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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
- kvn_95 6y agoWow this really brings back memories! If Ron Gilbert is reading this, thanks for all your hard work on this game. This game was definitely one of the highlights of my childhood. As to what makes the game great, I think it's the perfect combination of humor, pirates, and difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s. It also has an amazing soundtrack. Look! A three headed monkey!
- simonswords82 6y agoIf you want to be sure he gets your lovely message you should leave a comment on his blog...I just did :)
- throwaway287391 6y ago> difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s. You must've been a clever kid and/or I'm a bit dense :) When I played most of the Monkey Island games as a teenager / young adult there were definitely several times when I had to resort to GameFAQs.
- codetrotter 6y agoI remember that there were quite a few games that I never was able to finish as a kid, but to finish them is not really the point. The point is to play. And to play them was fun.
- kvn_95 6y agoOh there’s like 5 of us playing it on the same pc so there’s always ideas thrown around. If nothing works then start clicking on everything :) I don’t recall it to be as frustrating as say King’s Quest but then again it might be nostalgia.
- Max_aaa 6y agoKing's Quest..... That one was a challenge. As it was easy to miss an item from area and not be able to return to pick it up. I can attribute my debugging skills to playing these games as a child. As you had to be meticulous.
- herman_toothrot 6y agoThe King's Quest games were absolutely brutal. Actions performed early in the game could prevent you from winning at the end. I found this list: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Unwinnable_state http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Unwinnab... The only reason we beat these as kids was having a near infinite amount of time to waste.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoADOM had similar issues. You kill a cat any time, you miss out on a later quest. Instead you just had to fight the cat lord. Missed out on a very powerful ring. And it was so, so easy to kill a cat. You use the automatic repeat-move key and auto-hit when you collide with a monster, and if you ever find a cat anywhere that way, its dead. People would rage-quit and start all over, it was that frustrating.
- dariosalvi78 6y agowhich reminds me that I still need to complete Thimbleweed Park...
- germinalphrase 6y agoI was just the right age when ‘Monkey Island’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ appeared in my life. That kind of in-world puzzle solving seems absent from a lot of what I see my early-teenage nieces/nephews (choose to) play now.
- dudul 6y agoIndiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is the true 4th Indiana Jones movie in my book. And yes, I'll die on that hill.
- rpeden 6y agoBetter to die on that hill rather than in a refrigerator like Indy should have given how hard that thing landed.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoUse 100 orichalcum beads so that Indy becomes a god.
- bloopernova 6y agoI thought you had to trick a bad guy into using the machine instead?
- Chazprime 6y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI first played Monkey Island well after its time, but it held up and I enjoyed it immensely. I recall specifically being impressed by the twist in the insult-sword-fighting mechanic that occurs when you fight the Sword Master. I maintain that the game holds up even today, though obviously nostalgia bias probably applies.
- willismichael 6y agoWe're in the middle of playing this game for the first time with our kids, after literally decades of having people trying to tell me that I really need to play it. As a first-time player I can say that yes, almost everything about Monkey Island stands the test of time, no nostalgia required.
- kej 6y agoHow old are your kids? I'm wondering if mine are ready for this (I've also managed to avoid playing it for decades, despite many attempts to get me to play it).
- willismichael 6y agoWe have a spectrum of ages. I think the seven year old is the youngest one who "gets it" enough to be involved with solving the puzzles.
- BucketsMcG 6y agoI think a case could be made that those insults are some of the first digital memes. Even to this day, they're still widely-recognised catchphrases among nerds and nerd-adjacents of a certain age. Before Monkey Island you only really got that effect from TV/movies/radio.
- coldcode 6y agoIt was a great game. I also remember making gold master floppies for our products going back to 1987. It's actually a scary process because if you made any mistakes, you got back thousands-millions (depending on who you were) worthless disks back. Even sending out updates cost money and often we had to charge people in order to pay for duplication, packaging, shipping and sometimes a manual update. Often updates were the entire package of N disks; if lucky you can manage a patch disk. Thinking back now I think there were still dinosaurs on the earth at the time too.
