Return to Monkey Island

[madmardi]

25 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

 

And hey, if it is an echo chamber, I don't think it's one to an unhealthy degree - we disagree on stuff all the time, right?

Well you all agreed with me that EMI was by far the best in the series so they may have a point….

 

😂

[Vainamoinen]

11 minutes ago, madmardi said:

Well you all agreed with me that EMI was by far the best in the series so they may have a point….

 

To be fair, that was the most controversial standpoint we had for a long time. 💀

[simonsoup]

I foolishly thought that Monkey Island wouldn't attract those kinds of fans but this culture of commentary, ranging from a lack of tact and respect for the creators, to just extreme vitriol and abuse, seems to infect everything. It's depressing. It also irritates me (and it must be even more galling for Ron and the team) how so many seem to consider themselves experts in game dev nowadays, commenting on the budget or whatever in relation to the art style.

Twitter and Mojo are both echo chambers of a sort (I know which one I prefer today), but surely the vast majority of people who Ron will want to reach with Return to Monkey Island are frequenting neither? I think this fresh art style will serve him very well in that regard, and I'm sure he won't lose sight of that even with the whining 'fans' clogging up his blog comments.
 

Going to have another click around the new website and watch the trailer again to cheer myself up!
 

Edited June 30, 2022 by simonsoup

[Lagomorph01]

46 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

And hey, if it is an echo chamber, I don't think it's one to an unhealthy degree - we disagree on stuff all the time, right?

No, we don't.

[KestrelPi]

Just now, simonsoup said:

I foolishly thought that Monkey Island wouldn't attract those kinds of 'fans' but this culture of commentary, ranging from a lack of tact and respect for the creators, to just extreme vitriol and abuse, seems to infect everything. It's depressing. It also irritates me (and it must be even more galling for Ron and the team) is how so many seem to consider themselves experts in game dev nowadays, commenting on the budget or whatever in relation to the art style.

Twitter and Mojo are both echo chambers of a sort (I know which one I prefer today), but surely the vast majority of people who Ron will want to reach with Return to Monkey Island are frequenting neither? I think this fresh art style will serve him very well in that regard, and I'm sure he won't lose sight of that even with the whining 'fans' clogging up his blog comments.
 

Going to have another click around the new website and watch the trailer again to cheer myself up!
 

 

Yeah, give people a way to communicate with devs and suddenly everyone's an armchair producer. But it's not the first time I've seen this, I'm used to it by now.

 

I think Tim Schafer probably had the right idea by saying from the start he wanted to make the game using Bagel's style, because then nobody could be shocked when the adventure game he made featured a style he hadn't really worked with before.

 

But yes, quite clearly people have no idea of the effort that it takes to produce something of this quality. Even if they have their subjective opinion of whether the art style works for the game or not, as soon as they start to imply that it's cheap or low effort or easy to make or stuff like that they're just objectively wrong.

 

The people I've seen most excited about this are other game devs and artists, and I think it's because they actually have some understanding of what's been achieved here, and in such a short time, all told.

[Rum Rogers]

That's what humanity gets for creating a beautiful instrument of communication like the Internet, which not only connects us with the rest of the world but also connects the rest of the world with us (and that's where things go awry).

[ThunderPeel2001]

18 minutes ago, Lagomorph01 said:

No, we don't.

 

Yes we do!

 

 

[Aro-tron]

In the negative reactions, I think there’s a lot of curdled nostalgia — folks who have wanted a ‘Ron Gilbert’s Money Island 3’ since they were eleven years old. That’s a lot of time to dream and ruminate, and the fact that while sections of the fandom didn’t regard one or more of the sequels as legitimate probably just fed into that utopian dream of a game that would fill the childhood void. The new game doesn’t look like the 1990s, though, and it’s not designed to hit other nostalgia buttons either (for example, a lush and romantic period piece, or a hand-drawn Disney cartoon). I think for those of us who moved on, and who want Monkey Island to move on, the new style is exciting, but for fans who want the game to return them to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, the style is a stark reminder that it’s not coming back. 

I do think there is an aspect of the style which is a little disarming initially — it’s fun, but it’s not cute, and Guybrush’s face in particular has a distancing effect that doesn’t immediately pull you in like the Purcell portraits do. So I think some fans will need to warm up to it, after they get over the shock of seeing something that doesn’t match their expectations.

