LucasArts game collections, good scanners, and an uncommon generosity with their free time, we want to get all the mileage we can out of it. ; Speaking of which, is anybody in touch with Freddie of The Lucasarts Museum fame these days?

You might have a point there with Maniac Mansion, but that game is still pretty overtly a horror/sci-fi B-movie parody, while its sequel is overtly a Saturday morning cartoon. In addition, we've seen interpretations of Maniac Mansion rendered in ink, oil and clay that predate Day of the Tentacle that managed to be much more evocative of the game's world, in my opinion. I need to shut up about that now, because if I work through my ideas here I'll end up using it as an excuse not to make the article. To build on your point, though, I think the reason the visual jump from MI2 to Curse continues to spawn discussion is that there's always going to be a certain ambiguity about just how much the art styles of MI1 and MI2 were dictated by extreme technology constraints, and how much of their look can be ascribed to deliberate aesthetic choices on the parts of Purcell, Chan, etc. When it comes to really old games where there's so much sleight of hand involved to wring every last bit of potential out of limited palettes and ungenerous pixel counts, the art design and the problem-solving get melded together in ways that are difficult to unweave. The black magic Mark Ferrari had to pull to achieve those dithering effects in Loom, probably the most impressive EGA game ever made, was practically a programming task. I do think that certain people who can't stand the look of CMI can get this idea in their head that somehow the original art team would have made the game look like the LeChuck's Revenge cover art, which is silly. I don't think there's truly any way of knowing what a Steve-Purcell-art-directed Monkey Island 3 made in 1997 would have looked like, but probably the closest thing we have to a reference point would be the MI1 concept art or the original character close-ups from the EGA version, all of which is pretty cartoony. They're still distinct from Ahern's stamp on the series (I stamp he is entitled to, I might add), but I think it's a more reasonable comparison. Now, those pirates are still really different, but I think it puts the "How cartoony is too cartoony?" debate in the proper context.

It's interesting how Bill Tiller gets routinely credited/blamed for the CMI art style, but people forget that his role on the project was Lead Background Artist, not Art Director. That would be co-project leader Larry Ahern. And there's this, from our interview with Bill for the CMI retrospective: I love the look of CMI, but it's certainly different from the first two games. I actually find Day of the Tentacle's take on the Maniac Mansion universe far more radical a reinvention. And I adore Day of the Tentacle as well; I just find it interesting that its bold departure never seems to have engendered the controversy the post-Ron Monkey Island games did. Maybe the MI fan base is just more protective, maybe Maniac Mansion was relatively forgotten by 1993, or maybe the fact that Ron and Gary Winnick openly supported Day of the Tentacle's hairpin turn made it more acceptable to the audience. But that sequel outright shifted genres, let alone art style. I intend to write up my thoughts on this in an article some day.

Eighteen months ago I unveiled the first phase of an ongoing undertaking to bring old Mojo articles back online. To make a long story short*, the various redesigns of Mojo over the years, and the not-always-diligent efforts to port previous features over during these transitions, would cause articles from the sunsetted version of Mojo to simply get left behind in the process. The cumulative effect was that well over fifty percent of Mojo's content ended up missing. For years I've been keen on addressing that travesty, but the more I dug into it the more I came to understand why prior staffers gave up on the challenge. Mojo backups are woefully limited when it comes to the really old stuff, and though the backups have come to my aid many times on an individual basis, generally speaking the only strategy you really have when you want to recover an old article is to turn to the Wayback Machine and extract the content of a snapshot/crawl (hopefully, one even exists) by hand. This at least gets you the text if not always the media -- and without the media, many articles are borderline pointless, such as the Gold Guy Exposed article, which I only recently got the images for with the help of Jake. Not all articles have such a happy ending, though. Aside from the major issue of lost media, the other problem is that modern Mojo is way more restrictive on the presentation of features in terms of layout and available markup tags. This lockdown was deliberate and undoubtedly a good thing going forward, but it makes for an absolute nightmare when trying to adapt old articles, which were written with a laissez faire attitude toward handwritten HTML, to MojoEx. (Gabez in particular seemed to love to make his articles as bespoke as possible, and I'm going to die five years sooner than I otherwise would have died due to my traumatic experiences in trying to recreate them with any accuracy.) The end result is that it's often impossible to replicate the appearance of older articles even when you are lucky enough to have all the actual materials on hand. Sidebars, for example, once used regularly in Mojo, are simply not a thing in MojoEx. The compromises pile up. I'm still committed to getting everything back in whatever form possible for posterity's sake, and I've made a point of linking to Wayback Machine snapshots at the end of the retrofitted articles for reference. I also make a point of putting a link to the original news posts at the end of the resurrections, though hopefully Zaarin will at some point be able to associate the articles with their originating news posts the "real" way that modern features do. Similarly, we need to get the old articles properly backdated in the system. I have to say I consider what has been achieved even now to be a minor miracle, but there's plenty to be done. The reason I've made this thread is because I need the readership's help. I think/hope we're at a point where every legacy article is at least in the system now, in variable states of restoration. But I've pretty much taken this as far as I can bring it by myself. Now that the forums have returned and the community has a place to gather again, I am relying on any readers who share an interest in getting the old stuff back to help me fill in the remaining gaps -- by pointing out missing, incomplete or faulty articles, and maybe even helping me track down some of the stuff I could not. So if you spot something funky, point it out here, and I'll see if I can address it. With multiple sets of eyes on this, it'll be a lot easier to bring this insane excavation to the next level of polish. And then we'll really be cooking with Spaff grease. *Sorry for lying

Absolutely stunned that those links seem to still work.