- Ma8ee 6y agoI got a bit nervous when someone found out that the computer we used to burn our master CDs on where infected with a virus. Luckily all disks were clean.
- hinkley 6y agoThe thing I always screwed up when copying was getting the disks backward and having to start over. Did you do anything special to reduce human error, like special stickers or colored disks? For instance nobody in the office is allowed to use red floppies except for master disks.
- joezydeco 6y agoIt could have been worse. I know of one studio that sent a debug version to the duplication factory by accident. It killed the company.
- dep_b 6y agoI remember my brother playing (and me dicking around a bit with) Zack McKracken first and then Monkey Island. It's always the sword fighting part I remember the most. It's a pity I don't have time for anything anymore, I would love to revisit them some time.
- jansan 6y agoI loved Maniac Mansion,Day of the Tentacle and Zack McKracken. A modern game that may be comparable is "Trover saves the Universe" by Justin Roiland, probably best played on the Oculus Quest. I haven't had that much fun playing a video game for a few years.
- driverdan 6y agoIt takes a tenth of the time to play after the first play through. You could play 10 min at a time and get through it reasonably quick.
- dleslie 6y agoI'm still not willing to accept that it's all the imagination of a child running wild at a theme park.
- andi999 6y agoWhile MI2s ending gives this impression, MI was planned as a triology, where in MI3 the secret of monkey island should be revealed. (Un)fortunately Ron Gilbert left after MI2 and took the secret with him, never to be revealed.
- Trasmatta 6y agoMONKEY ISLAND 2 SPOILERS Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? I never interpreted it as being what was actually going on.
- WorldMaker 6y agoThat's certainly the takeaway that the Monkey Island 3 that we got (Curse of Monkey Island) used. Ron certainly seems to hint that it wasn't a trick by LeChuck and he had plans for what to do with that in the MI3 he never got to build, and likely never will get to build. Given how much the games were based on the Disney ride and a lot of metatextual jokes throughout both of the first two games (prominent Cola machines throughout, as one easy for instance). It is possible that a literal interpretation of the ending of MI2 is warranted and whatever Ron had planned would have continued from there. (Personally, I've grown to an impression that Ron was just as much pantsing the whole series as anything and even if Disney got it in their heads to give the entire IP back to Ron with carte blanche to design his own MI3 however he saw fit, I feel like Ron would have a harder time designing his way out of the box of that ending taen he likes to let on by teasing that there was a big secret he had planned. ;)
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? Yes. As they walk out into the theme park, LeChuck looks at the camera and his eyes glow. I think this is just another entry in the genre of "there was no plan, so the writers added several different plot hooks on spec".
- marban 6y agoThe thing I always wonder is how testing/QA worked back in the days for cartridge/disk games. I mean, there've been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can't even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoThough there were more overall platforms back then, the hardware for any given platform was a lot more uniform than any modern PC. OSs barely did anything where they existed at all, which also helped. Finally, codebases were a lot smaller and everything was single-threaded so there was generally just less to go wrong.
- nsxwolf 6y agoI remember Quest For Glory IV shipped with a game-breaking bug that required downloading a patch from a BBS and possibly starting with a new save. I never finished the game because of that one. Much worse when it was ROM media - Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete because of a bug that made it into the release. Still, this stuff was really rare. Very different QA mindset when recalling the product is impossible or expensive.
- anthk 6y ago>Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete Well, they were right.
- wgjordan 6y agoAccording to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.
- phaemon 6y agoThe original Doom code basically broadcast packets to every machine on the network, which on any large network would bring everything to a crawl. It's why network Doom was explicitly banned on many university networks. The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.
- gwbas1c 6y agoJust curious: How would I go about playing Monkey Island today? I know DOSBox comes to mind? But, is there an official port, like the "remastered" versions of Final Fantasy that are in the Play store?
- mr-ron 6y agoCheck out gog.com
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoSteam [0] and GOG [1], at least, have Monkey Island 1 & 2 special editions. Looks like GOG has them 65% off right now too. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Collection/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special_edition https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lechucks_revenge https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lec...