 

The more vitriolic voices are probably coming from people who are howling at the inability to regain their childhoods. I have a hard time not imagining deeply hurt, damaged people behind those keyboards. It’s sad, but they will eventually move in from spamming the comments and find other things to vent their existential disappointment in. Don’t let them get you down! There’s lots of other stuff to talk about
 

There was a Monkey Island game I never played because I “the graphics” didn’t appeal to me, and I ended up ok.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Hmm, I think calling us an "echo chamber" is overstating it a bit. This isn't a political forum. We're not all incels. We're not planning the revolution or encouraging each other to commit terrible acts in the real world. We're a community that's come together about a video game series. 

 

Every community is made up of people with shared interests. And every community has a personality. And that's normal. The fact that this one is generally light on hostility is a good thing.

 

And, to explore this a little further: Just because the collective personality here is generally good natured doesn't mean there's not differences of opinion, it just means we generally can't be bothered to get too bent out of shape about them. Plus when people do express contrasting opinions they're generally done with maturity and consideration, and the responses generally follow with logic and reason, and rarely personal insults.

 

It seems strange that outsiders look into here, see there's not a lot of hostility or conflict, and deem it a negative thing. Personally I'm glad to have found a community of like minded people. Again, I see it as a good thing.

[KestrelPi]

Given that it's my 40th birthday today it seems an apt time to reflect on things I have learned.

 

And one of the things I've learned, I think, is that you can never go back.

 

.. hmm.. but that's not quite right.

 

You can never go back, except by going forward.

 

When, probably almost exactly 30 years ago, someone showed me Monkey Island for the first time, it set my imagination on fire. In the good way. Whatever I thought games were before, this overwrote any of that and it was the start of a real fascination with storytelling in games, it was an immense influence on my style of composing especially melodies and bass parts, and it influenced me in so many other little different ways.

 

So of course when I look back to those days I'm a mess of nostalgia, and part of me wants nothing more than to recreate it, exactly as it was, to experience it over again.

 

But you'll never get that. It's an impossible dream. There's an uncanny valley associated with nostalgia, I feel. You can try to get back to the old house, and you might convince yourself that it's just how you remember it. But you know in your heart that some of the rooms aren't where you remember them, and that picture you thought looked really cool when you were 7 does nothing for you now, and it feels different when there isn't anyone living in it.

 

Even Thimbleweed Park, a game I have mixed feelings about, I thought was at its most interesting when it was being least like a game from 1990.

 

The closest you can get back to recapturing the feeling is perhaps experiencing it through someone else. Watching someone else experiencing something you love for the first time can be its own special joy.

 

So what can you do instead? Well, for me the answer isn't in trying to recreate the same lightning in the same bottle, but to try to do as much as you can to find different lightning in different bottles. And that can only be found with the same spirit of experimentation and risk that the original games were made in. It might not always work, but it's always worth the try.

[ThunderPeel2001]

1 minute ago, KestrelPi said:

Given that it's my 40th birthday today it seems an apt time to reflect on things I have learned.

 

 

Happy birthday. Welcome to the suck!

[Aro-tron]

I actually want to pick up on a point of discussion from earlier in the thread about the difference in art styles between MI1 and MI2. I can see the difference now, but at the time it did not register to me as a ‘new style’. I played the CD-ROM version of MI1, so the interface was the same, the character’s models looked basically the same, and I was a kid so I didn’t really think about it.

 

The jump in style with MI3 was obviously a much larger one, and I think a lot of fans were wary about it before they played the game. It was hard to know what to expect, and I think there was a general sense of relief that it still felt like an adventure game despite the animated style.
 

Curse threw down a gauntlet that the subsequent games struggled with. It was popular, so you couldn’t ignore it, but it’s hard to think of a character design that would be more challenging to translate to low-poly 3D animation. EMI tried, but I think in that game it was the technology that changed, rather than the overall visual approach to the world. It probably wasn’t as drastic enough of a change to my mind. Tales was a more successful adaptation of the Curse style, but feels like it’s set in the same visual world as MI3 and 4.

 

In that sense, I think we have three main visual ‘eras’:

-the original EGA Secret, the VGA remake, and Revenge.

-Curse, Escape and Tales.

-Return to Monkey Island!

 

Both Curse and Return show a big reimagining of what the visual world of Monkey Island is, in ways that actually manage to cast the previous games in a new light. They aren’t total ruptures, of course, and they remain rooted in aspects of the earlier games, but the approach is different enough that it feels like a radical change. 

 

[Aro-tron]

7 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

Well, for me the answer isn't in trying to recreate the same lightning in the same bottle, but to try to do as much as you can to find different lightning in different bottles. And that can only be found with the same spirit of experimentation and risk that the original games were made in.

Hear, hear! And happy birthday! We’re just about the same age. I’m astounded by how much influence my childhood has had over my interests as an adult, but I think the only way to keep that sense of joy and discovery really alive is to keep doing new things, experimenting and growing.

I suppose that’s why this new Monkey Island feels exciting to me, while I would probably not want to play a pixelfied version …

[KestrelPi]

30 minutes ago, Aro-tron said:

I actually want to pick up on a point of discussion from earlier in the thread about the difference in art styles between MI1 and MI2. I can see the difference now, but at the time it did not register to me as a ‘new style’. I played the CD-ROM version of MI1, so the interface was the same, the character’s models looked basically the same, and I was a kid so I didn’t really think about it.

 

The jump in style with MI3 was obviously a much larger one, and I think a lot of fans were wary about it before they played the game. It was hard to know what to expect, and I think there was a general sense of relief that it still felt like an adventure game despite the animated style.
 

 

 

I've talked about this briefly before, but I think it's possible to make a case that when you remove all the technological distinctions, MI2's style has lots of things that are more in common with CMI than MI1. Obviously the biggest difference is in the characters themselves, but when you look at the backgrounds I already feel like MI2 was already halfway or more to getting to where CMI was going.

 

If you take these 3 town shots, for example, and ignore that one of them is at night, and just look at how the buildings are drawn, and how the lines and shapes work:

 

 

Yeah, I think a case can be made that even though CMI clearly takes it further, MI2 is already starting what it continues. in the way it uses lines and shapes.

 

Funnily enough, while I think RMI is again a departure, I think that in some ways it's a departure back in the direction of MI1 - both styles have a fascination with conveying funky perspectives with straight lines, and although RMI exaggerates this a lot more, I think it's fairly apt given the return to Melee.

 

(edit: or, to put it another way, perhaps one way of looking at RMI's style as far at the backgrounds go is that in terms of the way it uses shapes, it's sort of a combination if MI1's straight lines and wonky perspectives with MI2 and especially CMI's more cartoonish exagerration and foreground/background detail.)

Edited June 30, 2022 by KestrelPi

[OzzieMonkey]

1 hour ago, Lagomorph01 said:

No, we don't.

Took me a second, ngl. Very Monty Python of you 👍

[Vainamoinen]

28 minutes ago, Aro-tron said:

In the negative reactions, I think there’s a lot of curdled nostalgia — folks who have wanted a ‘Ron Gilbert’s Money Island 3’ since they were eleven years old. That’s a lot of time to dream and ruminate, and the fact that while sections of the fandom didn’t regard one or more of the sequels as legitimate probably just fed into that utopian dream of a game that would fill the childhood void. The new game doesn’t look like the 1990s, though, and it’s not designed to hit other nostalgia buttons either (for example, a lush and romantic period piece, or a hand-drawn Disney cartoon). I think for those of us who moved on, and who want Monkey Island to move on, the new style is exciting, but for fans who want the game to return them to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, the style is a stark reminder that it’s not coming back.

 

The 'original' fans in their 40s who in fact experienced The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990 as teens, those who want the "promised" pixel art back, may even be a minority. I think that a larger part of the vitriolic critics got their lasting bam-bam to the head with Curse of Monkey Island. They want CMI in HD (which wouldn't work, but that is an altogether different topic). And then there's yet another part of the critics who would "allow" any style, "JUST NOT THAT ONE".

 

Most of those people, I guess, would ask from Return to Monkey Island exactly what you suggest. They want to return to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, and they seem to have the ultimate idea what stylistic choice Ron Gilbert should have made for them to find the path.

 

Funny thing though: Rex' style, in my opinion, makes exactly that possible, for me at least.

 

These tiny, puny games thrown together by a handful of people back then, they felt vast and grand. The secrets felt so plentiful and I was always the first person on earth to discover them (even when using a walkthrough). Every new scene could be any size, Guybrush could face any peril and challenge, and I would guide him out. No game today could render the same joy, that's the problem with adulthood. The latest Uncharted entries come close at tens and hundreds of millions of dollar budgets a pop. How are you doing that at a so much smaller budget, to an audience so used to big budget pizzaz?

 

The ReMI art team approaches the impossible task from a multitude of directions: the color schemes are very similar to the original monkey island games, the backgrounds take a lot of almost forgotten keys from the earliest games, the contrasts are so strong, we have more expressive facial animation than ever before, and a lot of abstraction is reducing characters and backgrounds to their most recognizable, iconic forms.

 

The alien and warped background compositions allow any scene, perspective, or exaggeration. This style does not limit RonDave in telling the story they want. Swordfight in a crow's nest? Spitting contest in a full to the brim amphitheatre? Labyrinth of doom in a fiery lava underworld? A monstrosity of a LeChuck ship that could easily house thousands? You try that in CMI's style, in Tales' style, in LeChuck's Revenge's style. It wouldn't look nearly as good as it would in ReMI's chosen style.

