Udvarnoky

Shame there won't be one more Struzan poster to go with it.

First image:

Fun fact: A design for a Monkey Island 2 floaty pen had also been pitched, as Tim bitterly recalled on the product page for the Double Fine floaty pen that was offered way back in 2005 when the company store originally launched. There was an accompanying Double Fine Action News post that elaborated on the design: it was going to be Guybrush in the coffin paddling to the International House of Mojo.

It's grimly relieving that this game was announced well after all the primary creative decisions were under glass. It seems unlikely that a team of professional game developers would ever depart from their own tastes and instincts in response to men's room graffiti, but between Ron feeling the need to put his blog in timeout and Dom directly engaging with Reddit comments to address the feedback, it's unfortunately clear that there is some personal impact here, so knowing that the shrillest voices were denied the ability to have even a subconscious influence on the game's development is satisfying.

Doesn't the scene with Morgan and the Voodoo Lady take place after the credits? I just view that as a coda. Sure, that thread could have been continued in a hypothetical second season, but I don't know how likely that ever was, and the game's primary conflicts were resolved. Kissing off those characters on an ambiguous note works fine. I don't see it as like, egregious unfinished business for the series.

Yeah I think TMI in aggregate felt of the proper scope. The budget constraints were more evident at the episode level, where there was clearly an exact number of environments that could be afforded. But so it goes. A proper remaster where Land's score gets the live instrument treatment and some tertiary characters actually get designs could be revelatory. As with Sam & Max, the bones are good, and an upgraded audio/visual presentation could show off the quality that was already there in a potentially dramatic way.

l could just be out the swim but I don't personally recall either this supposed minced enthusiam from Dave when promoting the game nor any particular rejection (at least beyond what any of the latter sequels were met with) from the fans. I seem to remember TMI being seen as something of a rebound from EMI, but I'd be lying if I said I did any deep digging or that an appetite for doing so has been worked up since.

While Dave was involved with TMI, it's not totally clear to what degree. After the first Sam & Max season he assumed the role of Design Director at Telltale, which seems to have been an overseeing role on all of the studio's projects. Judging by the credits, the project-level creative leads on TMI were Mike Stemmle and Mark Darin, while each episode had one or two primary directors and writers. While I am sure Dave had a non-trivial role in shaping TMI, he didn't assume any of those key titles on that project, so it's hard to gauge his direct contribution.

What an embarassing confession that Mixnmojo isn't your home page.

While we're all relying on the perpetually incoming Mojo review to know if the game itself is any good, it's tempting to put this big box on the shelf on the basis of Purcell's cover art alone.

The "Chris" by the way is Chris Purvis. He and Chuck Jordan were roughly the equivalent of Dave and Tim on the first game, in that they largely scripted and wrote the game's rooms.

The first half of the slogan was put in an unfortunate place in the official poster, but that's still no reason to scare it away. ;

Loom EGA, in addition to being the only acceptable version, is gorgeous.

For me personally, the biggest bummer about the militant wing of the online fandom is the grumpiness they would occasionally make me feel toward Ron himself. For something like twenty years now, every time Ron would allude to his hypothetical return to Monkey Island, it would ignite all over again this collective expression of desperation and entitlement from the usual corners. The supportive reactions could be alarming. And it grew tiresome to see it happen over and over again, since it was such a dependable cause-and-effect. Ron says "Monkey Island"; the volunteer troops assemble. And so whenever Ron would make an innuendo, or hint at how he'd continue his story if given the chance, or express his interest in buying the IP from Disney, I'd say to myself, "Would you please stop kicking the beehive?" Because whatever Ron's intentions were, people would get riled up anew at everything he said. But in retrospect it was unfair to hold Ron even indirectly responsible for the behavior of his most irrational devotees. In a way, I was probably being too optimistic, because I was in effect trusting that the mob needed any help from its messiah to whip itself up into a frenzy. That he's had to resort to locking down his blog goes to show that the mosh pit will swap from carrying you to trampling you on a dime. While I don't want to overdramatize it, I do think what happened to Chuck Jordan's relationship with the series is instructive. He's talked more than once about how Monkey Island was the reason he switched majors in college and pursued a career in the games industry. A total fanboy, who winds up landing a job at LucasArts and somehow working on the third game in the series. Straight-up Cinderella story stuff. But in the years after that, it seems the bloom came off the rose for him, and, reading between the lines, I infer that his constant exposure to the "But you know that wasn't a real Monkey Island game" drumbeat played a non-zero role in that. And the irony is, it's probably the very same people that have made Ron lower the portcullis now. That uncompromising mentality victimizes everybody in the end, because it's really just a kind of fanaticism laundered as something else. It could style itself as "pro-Ron" only because until now Ron's Monkey Island comeback had the convenience of being an abstraction. Now that it's going to be an actual thing and thus revealed to be, you know, a mere video game, the church is going to have to subtly shift its dogma. First the holy grail was whatever game Ron wanted to make, and when that one turns out not to cure leprosy after all, the object is going to be recast as the one he would have made. The fantasy never has to end so long as you keep reengineering the game such that you can never actually make the touchdown.

