Details of Monkey Island

[Jake]

4 hours ago, Toymafia88 said:

Its true, when they tried to update it for Tales and special editions it looked far less interesting.

 

Really shows less is more sometimes.

It was such a sadness, being told we had to use the new logo for Tales. I was glad to see Return… return to the original. 

[Vainamoinen]

7 minutes ago, Jake said:

It was such a sadness, being told we had to use the new logo for Tales. I was glad to see Return… return to the original. 

 

Which was, again, a Disney decision. Apparently the steward of the brand feels the wind blowing from a different direction. 🤔

[Toymafia88]

1 hour ago, Jake said:

It was such a sadness, being told we had to use the new logo for Tales. I was glad to see Return… return to the original. 

I feel for you as I know Lucasarts had a say and had certain restrictions.

 

Thank you for your hard work on tales btw. 😊

[ThunderPeel2001]

12 hours ago, Torbjörn Andersson said:

impersonating a federal mail boat

 

This is my favourite 😅

[ThunderPeel2001]

4 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

 

Which was, again, a Disney decision. Apparently the steward of the brand feels the wind blowing from a different direction. 🤔

 

The decisions that they make about their IP can be maddening. A few stories I could tell that I can't share online. But it makes zero sense sometimes.

[Lagomorph01]

13 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

The decisions that they make about their IP can be maddening. A few stories I could tell that I can't share online. But it makes zero sense sometimes.

I think he means that using the old logo is a Disney decision. When Tales was made, Disney hadn't acquired Lucasfilm yet.

[Jake]

Yeah, when Tales was made it was Lucasfilm’s decision to rebrand and update the Monkey Island IP, and they wanted Tales to be part of that. Disney-era Lucasfilm seems to have decided the original logo was already doing a good job of representing the IP so the new logo has been re-binned (or reserved for the SEs).

[BillyCheers]

This is getting a bit off-topic now and might have been told somewhere else (if so, sorry), but how did it happen that the SE and Tales of MI were announced almost at the same time - or: which project came first? Because basically they didn't really have anything to do with each other, did they?
 

And to not post completely offtopic: One thing I really liked about Tales was the implementation of aspects of the old games into the new story. I found that was mostly done very elegantly (and much better than in CMI oder EMI). It rarely felt like simple fanservice. I'm thinking of the puzzle with Stan's jacket, Elaine's wedding ring, but also the inclusion of the familiar characters: Stan wasn't just selling another thing, he was part of the story, Murray was well incorporated, etc. I hope Return can tie in with Tales in this regard! 🙂

[ThunderPeel2001]

2 hours ago, Jake said:

Yeah, when Tales was made it was Lucasfilm’s decision to rebrand and update the Monkey Island IP, and they wanted Tales to be part of that. Disney-era Lucasfilm seems to have decided the original logo was already doing a good job of representing the IP so the new logo has been re-binned (or reserved for the SEs).

 

Ah, yes. That's obvious in hindsight. Oops.

[OzzieMonkey]

19 minutes ago, BillyCheers said:

This is getting a bit off-topic now and might have been told somewhere else (if so, sorry), but how did it happen that the SE and Tales of MI were announced almost at the same time - or: which project came first? Because basically they didn't really have anything to do with each other, did they?
 

And to not post completely offtopic: One thing I really liked about Tales was the implementation of aspects of the old games into the new story. I found that was mostly done very elegantly (and much better than in CMI oder EMI). It rarely felt like simple fanservice. I'm thinking of the puzzle with Stan's jacket, Elaine's wedding ring, but also the inclusion of the familiar characters: Stan wasn't just selling another thing, he was part of the story, Murray was well incorporated, etc. I hope Return can tie in with Tales in this regard! 🙂

From what I remember of back then, the story goes that Craig Derrick (who's still an executive producer at Lucasfilm and might have had some involvement in Return aswell) was secretly developing MI:SE without company knowledge, and when it was pitched and approved, the president of LucasArts at the time, Darrell Rodriguez, asked him to find someone to continue the series (Telltale), because he too was a fan of the old IP and wanted to bring them back, creating what was called the "heritage team".  I'm sure I've not got all the details right, @Jake may or may not have further insight  at least on how the people at Telltale found out about Tales, but this is what I can gather from piecing together interviews and statements from Craig Derrick over the years.

[Jake]

My memory is too faint to be useful, sorry. I feel like LucasArts must have known about their own SE when they signed with Telltale, but I don’t feel like the Tales team really knew the SEs were a thing. (I feel like if we had, there would have been more synergy with the voice casting, eg not beating around the bush with whether Boen is in it, making sure we use the Curse voodoo lady actor, etc). My memory is that the SE came out after Tales, but that Tales was in preproduction before the SE was announced (and we didn’t really know about the SE or what it was until it was announced). I may be misremembering and we knew it all, and my memory has just eroded, but I don’t think so. 