 

This is the form that best serves the function.

[Aro-tron]

Yeah, I agree that there is a clear line from the MI2 backgrounds to the MI3 style. The character models are what makes it a big departure to me.

 

You’re right that Return seems to be as inspired more by MI1 than the other games. I like the connection you’ve drawn about shapes and lines. So cool!

[KestrelPi]

3 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

 

The 'original' fans in their 40s who in fact experienced The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990 as teens, those who want the "promised" pixel art back, may even be a minority. I think that a larger part of the vitriolic critics got their lasting bam-bam to the head with Curse of Monkey Island. They want CMI in HD (which wouldn't work, but that is an altogether different topic). And then there's yet another part of the critics who would "allow" any style, "JUST NOT THAT ONE".

 

Most of those people, I guess, would ask from Return to Monkey Island exactly what you suggest. They want to return to the comforting warmth of their childhoods, and they seem to have the ultimate idea what stylistic choice Ron Gilbert should have made for them to find the path.

 

Funny thing though: Rex' style, in my opinion, makes exactly that possible, for me at least.

 

These tiny, puny games thrown together by a handful of people back then, they felt vast and grand. The secrets felt so plentiful and I was always the first person on earth to discover them (even when using a walkthrough). Every new scene could be any size, Guybrush could face any peril and challenge, and I would guide him out. No game today could render the same joy, that's the problem with adulthood. The latest Uncharted entries come close at tens and hundreds of millions of dollar budgets a pop. How are you doing that at a so much smaller budget, to an audience so used to big budget pizzaz?

 

The ReMI art team approaches the impossible task from a multitude of directions: the color schemes are very similar to the original monkey island games, the backgrounds take a lot of almost forgotten keys from the earliest games, the contrasts are so strong, we have more expressive facial animation than ever before, and a lot of abstraction is reducing characters and backgrounds to their most recognizable, iconic forms.

 

The alien and warped background compositions allow any scene, perspective, or exaggeration. This style does not limit RonDave in telling the story they want. Swordfight in a crow's nest? Spitting contest in a full to the brim amphitheatre? Labyrinth of doom in a fiery lava underworld? A monstrosity of a LeChuck ship that could easily house thousands? You try that in CMI's style, in Tales' style, in LeChuck's Revenge's style. It wouldn't look nearly as good as it would in ReMI's chosen style.

 

This is the form that best serves the function.

 

Right, this is part of what I meant when I said you can't go back but by going forward. If this game had tried to look like MI1, or 2, I don't think it would have felt like MI1 or 2.  All it would have done is remind us of how much time has passed since MI1 and 2. Just like I don't -truly- think that Thimbleweed felt like an old adventure game, especially when it was being consciously retro. IMO the moment that the video game made me feel the biggest sense of wonder that reminded me of playing old adventure games was:

Spoiler

when I realised I had to look at the kickstarter video to solve the final puzzle

Which of course was also the moment when the game was at its least retro.

 

I don't remember exactly what I thought of the art when I first played the original games. I probably wasn't old enough even to have particularly complex thoughts. But I remember the feeling it gave me, and that was the feeling that I was on an adventure and anything was possible and LeChuck might jump out any moment and it was going to take me to some weird and wonderful places. And when I look at this, that's what I feel. I accept that others don't, but I can't let it get me down.

[ThunderPeel2001]

59 minutes ago, Aro-tron said:

In that sense, I think we have three main visual ‘eras’:

-the original EGA Secret, the VGA remake, and Revenge.

-Curse, Escape and Tales.

-Return to Monkey Island!

 

Hmm. I don't see how you can put Curse, Escape and Tales in the same "era". They look drastically different.

[simonsoup]

31 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

This is the form that best serves the function.

I wanted to resist being the 'armchair producer' I was complaining about above, but I agree. I feel that the art & animation choices we've seen so far very deliberately allow for a game with a scale and feel comparable to the first two games.

Dave Grossman once said about Monkey 2: "For what was essentially shoebox theater with tiny pixilated puppet people, it was tremendously cinematic."

The new screenshots and trailer reassure me that they've kept this in mind, and are achieving it in one of the very few ways possible whilst still moving forward and looking like a modern game.
 

Edited June 30, 2022 by simonsoup

[KestrelPi]

9 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

Hmm. I don't see how you can put Curse, Escape and Tales in the same "era". They look drastically different.