- LoSboccacc 6y agoit's also on the app store and it's a very good fit for tablets, slightly less so for mobiles
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- johnwalkr 6y agoI played through them on iphone and it was great.
- gpderetta 6y agoPlayed MI1 and 2 recently with my 6 year old from steam. We had a great time. Worked flawlessly with proton.
- 6y ago
- FpUser 6y agoOh sweet memories. I did not play the game, my daughter did. But I absolutely loved the music and still have it in my playlist.
- derwiki 6y agoMusic is very memorable! I kept the original game disc at my parents’ house so I wouldn’t lose the music. Silly me! There’s an entire internet of folks who won’t let this stuff die.
- geephroh 6y agoYou might check out the Super Mercato Bros podcast. They've done a couple of episodes on the Monkey Island franchise: http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island (And FWIW, my brother played marimba and some assorted percussion on Escape from Monkey Island. One of his weirdest gigs ever...)
- kvn_95 6y agoI played it using a basic Soundblaster card in the 90s and it’s already amazing. Lately I used DosBox with the MT32 emulation and was blown away by how good it sounds. Here’s an instruction on DosBox MT32 emulation if you’re curious: https://blog.zyrain.org/2016/11/roland-mt-32-and-emulating-it-in-old.html https://blog.zyrain.org/2016/11/roland-mt-32-and-emulating-i... Here’s a clip of the MT32 opening soundtrack if you just want to have a listen https://youtu.be/i3dB0qEcG20 https://youtu.be/i3dB0qEcG20
- andi999 6y agoLove it when something is labeled 'final 1.1'
- antaviana 6y agoI spent two months trying to cross the bridge at the beginning of the story keeping all money, gold, treasury bonds... I had a real ball playing this game.
- rburhum 6y agoMonkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam n Max made me want to study CS away from my home country. I loved those games as a young teenager. 30 years later I still do...
- mistrial9 6y ago.. better than Batman Gotham ?
- deeblering4 6y ago> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy. I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for. Computers have a long and complicated history. And the technical parts are being abstracted away more and more. I think it's important to help people understand how we got to where we are today, and why it is (or isn't) an improvement from the way things used to be.
- teclordphrack2 6y agoHe should of said he 3d printed the save icons
- robertakarobin 6y agoI hate this stereotype. "Hurr durr, stupid Millenials don't even know what a book is, amirite?"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ksangeelee 6y agoI think it's more a moment of realisation that a lot of time has passed, that things have changed to such an extent, and that it's hard to imagine something so large having so little function, relative to today's tech. I don't think it's written in the spirit of the stereotype you suggest.
- smabie 6y agoMillenials aren't even young anymore
- joshstrange 6y ago> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy. >> I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for. Expect it's not even funny, it's just super cringey and reeks of gatekeeping and condescension.
- deeblering4 6y agoYou make final gold masters like a dairy farmer
- danra 6y agoI'm shaking, I'm shaking
- amichal 6y agoI never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks trying to get a single disk to verify. This took hours and at the time blanks were something like 20$ each. I spent the whole night stressing I would get in trouble for spending so much and maybe I should have waited for someone who knew the process better. CTO told me the next day what being a single day late to get them to mfg would have cost and I felt better.
- hinkley 6y agoThe senior guys should not have gone for drinks until someone had verified the copy. They could have dinked around the office for an hour until the first one failed. You got left holding the bag. A very expensive one from the sounds of it.
- amichal 6y agoYeah, that particular configuration of SR guys didn't really work out. Why they went drinking and left me to finish up is a longer story, life lesson. I quit within months and went to work with a couple of the more dedicated of the bunch.
- cranesan 6y agoWere you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?) I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value you're getting from those $20 blanks!) There was a class action lawsuit, and I eventually got a replacement drive (no relief for those wasted expensive, blanks). But the vindication that it was defective hardware, and nothing I did wrong helps. The manufacturer of the drive was Philips/Magnavox, but there were some other brands that were all linked back to this same defect that the class action lawsuit covered.
