Mojo is 25 and we are much, much older

[Jake]

Somehow time keeps passing, and it’s been over 25 years since Mixnmojo opened. Jason got a bunch of past and present staff to take a look back over the decades and pick their favorite articles from the site. (I took the most harassing to turn in my homework!)

https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/25-Years-of-Mojo-Staff-Picks

 

Not sure if anyone else has any Mojo nostalgia, as that is admittedly a weird thing to have, but if you do, drop some memories or trivia or whatever it is in here. 

[Skinkie]

This brought back a ton of memories. I've been hanging out in various bit of this community since... oh probably 1998. The community has gone through many ups and downs, but I am always thankful that this place still exists, to me it's a cornerstone of the internet, and a real testament to the dedication of  everyone involved. Thanks Mojo!

[Blondebeard]

I have been a regular visitor of Mixnmojo for a long time. Although I cannot recall the exact date when I started, it must have been in 1998 or 1999 as I remember reading rumors and news about the upcoming Escape from Monkey Island.

 

The International House of Mojo was also a significant part of my website history as it was the first proper hosting I had. Before that, the site was hosted on Geocities and Xoom, among others, which were always a pain to manage. I remember having to ask several times to get hosting and getting rejected. Mojo already had many Monkey Island sites and they didn’t want to add one more. Eventually, they did accept after several tries.

 

Being part of Mojo also meant creating a mini-website from time to time due to server issues. These were websites temporarily hosted somewhere else with just news updates while waiting for the problem to be solved. Unfortunately, one of the downtimes was partially my fault. I was using a forum from phpBB with many modifications. That meant updating phpBB to newer versions was really difficult. Eventually, a Brazilian hacker used a known exploit from an older phpBB version and managed to get access to the server. Sorry for that!!

 

I still visit this website almost daily to check for news and see what is being said on this forum. I hope you stick around for at least another 25 years. Happy 25th anniversary!

Edited May 22, 2023 by Blondebeard

[ThunderPeel2001]

I joined last week. Hi everyone 👋

[Gins]

I wish I had joined much much earlier. I was part of a few communities centered around Bad Brain Entertainment (anyone remember those?), Telltale and Ron's newer games, but it took Return and grumpygamer shutting down to get me to seek you guys out finally.

[Udvarnoky]

Oh, we’re doing a bonus disc?

 

I wanted to avoid including any of my own stuff in my list, but within the disreputability of the forums I’m comfortable singling out Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix: The Lost Sequel to Fate of Atlantis (in many ways my training for the big Freelance Police article), Maniac Mansion and the Orphaned Tone (mostly for the header I convinced Remi to do) and Disinterring “Fiction by Louie” (because it felt like we genuinely got to unveil the most obscure thing of all time) as some of my favorites that I got to do.

 

Articles that I felt were unjustly snubbed: The “watchalong” of Jake and Marius’s The Secret of Monkey Island stream during COVID; elTee’s failed attempt to get more than curt corporate platitudes out of Mary Bihr in what I call the reality check for the halfhearted “comeback” everyone wanted to pretend LucasArts was having in 2009; a Hulabee-era interview with Ron where he essentially proves he invented Telltale before even the cancellation of Sam & Max 2 and refers to a deleted moment in LeChuck’s Revenge where Wally gets eaten by a shark that he directly denied to us twenty years later; Lemonhead’s one-star fuck-you to Maniac Mansion; Bill Eaken’s exceptionally tea-spilling interview that is admittedly fused (as are a lot of fine interviews) to a Secret History feature instead of catalogued under Interviews.

[Staple Remover]

I wish I could find the article (and by find I mean “put effort into searching for it”) from the SCUMM Bar that said there’d be no more MI sequels until 2015. Good times!🙃

[Udvarnoky]

You might be thinking of that time the then-president of LucasArts Jim Ward infamously suggested that the studio's legacy properties wouldn't be revisited until at least 2015. For context, this was 2006.

