If there's one thing you can count on even more than annual Mojo downtime or regularly scheduled mass firings at LEC, it's Monkey Island 5 rumors. The latest comes from Destructoid, which has the following to say:
A source recently revealed to us that LucasArts is planning to resurrect a classic franchise at E3. The million dollar question -- what series is it -- is unknown to our source. However, we do know that titles like Grim Fandango and Monkey Island were uttered within earshot as examples of a LucasArts' golden oldie.Hopefully we don't have to tell you that this is rumor material to the extreme, but there you go.
If it is Monkey Island I would expect some action game set in its universe which could actually be decent if it had really good writing and was funny.
After the PoTC movies I'm surprised LEC hasn't leveraged SOMI franchise more given the mainstream popularity of the very similar settings.
I think that it could very well be the next installment in Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series. Could be something else entirely.
Or Ballblazer.
Hugely unlikely, I know, but never say never.
Q: Does competition worry you?
Dan Connors: No, because I think there's still that point about people needing to understand what it is, and Telltale is always going to define its own kind of game. When we talked about our vision statement early as a company that, whenever people sit down and play a game of ours, they know it's a Telltale game. It has some set of qualities that is Telltale.
So we want to be there and have people around us that are doing similar things, and we want to learn from them and that validates things. I will say that we've been hearing from a lot of big publishers that have ideas for their franchises, asking how we'd like to work with them.
Q: That must be very flattering?
Dan Connors: Is it, but we're not a work-for-hire studio either, and that's a real hard thing for them to get their brains around. Telltale has built a business - we're an independent developer and publishers, we're going out and licensing, we're funding the products and we're monetising them.
For economic health of the company, those are three critical pieces, so we just need to find relationships that will let us work in that context, or at least some of them.
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I would say the Maniac Mansion universe would be the most likely "franchise" to lend itself to new episodic adventures.
GI: A lot of those LucasArts franchises are still very popular - you spoke about Day of the Tentacle. Is there a chance you'll be able to wrangle a few more of those away for more episodes? Are you working on that at all?
Connors: It's definitely on our minds and it's definitely something we think about. Maybe I can give you more information a while from now. It's definitely something that makes good sense to everybody. For them it's the same thing. For them it's "What's the business model? What's the retail model?" It's not their type of game - it's not Star Wars, it's not with the movie, with the lightsaber - an action game. When trying to do the two things at the same time it makes it challenging. They've been trying to figure out the right solution, and hopefully Telltale is part of it.
Of course, it's never going to happen. Just saying.
Man, classic to them is probably when they stopped making games and started making money.
LEC resurrecting a classic franchise? So what it could it be? x-wing vs. Tie fighter? Rebellion? Super Bom Bad Racing? Which Star Wars game style is it?
Hell, they're probably just talking about a new Jedi Knight game. It's been a few years. They could get Kyle with gray hair teaching padawans fighting the new sith.
They already made that game, it's called Jedi Academy.