[OzzieMonkey]

9 minutes ago, Jake said:

My memory is too faint to be useful, sorry. I feel like LucasArts must have known about their own SE when they signed with Telltale, but I don’t feel like the Tales team really knew the SEs were a thing. (I feel like if we had, there would have been more synergy with the voice casting, eg not beating around the bush with whether Boen is in it, making sure we use the Curse voodoo lady actor, etc). My memory is that the SE came out after Tales, but that Tales was in preproduction before the SE was announced (and we didn’t really know about the SE or what it was until it was announced). I may be misremembering and we knew it all, and my memory has just eroded, but I don’t think so. 

Yeah that makes sense, MI:SE came out about a week after the first episode of Tales. I guess it was mostly just a happy accident that both were developed at the same time!

[Jake]

I have to imagine LucasArts management was interested in reviving Monkey as a franchise and it was all at least partly strategic on their end, even if it came from seeing some unrelated opportunities and tying them together. But at Telltale, we didn’t feel like part of some strategy, we were just happy to be making a new Monkey game, and happy that LucasArts was interested in adventures and the IP enough again to be doing two projects at once.  

[Jake]

Anyway, I’ve always liked that the stairwell into the Bloody Lip is dark, and the characters get dark when walking through it. It’s a detail that immediately made Woodtick seem like a real place I was existing in with the characters. 

[Thrik]

1 hour ago, Jake said:

Anyway, I’ve always liked that the stairwell into the Bloody Lip is dark, and the characters get dark when walking through it. It’s a detail that immediately made Woodtick seem like a real place I was existing in with the characters. 

Makes me think of this thread:

 

 

Here we noted that in addition to the CD version seeming to lose the VGA version’s dynamic sprite lighting — where characters would be lighter/darker according to the scene they’re in — the Special Editions and Ultimate Talkie added lighting within scenes that lit the sprites differently according to where they were exactly.

 

I had completely overlooked that in addition to those excellent Details of Monkey Island, MI2 has its own functionality in this respect. It’s also used when going through the swamp, the House of Mojo, and presumably plenty of other places.

[TimeGentleman]

This may be cheating, but this YouTube channel (which I think is run by someone on these forums?) is full of these kinds of details:

https://www.youtube.com/c/legendofmi

 

I binged it a while back. It's amazing how much they stuffed into these games while keeping it unobtrusive.

[ThunderPeel2001]

3 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

This may be cheating, but this YouTube channel (which I think is run by someone on these forums?) is full of these kinds of details:

https://www.youtube.com/c/legendofmi

 

I binged it a while back. It's amazing how much they stuffed into these games while keeping it unobtrusive.

 

I'd never seen this one before: 

 

 

[Lagomorph01]

I like this one! I never knew it had so many different reactions!

 

 

[Thrik]

3 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

I'd never seen this one before: 

 

 

Haha. I discovered this for the first time during my recent playthrough, complete with Dom acting.

[Blondebeard]

20 hours ago, TimeGentleman said:

This may be cheating, but this YouTube channel (which I think is run by someone on these forums?) is full of these kinds of details:

https://www.youtube.com/c/legendofmi

 

I binged it a while back. It's amazing how much they stuffed into these games while keeping it unobtrusive.

That would be me

 

To be fair I didn’t come up with most of them. I asked for help on Twitter and people sent a lot of suggestions, but most of those are actually suggested by people that commented on the YouTube videos.

Edited June 22, 2022 by Blondebeard

[Thrik]

As we know quite a few tunes in Monkey Island are derived from old folk music and the like.

 

Here’s one I hasn’t come across, courtesy of Reddit:

 

 

 

[Vainamoinen]

I hear no resemblance at all. And I've known Oh, du lieber Augustin for like 14 years before I first booted up LeChuck's Revenge. 😄

 

I mean, I can hear strong similarities between Jared Emerson-Johnson's "4-59" and a song from Bud Spencer's "Non c'è due senza quattro". But I don't even for a second think that Jared was inspired by a 1984 Italian movie.

 

 

Edited June 24, 2022 by Vainamoinen

[Thrik]

Funny how these things go. Remi had a similar response, but it jumps out at me like crazy.

 

The first section where the guy sings in the folk song is totally the same melody to my ears. 😆 Especially if you adjust the speeds on YouTube as the folk song is much faster.

 

[Remi]

19 minutes ago, Thrik said:

Funny how these things go. Remi had a similar response, but it jumps out at me like crazy.

 

The first section where the guy sings in the folk song is totally the same melody to my ears. 😆 Especially if you adjust the speeds on YouTube as the folk song is much faster.

 

 

Two against one, you lose. ;

[ATMcashpoint]

Funny, I'd been trying to figure out for weeks what song the Phatt Island roulette wheel was derived from, because somebody mentioned it long ago and I couldn't remember what it was. I finally figured it out about a week ago:

 

 

Edited June 24, 2022 by ATMcashpoint