I too await the comeback of Laserschwert's poster thread, though in the meantime there seems to be a quasi-backup of that humanitarian work over at Adventure-Treff: https://www.adventure-treff.de/Features/14067-hochaufloesende-adventure-poster

So, this is something we have to contend with in October. A big, physical collection of the first four Monkey Island games (Why exclude Tales? It is over ten years old now and shouldn't pose special rights issues...I think?) that is poised to attack our wallets with ravenous hunger. Judging by past LTR releases, there could be any number of weirdly conceived collectible extras. Will we finally possess our own Monkey Bucks, or perhaps a Planet Threepwood coupon? Speculate.

For me it's never not been Monkey Island 2. The only thing that has fluctuated in my mind is how thin the margin is. The original is an undisputed classic, the game that showed off the true potential of a SCUMM adventure game and more or less represents the best of a genre and the halcyon days of LucasArts as a spirit. I don't think the series ever really did fully recapture that kind of Princess Bride storybook flavor it had going here. I can't imagine arguing with anybody who would rank it first, though I find it hard to find any new way to sing its praises at this point. Monkey 2 feels like it builds on the first game and offers a deeper, richer, more ambitious experience. It ups the ante in every way, and to this day you can pit the Four Map Pieces segment against pretty much anything the genre has produced since. Again, three decades worth of discussion sort of leaves me at a loss to come up with some kind of original take on the thing, but for me this is still my favorite game. CMI is an undeniable departure from the first two in overall feeling for reasons both unavoidable (major technology gap, different creative personell) and chosen, and it probably honors the template of the original a little too much in the first half (get ship and crew, insult sword fighting) but it's just such a well-made adventure game top to bottom, with stupid good production values, that I doubt a convincing, objective argument could be made for it representing any kind of misstep from a strict quality standpoint. It's another installment where I can't object to it being ranked first. It is also as influential as the first game in a certain sense as it seems to have spawned, or at least been released at the right time to soak up, that initial burst of online fandom. Many people seem to have met the series through CMI. EMI is the least of the games, but I think it deserves reappraisal in terms of what that really means. What I see is a satisfying, rock solid adventure game with a lot of funny moments, good animation and very possibly the best voice acting in an LEC game -- and that's really saying something. On the other hand it delivers a somewhat off brand story for a Monkey Island installment, it comes dangerously close to making the world feel too small (that Tri-Island Area map: hilarious) and it unquestionably fails its pedigree on the graphics front (both because using GrimE to create a cartoony-yet-lush 3D world with the target specs of the average turn-of-the-century Windows user isn't setting yourself up for success, and because Chris Miles, by all accounts a talented animator, probably wasn't the guy to sit in the Art Director chair for the series' delicate transition to 3D.) But visuals aside I think it's held up reasonably well, and I would like to think its status as a kind of "side trip" story will gain some appreciation/perspecitve now that it is a middle installment and not the last game, which admittedly was not a good look for it. Monkey Island is an exceptionally good series, and in this case being the worst of five great games still leaves you: a really good game. TMI is a bit of a rebound that to a large extent feels like a course correction or return to form, especially in terms of a moody atmosphere and a general sense of captivating piratey-ness (both of which were a bit lacking in EMI as a consequence of its story), and the Telltale engine really upped the ante on the "performances" in my opinion, allowing the installment to go into some new emotional territory. On the downside, the decision to develop the episode with WiiWare in mind and general corner-cutting absolutely and unnecessarily hurt the production values. The art direction is good, but the 3D is up against limitations it should not be up against, and it is kind of funny how the Xerox-character-designs-for-background-NPCs strategy never really improved on Monkey 1. And while the MIDI score has a certain nostalgic feel that I like, it is kind of shameful that Michael Land's excellent compositions were not given the respect of a proper production, which might well have resulted in something that could have usurped the CMI score. The game's qualities more than overwhelm these drawbacks, it's just frustrating that they feel so self-inflicted. On the quibbles front, the equal-sized chapters necessitated by the episodic structure made me weirdly sad, I object to the absence of Alt+W, and the abruptness of the last moment felt like the one real shortcoming of CMI wasn't learned from. Short version: All these games are great, and I question the value of rankings, but I give the crown to MI2 if coronating one is a life or death matter. And I look forward to buying them all yet again in what promises to be a truly absurd anthology package in October.