 

There's possibly an agument they were going for some of the same things in that curse seems to establish some series conventions that the games since have followed: a very long, very blond guybrush, a more cartoonish, curvy style of graphics, those curly clouds, LipChuck. And I think at least some of that has remained with RMI too. But that possibly has more to say about how conventions have formed around the series than the actual art style itself.

[Lechuck]

I think something that is getting overlooked in the art discussion is not just the art from the original games, but the art used to sell them. While pixel art may leave a lot to the imagination, Steve Purcell's box art painted a pretty clear picture of how those worlds and characters were supposed to look. And I think we can agree that those paintings are seminal works amongst Monkey Island fans.

 

Nostalgia for the childhoods of the 80s and 90s has been sweeping the world for several years now, across numerous properties, so I don't disagree that it's part of it. I've read about it for other reasons and it's seen as a symptom of troubled times, so take from that what you will.

 

Yes there was a shift in art style between MI1 and 2, but it was hedged. The backgrounds were more surreal but the characters were similar, or in some cases exactly the same. And the promotional artwork was consistent in style across both games. The full shift in art didn't happen until Ron left the series.

 

When taken as a totality - box art and game art, and the original creator responsible for both coming back - the choice to go in this direction is like expecting a sequel to the Mona Lisa and instead getting Picasso. Brilliant in its own right perhaps, but also confounding for many who were expecting something like the original Ron Gilbert game style.

 

[Jake]

2 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

 

If you take these 3 town shots, for example, and ignore that one of them is at night, and just look at how the buildings are drawn, and how the lines and shapes work:

 

 

Yeah, I think a case can be made that even though CMI clearly takes it further, MI2 is already starting what it continues. in the way it uses lines and shapes.

This is a cool example. Good stuff. If you arrange these in a line as CMI, MI2, MI1, Phatt Island town is literally a gradient transition, starting on the right with an angular building that pokes out off its foundation like Melee town, and ending on the left with swoopy expressive lines. 

[MurraySchull]

Happy Birthday, @KestrelPi!! 😃 🎉 🎈 🎂 🥳

[KestrelPi]

22 minutes ago, Lechuck said:

I think something that is getting overlooked in the art discussion is not just the art from the original games, but the art used to sell them. While pixel art may leave a lot to the imagination, Steve Purcell's box art painted a pretty clear picture of how those worlds and characters were supposed to look. And I think we can agree that those paintings are seminal works amongst Monkey Island fans.

 

Nostalgia for the childhoods of the 80s and 90s has been sweeping the world for several years now, across numerous properties, so I don't disagree that it's part of it. I've read about it for other reasons and it's seen as a symptom of troubled times, so take from that what you will.

 

Yes there was a shift in art style between MI1 and 2, but it was hedged. The backgrounds were more surreal but the characters were similar, or in some cases exactly the same. And the promotional artwork was consistent in style across both games. The full shift in art didn't happen until Ron left the series.

 

When taken as a totality - box art and game art, and the original creator responsible for both coming back - the choice to go in this direction is like expecting a sequel to the Mona Lisa and instead getting Picasso. Brilliant in its own right perhaps, but also confounding for many who were expecting something like the original Ron Gilbert game style.

 

 

Arguably the reason that the Secret of Monkey Island  and MI2 had hand painted box art by Steve Purcell is that at that time it was the convention for video games to have these kind of painterly pieces of key art on the box:

 

 

 

don't get me wrong, the boxes for the first two games are GREAT - the second one is in particular probably my favourite piece of box art of all time. But they were kind of in keeping with the way game boxes were done at the time.

 

So I don't think we need to necessarily interpret the game box art of the time as anything more than 'a piece of art that the team liked and thought conveyed the tone of the game well'. In fact I'm fairly sure they weren't trying to make a clear statement with them, because if they were, as has been pointed out, who on earth are those random extra pirates in the MI1 box art who don't seem to appear anywhere in the game?

 

Fact is very often box art of the time only had a tangential relationship with the game. Here's Mega Man 2:

 

Weirdly, nobody is saying now that this was supposed to be some big statement about how the creators saw the Mega Man universe.

 

I think it's worth pointing out how different the MI1 and MI2 boxes were to each other too, even though drawn by the same artist. Guybrush looks very different. The whole composition is much darker and more focused on 2 characters.  So I don't think they were really THAT concerned with continuity.

 

And indeed, neither was Steve Purcell. From what I heard, he was given the opportunity to make box art for Curse, but decided against it, out of respect for wanting to let the new art style shine. He made some art for the Tales box, of course, but even that incorporates elements of the new style, and he probably felt less conflicted about being asked to interpret a 3D style in 2D.

 

So I think if you were even to ask Steve Purcell himself, his answer would very likely be - let the new artist do his thing.

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by KestrelPi