Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
(That’s all I got.)
Source: The Forums—Read them daily!
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It was an impressive trick on the part of the upcoming Indy game, getting itself announced prior to the fifth movie going before cameras and managing to stay a committed no-show all the way up to the present, on the other side of Dial of Destiny’s home video release.
But that is scheduled to change later this month, as Eurogamer reports:
Wolfenstein developer MachineGames will showcase more than "more than 10 minutes of game and developer insights" including the first gameplay trailer. Expect to hear details about when the game will be set, what its story will be about, and "how fans will actually play as Indy". (Using a video game controller? An actual whip?! The mind boggles.)
Bethesda announced it had an Indiana Jones game in the works all the way back in January 2021, and warned at the time that it would be some time before the project was given a full reveal. Now, that time is finally here. In the meantime, we did at least get confirmation via an FTC hearing that it'll be releasing exclusively on Xbox and PC.
It’s all part of the Xbox Developer Direct showcase, which “will be broadcast on 18th January at 8pm UK time - that's 3pm Eastern or midday Pacific.” We’ll be here to point you to that stream when the time comes. I mean, probably.
Source: Eurogamer
If you’re an avid Wireframe reader, this article should already be familiar to you. If not, get ready to dig into the many towns of the Monkey Island universe, from Secret to Return in a scholarly essay. An excerpt—and as this is The Year of “Escape from Monkey Island”, it seems like an appropriate example:
We wanted it to feel well-manicured and inviting. This is where all the ill-gotten pirate booty got laundered, and the banks, lawyers, etc. became a thriving society. While it looks bright, shiny, and happy, to Mike [Stemmle, co-director] and I, it was more of a cynical statement about ‘professional pirates’. We used images from tropical seaports and a lot of organic shapes and brighter colours. The idea wasn’t necessarily that it was an amazing paradise, but it wanted to look like one.
That’s from Sean Clark, speaking about Lucre Town. In fact, almost all the familiars are quoted in the article: Gilbert, Grossman, Fox, and so on and so forth. As far as Monkey Island architecture goes, it’s a must-read .
Author Konstantinos Dimopoulos might be familiar to some of you—he co-wrote Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities which covered Grim Fandango’s Rubacava among other things. It got stellar reviews around these parts:
“DON’T BE SUCKED IN” — 
But Escape from Monkey Island’s 25th anniversary isn’t until next year, you cry, and right you are. What needs to be taken into consideration is Mojo’s track record with anniversaries, which is... less than stellar. In that sense, it only makes sense to start a year earlier, and when we finally hit the actual date, we may or may not match up. It’s all more or less logical.
So, to start it off, we have videos. Many, many videos.
And if you don’t want Mojo’s fake(-ish) EMI trailer, you can spend your day comparing the PS2 cutscenes to the PC ones. Dig through all the EMI videos to find official trailers and who knows what else?! (And for those who are YouTube averse, we’re in the process of putting all of this up on Mojo proper.)
More to come! And if you followed us on Mastodon or Bluesky you would have seen most of these, as we often provide exclusive previews there.
By now you should recognize Cressup as the UK task force in this internationally bustling Interviewing Adventure Game Adjacent Humans For A Long Time genre. She has notched another great interview, this time with voice actor Bill Farmer. Best known generally as the voice of Goofy for Disney, Farmer is most treasured by us as the original voice of Sam in the multimedia debut of Steve Purcell’s characters, Sam & Max Hit the Road. It stands as the only published instance of Farmer voicing the character, though as we all know he was reprising his role in LucasArts’ ill-fated sequel before the assassin’s bullet found its mark. (Footnote: We’ll always have that trailer, though.)
Farmer discusses both of his Sam & Max experiences as well as his broader career in the enjoyable conversation, available in full below. We're above giving Cressup any grief over the misleading choice to put the Telltale/Skunkape version of Sam's model in her video's preview image, so that's why I'm not even gonna bring it up.
Source: Cressup
I don’t know how many times we have to stress that Laserschwert’s poster thread is basically the nexus of all that makes the internet esteemable -- a status aided by the fact that it’s pretty much the only example of it.
Why just this week, none other than legendary illustrator Ken Macklin decided to serve the cause by offering up three gorgeous pieces he did for Lucasfilm Games during the 80s. Behold some truly mindblowing, never-before-seen (Footnote: At least in raw form, in the case of The Eidolon.) art for The Eidolon and Maniac Mansion, along with some context by Laser:
These are scanned from 35mm slides he made prior to sending them off to Lucasfilm, and while the resolution is very high, the quality isn't the best. Still, the Eidolon scan will work as a great source for a complete version of the art.
The Maniac Mansion artworks are so weird, though, especially since Ken stated these were commissioned by Lucasfilm AFTER he had already done the MM key artwork. Why further art uses these strange characters is unclear.
Weird, yes, but it makes them especially noteworthy that the Maniac Mansion pieces are artifacts of an earlier phase of the game’s conception, when Weird Ed was imagined as a far friendlier character and even the villainous meteor had a decidedly cuddlier demeanor. (Well, a demeanor period.) Naturally we’ve welcomed these images into our concept art gallery, where you can find some Gary Winnick sketches from that same trimester of the eventual classic’s incubating identity.
Source: The Forums
Afterlife may not be something we (for whatever reason) talk much about here at Mojo, but child-of-Kotaku, Aftermath, has a lot to say about it. One Mike Stemmle, in particular, gets downright confessional:
At the time I built Afterlife, I was not a very religious guy. I clung to the last vestiges of my Roman Catholic upbringing, even though I increasingly found it (and most religions) to be very silly (if not downright dangerous) exercises. Even so, I still held on to the notion that something/one must be responsible for this beautiful universe. I mean, it's too damned cool to have come about by chance, right? So, when scribbling up a note for the Shak, I blurted out the classic bit about finding a watch on a beach, and knowing there had to be a watchmaker out there. I'm sure I thought it was very profound at the time, but the years have made me a mite more rigorous in assessing metaphorical wisdom. These days you'll find me comfortably on Team Atheist - sometimes obnoxiously so.