MI2:SE was definitely an across-the-board improvement, and the concept art gallery alone justifies its existence. However, classic mode has compromises (inaccurate MIDI playback, removed vertical scrolling effect) which I consider more than a nuisance in a world where the SEs are the only versions of the first two games sold. The original games are either represented or they or not. My feelings about the SEs would be a lot less conflicted if Lucasfilm would toss out vintage, as-is builds of the original release(s). It's much easier to accept the SEs as their own thing when they are available alongside what they are effectively replacing.

There's one other wrinkle to this story.

Tim's line at the time was to the effect that he only considered it appropriate to remaster the LucasArts games he worked on in a project lead capacity. This baffled me, as I felt that Double Fine's tasteful approach qualified them in general and could just as easily have been applied to other games (and I wish they'd been the ones to do MI1 and MI2). Double Fine at that time seemed to have an in with Lucasfilm/Disney through Sony that might not have been easily reproducible at another studio. I wish they would have kept going while the iron was hot and the necessary connections established. Not to mention that they still could have invited the relevant folks (e.g. Hal Barwood if you're remastering Fate of Atlantis, Brian Moriarty if you're remastering Loom) who were willing/able to participate or at least have signoff. It's not like those guys own their own studios and Tim would thus be stealing their lunch. I suspect if the remasters sold like absolute hot cakes, we might have seen more of the catalog get the treatment.

You're in for a treat.

Did you check the stream? A lot more was shown there beyond the stuff Frank curated for his (excellent) companion article.

A game by David P. Gray.

Oh, I'm sure we've all taken our turn indulging in that mindset a bit. Hopefully it's gratuitous for me to clarify that there's not the slightest bit of invalidity with preferring the Ron-led games or for feeling that the subsequent ones represented a departure in spirit, or whatever. That's probably a pretty common perspective -- maybe even a majority one for those who played the games in release order? -- but every "take" has its ugliest extreme. It's when people's preferences become tantamount to some sort of purity test that we enter The Dumb (technical term), and I take solace in the fact that it doesn't really show up in these parts anymore. Probably because the median age here is 153 now, but still.

I haven't visited Ron's blog in a while, but I remember the kind of comments he would get there and on Twitter whenever he would touch on his plans for another Monkey Island game. I can only imagine the merry nonsense he brought down upon himself now that there's something tangible to react to. My new joke these days is "Now it's Ron's turn to be the guy who ruined Monkey Island." It's a rite of passage, really. There's always been a contingent of fans who have judged the third, fourth and fifth games not on objective criteria, but against what they knew in their hearts Ron would have done differently. Discussing the sequels became an evaluation of their legitimacy. The "real" Monkey Islands vs. the imitation ones, and all that codswallop. And guess what, now that Ron is in fact making his follow up, those same people are going to turn against that one, too. Because Ron's not going to make the game they decided was the correct one -- either because he "sold out" or "lost it" or got soft or committed that unpardonable sin of growing more philosophical about (and thus accepting of) the other games or had to defer to all those modern ideas Lucasfilm forced upon him. There will be a reason, don't worry. It was a foregone conclusion; it can't be helped. The best thing to do as always is just enjoy the ride.

I'm just more excited than ever by the idea of Skunkape remastering TMI. Is there someone I can write to?

I'm pretty sure it was yet a third item, in addition to the manual and the Grail Diary. It looked like this. And yeah, LucasArts put out some budget reprints of their games around this time, which cut down on the paraphernalia included and exhibited cheaper printing choices. The disk labels on these releases are so generic looking, that sometimes when they show up on eBay people mistake them for bootlegs. Nope, the company was just that cheap!

I wonder if they figured the Grail Diary was piracy-discouraging enough, and saw an opportunity to save a few pennies by not printing out those cards.