 

That was the reason Mojo's serialized retrospective of all the graphic adventure games was called the Secret History series. Mocking Ward for those comments was still very much topical. I don't think it's what inspired the idea in the first place, but I wanna say @Gabez was the one who saw an opportunity to jokingly style what we were doing as if we were a dissenting newspaper under a totalitarian regime. There was also the prosaic fact that we were at a loss to come up with a good title and @Jake suggested from the sidelines that "Secret History" if nothing else was simple and sensationalistic. Nothing like making a dependency of a running joke that nobody remembers -- the Mojo way.

 

Also I just uncovered the promotional campaign of fake movie posters Gabez made before he lost interest after Fate of Atlantis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Remi]

1 hour ago, Staple Remover said:

I wish I could find the article (and by find I mean “put effort into searching for it”) from the SCUMM Bar that said there’d be no more MI sequels until 2015. Good times!🙃

Any real fan would’ve known it was 2014. https://scummbar.com/index.php?newssniffer=readcomment&news=866

3 minutes ago, Remi said:

Any real fan would’ve known it was 2014. https://scummbar.com/index.php?newssniffer=readcomment&news=866

Any real real fan would’ve known the site would have returned in 2014 and the sequel in 2015.  😒

[Huz]

Those posters are excellent, as are your reminisces in general. The tale of Jake and Spaff's early bromance brought a tear to my eye.

[BuzzMoo]

Time flies when you're having fun! I've been a lurker / beneficiary of the effort put into this place since the beginning but I've never actually posted before. 25 years is a landmark so I thought it'd be worth expressing my appreciation and gratitude!

[OzzieMonkey]

Just to make most of you feel ancient, I was born 3 years before Mojo, the year Full Throttle and The Dig came out 😂 I think I discovered Mojo in the years between Escape and Tales, then officially joined the community along with the Telltale forums when that was announced, so a decent length but not as long as others. It really is THE site for Lucasarts fandom, whether it's the articles or the forums, and the amount of pure passion, humour and dedication over the years is truly something to behold. It's also managed to be free of toxicity over the years which in itself is a triumph; you don't see the kind of division in discourse that seems to occur daily in the Star Wars fandom. Here's to many more years here, even when we're all in a retirement home playing Monkey Island 10 and The Dig 3  

[Jake]

1 hour ago, OzzieMonkey said:

The Dig 3

Wow

[Garystu]

Congrats on the quarter century! 🥳

[Laserschwert]

What a ride...

 

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by Laserschwert

[ThunderPeel2001]

You might be putting Rhonda in a difficult position with that post

[Laserschwert]

17 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

You might be putting Rhonda in a difficult position with that post

That post is 18 years old.

[ThunderPeel2001]

14 minutes ago, Laserschwert said:

That post is 18 years old.

Oops. 

[gwarek]

Happy birthday Mojo!

 

Loved reading your retrospectives. 

 

 

I didn't think today I'd be procrastinating by reading a 10-part epic on S&M Freelance Police that I was previously unaware of. Nice deep investigative journalism... I expect nothing less from Mixnmojo.

 

 

[Udvarnoky]

There are so many exceptionally stupid stories to pull from the life and times of Mixnmojo that it’s hard to know which ones to single out. I always felt like I came in well after the heyday and thus like I know the best tales only as hand-me-downs, but a highlight from my tenure was certainly the great MojoX Easter 2010 heist where Gabez, queztone and Zaarin (with elTee as a complicit bystander, I think) conspired to take down and relaunch the site with a new design without looping any of the other staffers in. It was some classic passive-aggressive old lady drama for a bit there on the admin forum. As the strangest possible form of commentary, I slapped together a truly bizarre PowerPoint "game" fictionalizing Gabez’s impetuous ways (exaggerating them by as much as fifteen percent), honoring a pastime some friends and I had developed in grade school.