Go read.
Meanwhile, over at YouTube, Daniel Albu has yet another brief conversation, this time with Steve Purcell.
Longtime fan site The Legend of Monkey Island is still busting out jams. (Footnote: Remi points out that this article got advertised heavily on “the socials,” but I figure civilized people deserve to know about it as well.) To celebrate the 26th anniversary of The Curse of Monkey Island, they’ve published an ambitious new article detailing the differences between the game’s demo and the shipped final product. There are even some fresh quotes from Bill Tiller to give it that extra prestige. Read it and remind yourself that great Monkey Island content isn’t exclusively hosted on or by Mojo. Even though it's basically a rounding error.
Source: legendofmi.com
We’re barreling headlong toward the 20th anniversary of Sam & Max: Freelance Police’s cancellation now, yet there always somehow seems to be a few drops more blood to squeeze out of the stone.
Karen Purdy, who worked as an environment artist on the game, was the source of the last bits of known media, through her online portfolio. Reader Emma T has alerted us to the fact that Purdy has since revamped said portfolio with some additional art from her LucasArts projects, including Sam & Max 2.
We’ve dutifully made both our screenshot gallery and preposterous feature-length Feature current in accordance with this development. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for our attempts to contextualize the latest additions.
Need more Freelance Police autopsying to bring your day to its fullest potential? Daniel Albu’s ongoing series of developer interviews, which you can always keep track of in the dedicated forum thread, has included a recent chat with Dan Connors. This timestamped link will drag the needle to where most of the Freelance Police talk is.
I wish I liked it. But I don’t. I do hope you enjoy “The Lair of LeChuck,” though! And feel free to read my opinions.
Not content to only chat with Dom one time, Laura Cress has upped the ante:
I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but apparently the topic of conversation is Sea of Thieves: The Legend of Monkey Island — go listen if that’a your jam.
Boss Fight Books is now taking pre-orders for their upcoming release of the Oral History of Day of the Tentacle, available in both paperback and e-book formats.
* Bob interviewed the game's creators: Dave Grossman, Tim Schafer, Larry Ahern, Peter Chan, and Peter McConnell.
* Learn about the glory days of LucasArts, the golden age of point-and-click adventure games, and the creative problemsolving it takes to fit a full game onto a stack of floppy discs.
* The book opens with a foreword from artist Larry Ahern and ends with a hilarious afterword from co-director Tim Schafer.
Don't delay; order yours today!
Source: Boss Fight Books
It’s no secret that, despite Mojo’s bandwagon-spurning affection for the movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ended up being a massive box office face-plant for Disney. Since the studio long ago stopped granting me gross point participation in their feature films, I am happy to report no personal financial impact, but it does raise the question of the fate of whatever MachineGames is working on.
Hypothetically, one should have nothing to do with the other, but having already noticed a certain deafening silence around the Indy game despite its two-and-a-half-years-ago origins, one feels justified in growing a bit jaded.
Today, you can breathe a sigh of relief. In a new interview with Bethesda big shot Todd Howard, the game is given an official status of, erm, “midway.”
Howard is showing no sign of slowing down. As well as executive producing the Fallout show, he’s midway through executive producing an Indiana Jones game – a “bucket-list thing” for a man whose favourite movie is 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s developed by MachineGames, the team behind Wolfenstein. “They’ve got the whole Nazi killing thing down,” he says, “and they’re doing a really great job.”
Of course, they say such things about Beyond Good and Evil 2 about every fifteen years, but hey, let’s be optimistic.
Source: British GQ
As some of you already know, we made a startling discovery last week: By all accounts, Stan and Elaine had a serious thing going in The Secret of Monkey Island before—or until?—Guybrush showed up.
To further dive into this fundamental plot twist, we sent our software architect department into the depths of the two first games and their discovery... Well, let’s just say that Return now is fully and wholly explained.
Make your own conclusions from rock-solid proof that never was run and edited through multiple pieces of software.
Our trip down the old and dusty interview caverns continues. This time we’ve pulled seven of 'em out of the vault and combined them into one “Curse of Monkey Island Retro Interview Bonanza.” Some pre-launch, some post. They’re the type of texts that probably will be taught in universities for decades to come.
Sincere apologies for the lack of any pictures. In the early aughts, we were more concerned about the page loading on a modem than anything. Now read.
As part of our current merger with The SCUMM Bar—thanks in no small part to expert negotiations by the CEO —we have resurrected a highly informative interview with Bill Tiller. For the CMI fan amongst you, it’s a must read and likely what Kubrick had in mind when he filmed 2001.
We didn’t quite plan this retro week, but more to come tomorrow!
Long-time readers may remember all the excitement surrounding the infamous Monkey Island 2-demo hack. Within the source, cut dialogue was found, different scenes were revealed, and music was extracted.
This was all in 2003, and some may have forgotten all that was uncovered. Thus, we decided to not only revisit it, but also update it with newer findings. And, as a bonus, we converted the MIDI music to MP3s. That’s just the service we provide.
Give Monkey Island 2: The Demo Examination
a read, and you may or may not learn a little about what never was.
Update! A couple of more factoids have been added. Also, a few more musical cues were provided by Zaarin, albeit in OGG format: Only the best for my precious MT-32 >: