Telltale's Sam & Max games getting remastered

[TimeGentleman]

20 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

Re-doctoring the art style of Tales might give some folks ideas about what could be done to Return, so it might still be a good thing that it likely isn't happening.

 

Then again, it might get Skunkape the contract to remake Escape From Monkey Island to the same fidelity, which I'd love to see!

[MurraySchull]

Will be out of town for a week or so but I'll be able to play the game properly upon my return. Have sampled the prologue however and you guys have done a great job! Am looking forward to seeing how the remainder of the game was preserved and remastered. (Also thanks for making me feel old by realising that I'm now playing remasters of games that I played the first time around at launch!)

(Little thing, though, after Max turned back from a plant in the prologue, he remained invisible while Sam was talking to him and popped back in after the cutscene. Just thought I'd flag it up here!)

 

And yes, in terms of future projects for Skunkape, a remaster of Tales seems to make the most sense to me and I'd be all over that. I don't even think Disney/Lucas owns Tales in its' entirety as it's never included in the game bundles with the rest of the games (including Return), so I guess it would be a matter of either purchasing the rights from whomever owns the non-Disney share of Tales now (am just guessing!) and then getting the all clear from Disney/Lucas to make it happen?

 

IMO, Tales has a lot going for it in terms of the main characters' journeys and the general storyline, but I realised upon my 2022 playthrough that it's let down by the visuals of the day (the close-ups on the low-polygon character models in particular do a lot to remind me that the visuals are holding it back) so I think improving the visuals similar to the S&M remasters would help give the game a great overall lift. (I was actually never bothered by the repeated character models, but if they want to re-work the minor characters' models a little more, I wouldn't say no to that.)  Would also be great to hear the music played live where possible as the melodies themselves are great, but they just need that "authentic Caribbean flavour" that CMI/EMI has to bring it up to those levels. Would also love to hear Leilani Jones Wilmore as the Voodoo Lady in Tales before it's too late, just to maintain that consistency across the series.

Edited August 15 by MurraySchull

[Udvarnoky]

2 hours ago, MurraySchull said:

And yes, in terms of future projects for Skunkape, a remaster of Tales seems to make the most sense to me and I'd be all over that. I don't even think Disney/Lucas owns Tales in its' entirety as it's never included in the game bundles with the rest of the games (including Return), so I guess it would be a matter of either purchasing the rights from whomever owns the non-Disney share of Tales now (am just guessing!) and then getting the all clear from Disney/Lucas to make it happen?

 

Presumably NuTelltale (aka LCG Entertainment) owns the assets to Tales, while Lucasfilm owns the IP, and thus it can only be distributed under a license with them. That means you have two parties you have to come to terms with. I can think of a lot of prosaic ways that would fail to get traction when one of those parties is Disney.

[Lagomorph01]

On the other hand, ReMI did happen and LoMI did happen. So it's not impossible!

They're probably already pretty close with NuTelltale if they were able to make the S&M remasters, so Disney would be the only party they'd have to strike a deal with, and they were pretty lenient when it came to ReMI and LoMI.

I think it's at least worth a shot!

[LuigiHann]

21 hours ago, Udvarnoky said:

 

The visuals for Strong Bad were a much better fit for the constraints of its target platform. The game needs to be made available again, but I don't know that it cries out for a new coat of paint. It doesn't feel compromised. Tales suffers much more obviously from being coerced into being made with a WiiWare SKU in mind. I'd love to see what redemption Skunkape could offer it now that it can present the most perfect qualifications imaginable.

 

While we're pipe-dreaming: I wonder what it would take for NuTelltale to get Puzzle Agent running on Switch?

 

Yeah, SBCG4AP doesn't need much more than it already has in terms of geometry, but the resolution of the textures for things like signs and posters, even the UI, tends to be a little low by current standards. Would be nice to have those upscaled or even vectorized for a cleaner look. And the improvements in cel shading tech since that game came out could make it possible to get the character outlines looking even nicer. And combining the game into one shared launcher would be good. But yeah the big thing would be to have it available at all.

 

  

7 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

More pipe dreaming: I'd love to see Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures get a glow-up, get them looking even closer to the films. I wonder how close the Telltale engine could get. (If Skunkape did it really quickly they could get it done in time to tie in with the new W&G short coming this winter!)

 

 

Oh absolutely. Wallace & Gromit would massively benefit from the sort of attention these Sam & Max remasters have gotten. There are modern shaders explicitly designed to evoke clay-based stop-motion animation that could breathe a ton of life into the game's look. And a point and click interface would be a blessing.

Edited August 15 by LuigiHann
incorporate quote

[Laserschwert]

9 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

More pipe dreaming: I'd love to see Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures get a glow-up, get them looking even closer to the films. I wonder how close the Telltale engine could get. (If Skunkape did it really quickly they could get it done in time to tie in with the new W&G short coming this winter!)

I'd fully support a W&G remaster!

 

Also, a little correction: The new W&G film isn't a short, but a full-blown feature, Were-Rabbit-style.

[OzzieMonkey]

On the topic of what Skunkape does next, Tales is an obvious choice, but also, who says they have to be limited by games that use the Telltale engine? Assuming they get the thumbs up from Disney, why not let them remaster Hit the Road and maybe even the rest of the Lucasarts catalogue? It seems pretty clear that Double Fine have no plans to tackle them now that they’ve done Tim’s games. Of course It’d also be awesome to see them do a brand new Sam & Max adventure seeing how well the remasters appear to be doing and the renewed demand to see these characters again. A Tales season 2 wouldn’t go astray either but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. As of right now though, they’ve done a fantastic job of all three seasons, TDP was perfect.

Edited August 18 by OzzieMonkey

[ThunderPeel2001]

Any Poker Night fans out there? 😎

 

Just me?

[Vainamoinen]

I'd love some updates concerning the bandcamp soundtrack release and of course the GOG release too ...

 

 

17 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Any Poker Night fans out there? 😎

 

I never liked Poker and I've come to actually hate crossovers during the last years. But STILL Poker Night 2 had a real spark to it, it really considered the possibilities. How about a bad guy edition for Poker Night 3 ... say, Wreck-It Ralph, Biff Tannen, LeChuck, Agent Smith, Doctor Robotnik, and/or of course Skunkape?

Edited August 20 by Vainamoinen

[Garystu]

SBCG4AP could benefit from some 3D model updates. Important characters like Homestar did not make the transition to 3D well. I don't think its a big issue, but. I guess that's another thing a remaster could improve. I do agree its stylization has meant its aged more gracefully than other games.

I'd love to see a Tales of Monkey Island remaster. I'd love it a lot. I'd lose my mind.

 

I guess Skunkape can go a lot of ways now. Whether another remaster, or a new game, I'd be there for most of what they could do next. Whatever it turned out being.

[Udvarnoky]

With an animated Bone adaptation going tits-up for what I think was the forty-sixth time, Skunkape needs to text "u up?" to Jeff Smith and get this show back on the road.

 

 

I'll even make @s-island dig out @Gabez's would-be hosted site Th' Tavern from the archives.

[Udvarnoky]

A "new" interview with Skunkape that touches on some of the topics we brought up here.

[LuigiHann]

That is pretty neat. Nice to know that they do intend to update more games, and it seems like that'll just come down to which licenses they can get their hands on. I'm still picturing Strong Bad being an early one because there's no giant corporation to deal with, just a couple of guys

[Scummbuddy]

Yeah, but what if it is Strong Bad that gets to their email request first?!? 🗑️

Edited September 25 by Scummbuddy

[TimeGentleman]

Good to get an interview - I was just trying to find behind the scenes material for these remasters the other day. I guess the release notes were pretty comprehensive and covered most of it, doesn't seem like there's too much juicy stuff to tell!

 

As we've already discussed, it would be lovely to see TOMI (and W&G) get remastered but it sounds like they're up for doing new stuff as well and actually I think I'd be more excited if they said they were going to remaster Bone and then continue it with new episodes to cover the whole story! That'd be awesome. Or them developing a wholly new adventure game IP would also be great.

Edited September 26 by TimeGentleman

[Jake]

34 minutes ago, TimeGentleman said:

Good to get an interview - I was just trying to find behind the scenes material for these remasters the other day. I guess the release notes were pretty comprehensive and covered most of it, doesn't seem like there's too much juicy stuff to tell!

What sort of juicy stuff are you looking for? I’m happy to dish out any dirt as a Mojo Forums exclusive. 

[TimeGentleman]

Legal battles, creative fallings out, torrid love affairs, a race to rescue the Telltale hard drives before the building they were stored in got demolished...

 

Seriously, though, I guess what I was hoping would surface at some point would be a Double Fine style 10-20 min making of vid or a post-mortem GDC talk or something like that.

[ThunderPeel2001]

21 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

would be lovely to see TOMI (and W&G) get remastered

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and Poker Night 2

[Jake]

20 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

Seriously, though, I guess what I was hoping would surface at some point would be a Double Fine style 10-20 min making of vid or a post-mortem GDC talk or something like that.

Ah yeah, probably not. This remastering process has been very straightforward and drama free, and was done by a very small team (4-8 people at the max), all working remotely, so a doc would be pretty boring. We might do a stream at some point and show some things, but I don’t think there’s an audience for a GDC talk unfortunately. 

[LuigiHann]

4 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

...and Poker Night 2

 

Ooh, that seems like it'd be one of the tougher ones to do, given the variety of licenses. Would be very neat though.

[TimeGentleman]

1 hour ago, Jake said:

Ah yeah, probably not. This remastering process has been very straightforward and drama free, and was done by a very small team (4-8 people at the max), all working remotely, so a doc would be pretty boring. We might do a stream at some point and show some things, but I don’t think there’s an audience for a GDC talk unfortunately. 

 

A show-and-tell stream would be cool!

[Vainamoinen]

Well ... more than two months ... no soundtrack release on bandcamp (and no game on gog).

Any good news there ... ?

[Jake]

 

[Torbjörn Andersson]

"The soundtrack is still in progress"

 

That's great news! I can't really justify buying the game (maybe if there had been a Linux version, but that's probably never going to happen), but I've been waiting for a chance to buy the soundtrack for the past... 14 years? It's been that long?

 

If I really want to play the games, I think I'll stick with the original versions. They can be run in Linux by using Wine... with the occasional nightmare-inducing glitch.

 

[Jake]

Everything seems in order here.