- savrajsingh 6y agois this it? https://www.retrogames.cz/play_492-DOS.php?language=EN https://www.retrogames.cz/play_492-DOS.php?language=EN
- curiousllama 6y agoTangentially related - For some reason, I love the universal impulse to throw ironic shade at millennials/Gen Z whenever a floppy disk comes up. Like, we’ve all independently decided to embrace our deepest boomer tendencies when it comes to a single innocent topic. It’s nice.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Bayart 6y agoI played Monkey Island ten years ago, when they launched the Remaster. It was such a great game. And I've got to say the follow up ranks as one of the best games I've ever played. It's funny that having played Monkey Island 1 & 2 well into my adulthood, I still get somehow very nostalgic and tender vibes from it.
- raldi 6y agoThis is a nice (short) post, but the one with the great storytelling was 2015's celebration: https://grumpygamer.com/monkey25 https://grumpygamer.com/monkey25
- throwaway99942 6y agoShouldn't the title read "Thirty years ago today I made the final gold primaries for Monkey Island". I can't believe people use such offensive language and reinforce such oppressive and racist speech. \s
- LifeIsBio 6y agoWhen I was growing up my brother and I used to spend a week each summer at our cousins' house. They had a copy of Monkey Island and each summer we would tell ourselves, "This is the year we're going to beat Monkey Island." Each year we never made it much further than the first Island. Eventually our cousins lent us the game and we beat it over the course of a few months. Interestingly, I think about Monkey Island a lot because I often tell people (only half jokingly) that the way that I think about learning conversational skills is by using the same mechanics as the sword fighting challenge in The Three Trials. As you gain experience sword fighting, you pick up new phrases and you eventually learn the situations in which you yourself can apply those phrases appropriately to defeat the other swords[wo]men. Similarly, I've found it quite effective to watch how other people use techniques to illicit specific reactions from people. After a while of seeing the same technique applied by different people for slightly different reasons, you can start using it yourself. Eventually you have a big bucket of techniques you can use whenever!
- will_pseudonym 6y agoI enjoyed your anecdote, as someone who has never played Monkey Island. Just FYI, the word you're looking for is "elicit", not "illicit".
- LifeIsBio 6y agoAh, for sure. Thanks! Too bad the editing window is past.
- thefaux 6y agoWhen I was 9, in 1993, I hurt my eye and couldn't go to school for a week while it was healing. To make it bearable, my dad somehow got me a pirated copy of the secret of monkey island from a coworker (he worked at a PR company so I still find that mildly surprising today). The game had a copy protection feature where there was a spinning wheel and you had to input some text that was revealed when you combined the top of a pirate's head with the bottom of a different pirate's head (IIRC). This was defeated by the office photocopier. Eventually I got stuck on a puzzle that I just couldn't figure out. Rather than giving up, I sent a physical letter through the USPS to Lucasarts explaining where I was stuck and asking for help. A few weeks later, I received a response with Lucasarts letterhead with the solution to the puzzle. I actually ended up sending two or three letters to finally complete the game. Talk about a different time and place. Of course a few years later I racked up $30 in hint line charges while making my way through Sam and Max Hit the Road. It took a lot of chores to pay my mom back for that.
- Cakez0r 6y agoI also sent a physical letter to Lucasarts when I got stuck as a kid. They kindly sent me back a full walkthrough! I wonder how many other kids must've done this...
- brianwawok 6y agoI mailed Nintendo for a dragon quest puzzle and they wrote back. Was great.
- aresant 6y agoFor anybody that needs to scratch the nostalgia itch after reading this post I highly, highly recommend the free web series "Double Fine Adventure" It chronicles Tim Schafer (ass't designer on Monkey Island and designer of numerous other LucasArts classics) and Ron (early on, he eventually leaves) building out their kickstarter adventure game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE
- ilovefood 6y agoLove that footer :) wouldn't dare copying it for my websites!
- jedberg 6y agoIn the middle it links to the post he made on the 25th anniversary, which talks about how they would ship the gold masters to Europe. He says they didn't have time in the schedule to mail it, so they would go to the airport, find a flight to London, walk up to the gate and find a passenger and ask them to carry a pack of disks with them, and tell them someone at the other end would meet them at the gate to pick it up! Man how times have changed in 30 years.