There were some fitful attempts to bring back contests. There was one I instigated because I stumbled upon some dirt-cheap copies of A Vampyre Story at Target – like five bucks a piece or something. They were budget printings but nevertheless in actual boxes, so I scooped up a handful and donated them as prizes for whatever the contest premise was that we subsequently wrapped around them. I handled mailing out the games to the three-ish winners, and I vaguely recall printing out some kind of “humorous,” individualized missive of congratulations to each on Mojo letterhead. I’m sure I’d be mortified to find out what I wrote now, but I remember making a lark out of that whole thing, and paying for international postage in good humor.

It came to my attention recently that Mixnmojo’s affectionate nickname of “Ronzo” was once the subject of some adventurous discussion on the Thimbleweed Park forums. As far as I know, styling Ron’s name this way was a non-sequitur that Gabez (?) meaninglessly started doing out of the blue one day, and it was applied to others as well -- I seem remember Gabez routinely calling Benny “Benzo” and Benny labeling him “Gazbo” in return. Or maybe the truth really is something more sinister and intentioned? I’m prepared to humble myself to the possibility that LowLevel has better sources.

As the webmaster of The Grim Fandango Network, Thrik (excuse me, our CEO) was the natural talent to make the original and per-eminent Psychonauts fan-site. Razputin.net (aka Razputin’s Domain) certainly lived up to that potential (and know that if you disagree, you’re disagreeing with Tim, who shouts out the site at 14:00 of this video), and I’ll forever lament Thrik’s abandonment of it. (The legacy of The Church of Tim is a little more complicated – we failed all of you by being unable to dig up @Yufster and @Kingzjester for the article.) The site ran a brief Q&A with Tim on the eve of the game’s launch, and in response to the innocent question of how he felt about shipping the title at last, Tim went on one of his greatest riffs that nobody remembers, and so I’ll reprint:

Quote

Well, try to forget for a second that I don’t know anything at all about foot ball, and I will tell you that I feel like we just made the touchdown of all touchdowns, after running the entire length of the field, and the field was so long that it took five years to run, and it was tilted so we run running uphill the whole time, and it was infested with land mines and bear traps and killer bees, and instead of grass it was covered in jagged shards of glass, and the opposing team’s smallest player was 20 feet tall and one of his arms was a machine gun and the other arm was a poisonous snake, and the snake had a switchblade. And after running for two and a half years, half the stadium got bored and left, and half of the people that remained started booing, and half of the people who weren’t booing were reading magazines.

And then it started raining, and then snowing, and then hailing, and then acid rain, and then poison snow, and then radioactive hail. And then the white lines in the field turned out to be trip wires, and when we stepped on them poison arrows shot into our legs and arms and cheeks. And then the Goodyear blimp crashed on the field, and it was one of the rare, hydrogen-filled blimps, and it exploded, and we had to run through it, and all the passengers on the blimp were burned beyond recognition, but they died in a rage so they were still alive in a smoldering, zombie state, and all the burned zombies attacked us, and then there was an earthquake, and then we found out our wisdom teeth were all impacted and had to come out, and then the world exploded, and then when we thought all the blimp zombies were dead, eight more came out of the luggage compartment, and then we twisted our ankle, and then we lost the ball for a while, and then we died.

Then a volcano fell out of the sky and landed on the field, and then everything was just a pile of hot lava, and acid, and poison, and snakes, and blimp guts, and there was no sign of us, so they started playing “Taps” and the TV coverage cut to a commercial and the fans started getting up to leave, but then, right then, a tiny girl in a Whinny the Pooh nightie stood up in the cheap seats and, with a single tear falling down her dirt-smudged face, she said simply, “Psychonauts?” then the tear rolled off her face and fell on to the lava and hissed into steam and then the steam rose up and turned into the Earthly Form of Satan, and he walked onto the field and started taking a leak on the Double Fine two-headed baby logo painted on the ground and he laughed and laughed and then he shuttered a bit and then he laughed again and then there was an eerie silence, and then the silence grew more silent, and then everybody looked to where the silence was coming from—the pile of lava and acid.