- gambiting 6y agoMy dad used to do the same thing all the time but with trains and coaches - if you had to send something to the other side of the country pronto, you'd go to the train/coach station, speak to the driver, hand them some money, and they'd happily take whatever you were sending with them. It was literally the fastest way to get something somewhere. It doesn't surprise me at all that people used to do the same thing with flying.
- biztos 6y agoIn some parts of the world this is still the norm. I know someone who sends things to her parents (about a 10-hour drive away, in a village) exclusively by bus. You pay off the driver, tell him/her who's going to pick up the package and at what stop, and off they go. Seems to work really well, from the POV of the driver, the sender, and the recipient. Cheaper than DHL, more trustworthy than the post office, faster than both! It's routine enough I can't imagine the bus service doesn't know about it, my bet is they tolerate it because it lets the drivers make a living wage (and thus gets you better drivers) and because most packages aren't big enough to be disruptive.
- myself248 6y agoA friend of mine had this happen with a processor card for a telephone switch. A bad software update had hosed up the primary card in such a way that it also made the standby unable to function, and they were capital-D Down for hours. The manufacturer was in Texas, the switch was in Michigan. The soonest flight was a passenger flight, not a cargo flight, so they bought the box a ticket and sent it on its way. At the receiving airport, a logistics company picked it up and drove it straight to the office in need. Thing is, the logistics company sent a semi. Because they hadn't been told the size of the shipment, just its declared value, and they reasoned that anything worth mid six figures must be big. So this intrepid truck driver couldn't (in a timely fashion) get close to the building, and ended up jogging across the parking lot with the card under his arm, as the tech headed down the elevator to meet him at the door. "Sign here. What the heck is this thing, anyway?" "Twenty thousand people's ability to call 911. Thanks, gotta go!"
- Razengan 6y agoConsidering how successful Thimbleweed Park, the spiritual sequel to Maniac Mansion, has been, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaffer and Dave Grossman could just reboot Monkey Island with a different name, say Ape Archipelago or something. Fans would only love a chance to return to that world as envisioned by its original creators, and even if all the character etc. names have to be change it would be better than waiting forever for Disney to do anything with the IP given how it conflicts with Pirates of the Caribbean.
- ginko 6y ago>> It would be great if you could release the source code under an open source license >Yeah... talk to the Mouse. I don't own any of it.
- huhtenberg 6y ago> The day has come and gone and I didn't get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside. Disney got the Monkey Island IP when they bought Lucas Arts. The first thing they did with it was to pull an excellent MI remake off the iOS Apple Store. The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit. So I really doubt that Ron will ever have his wish granted :(
- Thin_icE 6y agothe more we talk about it, the more disney will think it has value and will hold on to it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 6y ago> The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit. If you're convinced it's bullshit, what do you think the real reason is instead?
- lostcolony 6y agoI think you misunderstand what he's calling bullshit. He's not claiming they don't actually believe the reason they give. He's saying the reason is bullshit.
- chrisseaton 6y agoOh right - was going to say they kept the other games up so they obviously aren't doing it because they hate games or out of spite. Reasonable to believe their stated business reason.
- ppod 6y agoI just noticed recently that in American English "bullshit" often means "unfair" or "trivial" where in British English it usually means "untrue".
- sicnus 6y agoThirty years ago today and I was in Saudi Arabia getting ready to go to Iraq. It would be another 4 years before I started using my first computer and a year after that my first Linux OS.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy. Tsk. Please. We've all seen CD disks before, you know.
- gre 6y agoFun fact, the D stood for disks, so you're literally saying "Compact Disks Disks".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- myself248 6y agoThe D stood for Disc. Consensus at the time was a disk with a K was writable, a disc with a C was read-only.
- smegcicle 6y agoOr disc for optical, disk for magnetic
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoI'm fine with that. Like "SAM Missiles" (in the sky) or "CMS System" etc. Also, it's "pedant", not "pendant" :P
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoMonkey Island was great. To this day I occasionally use insults learned during the swordfighting part of the game. Also, the MI theme was once my ringtone on a good old Siemens S65i
- haecceity 6y agoYou fight like a dairy farmer
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoHow appropriate, you fight like a cow!
- acd 6y agoMonkey Island brings back very good game memories and who the whole Lucas Art series had good stories! I learnt a lot of English from playing text adventure games. It was a fun way to learn a language. Whenever I encountered English words I did not know I had an English dictionary by the side of the computer and looked up the word I did not understand. Of course I am also thankful to my official English school teachers but playing text adventure games was a very fun way to learn a new language! You had to comprehend the text in the game to be able to play. It was somehow a bit hard but you got the reward of playing from learning.
- andrewzah 6y agoGames are such a great way to get people to naturally learn language. I do the same thing nowadays with games like Animal Crossing and Ace Attorney. It's easier now than ever to find translations for other languages than English.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoA rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle is still the most memorable item I've ever come across in a game. Thanks Ron.
- Intermernet 6y agoAlso "Mug-O-Grog"
- bengalister 6y agoGuybrush Threepwood, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle so many good memories. I remember the anti-piracy message in Guybrush where the main character was sent to jail, the inner game (Maniac mansion) in Day of the tentacle.... I think Monkey Island was the game I spent the most time with, it was full of humour.
- blaz0 6y agoWorking on Monkey Island Special Edition in 2009 while at LucasArts is one of the highlights of my career. I have really fond memories of my time there on the team (Team 3!). I wish I had worked on the original but that was way before my time. The game is actually running the full original code alongside the new Special Edition stuff. We didn’t want to disturb the original codebase, so we ran it basically unchanged on another thread and the new game loop would surgically peek and poke some state every frame (animations, etc) to get synchronized. That’s how we essentially layered all the new art and sound on top of the original game. There was a lot of reverse engineering of data and asset formats that we had to do because all the original authors had since left, perhaps with the exception of EJ. The F10 hotkey to transition between the old and the new art was actually a debugging feature that our lead rendering engineer wrote during development, but everyone agreed that it was too good not to ship it as an actual feature of the Special Edition.
- technofiend 6y agoFor those who didn't experience it the first time or perhaps would like to do so again, I feel obligated to mention your version is on sale for $3.49 at Good Old Games aka gog.com. No affiliation myself other than a customer and someone a bit in awe of what you guys wrought. https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special_edition https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special...
- gerdesj 6y agoAhh that takes me back. For the kids, here's how you use those things: You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or "needle" as we used to call it - a joke riffing on those archaic record player things that mum and dad danced to. We would of course be listening to our modern cassettes in our dodgy knock off Walkmans and rubbish headphones. You will notice that there are two small square cut outs on each disc. That means that grumpygamer had access to the latest double sided discs. When you got to the end of side A, you turned it over and engaged side B to continue loading. That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1/4" effort was actually ... floppy. I don't miss them at all but I still have a few around the place.
- goberoi 6y agoMonkey Island and its sequel are some of the defining games of my childhood. My brother and I played all the Sierra Games, and Lucas Arts games, and while we have many loves (Heroes Quest/Quest for Glory, Indian Jones), Monkey Island was by far our favorite. We few years ago we were lucky enough to meet Ron at PAX when he was there promoting Thimbleweed Park. Since then, I saw him fairly often at a neighborhood coffee shop here in Seattle. Earlier this year, at the start of the pandemic, my brother and his partner ended up making an adventure game in the style of Monkey Island. It's almost an homage and has a few shout outs to those in the know. Check it out here: https://www.landlubbersgame.com https://www.landlubbersgame.com. Thanks Ron and team for the good times!
- kuon 6y agoI really loved the Lucas Art point & clicks. I remember being stuck for hours in those games. Eventually, I finished most of them (or I remember I did, but maybe I didn't, honestly I don't remember). I want to deeply thanks everyone who worked on those games. Thank you.
- bastijn 6y ago> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy. Makes me remember this open day we organized a year or two back at work. We had some floppy disks laying around and this one kid pulled his dad's jacket and told him that we had 3D printed save icons here.