And then there was a distant murmur, and then a far-off rumbling, and it got louder and louder and louder, and then Satan started mouthing the words “wtf?” but before he could finish, BOOM! We exploded out of the lava pile, riding a motorcycle we fashioned out of zombie bones, riding a wave of molten radioactive hydrogen that comes crashing down with us onto Satan, melting him into nothing and ending evil forever, and then the stadium exploded with applause as we hit the ramp and jumped over 44 busses and landed doing a wheelie that we kept riding all the way into the end zone, and as the largest worldwide television audience in history sat there with their jaws wide open we took this ball, this ball called Psychonauts, and we spiked it into the end zone, we spiked it down so hard that a ripple spread out from the point of impact--a ripple in the fabric of reality itself--and it spread out like a wave of light and ecstasy and satisfaction that healed all Psychonauts fans of all known diseases, and caused all enemies of Psychonauts to immediately pop like eggs in a microwave.

The international dateline AND the Equator were both moved so that they passed through the place where we spiked down that ball, and all measures of time were reset so that the moment the ball hit the ground was forever thereafter refereed to as 00:00:00 on the day 0 in the year 0. And by some fluke by-product of these changes, all of our parking tickets were somehow instantly forgiven and Rhandy Rhodes came back to life and a tiny, tiny spider in a nearby meadow silently spun the words “Good Job!” into her dew-covered web and smiled. It’s a great, great feeling.

What else… I can recall being disproportionately enthusiastic about receiving a review copy of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings in the mail. This was already well past the time (2009) Mojo would have been reviewing current LucasArts titles outside of novelty, and even when Mojo scored early copies of anything (pretty much limited to Remi getting Telltale episodes, I think – thanks Emily!) we were pretty much in the digital code era by then. I don’t think my copy of Staff of Kings arrived much before the release date (if it even did?), but for about five seconds I thought I knew what Formally Being A Game Critic felt like. Looking back on my radically generous review, I can’t help but wonder if I got subconsciously corrupted by this notion, although I do maintain I enjoyed that game.

 

[Remi]

42 minutes ago, Udvarnoky said:

As far as I know, styling Ron’s name this way was a non-sequitur that Gabez (?) meaninglessly started doing out of the blue one day, and it was applied to others as well -- I seem remember Gabez routinely calling Benny “Benzo” and Benny labeling him “Gazbo” in return.

 

Not quite. Huz was the one who started doing the first-syllable-zo naming convention. At some point, I posted a news update on TSB referring to Ronzo because of Huz's conditioning/brainwashing/both. At this point, I think Benzo and Ronzo (and maybe Huzzo?) are the ones that still hang around.

[Udvarnoky]

Dang, but I'm grateful to know The Truth now. I can't help but think my longstanding claim that Gabez invented the cotton gin needs to be held up under scrutiny, too.

 

7 hours ago, gwarek said:

I didn't think today I'd be procrastinating by reading a 10-part epic on S&M Freelance Police that I was previously unaware of. Nice deep investigative journalism... I expect nothing less from Mixnmojo.

Thanks! It was fun to write. I think it passed largely unnoticed when we first put it online (as to be expected given that it’s the fringiest article in the history of mankind), but we sort of hoped it would be quietly found by the right people over the long-term. Every time that Bill Eaken art gets discovered, a Cocytus-ian being gets routed home from Spacetime Six. (Or whatever the hell. What a weird game.)

[Huz]

Even John Oliver has jumped on the bandwagon, although I've got a feeling he wasn't talking about Thimbleweed Park.

 

[Udvarnoky]

Cressup's interview with Tim from earlier this year made time for the origin story of the Marmite photo, which fans know is Mojo's first trip to Double Fine in 2001.

 

You see people, this lore still has currency.