Until he let the domain expire, Wilmunder.com was the longstanding web presence of SCUMM Lord Aric Wilmunder. Today, the URL will finally work for you again…as somebody’s World of Warcraft site. That’s like a guy coming along and exhuming your loved one’s grave just so they could fill the hole with pog slammers instead.
Around ten years ago, Aric had started using his site to make the most constructive contribution to humanity since penicillin: uploading his irreplaceable treasure trove of LucasArts design documents. Fortunately, the stuff he did get around to posting seems to be preserved by snapshots, but he had so much more to offer that was meant to be on the way, like the Forge pitch documents (Footnote: Yes, there were apparently two separate ones.), a proposed Star Trek SCUMM game, and even a Maniac Mansion II that was not Day of the Tentacle, which he held up at one point for Daniel Albu during their last interview:
Aric, come back to us. Continue your noble work. Light a candle, rather than curse our darkness. ‘Cause I really wanna know how pissed the Meteor is.
The Adventurer is our weekly-ish round-up of oddities in the Greater Mojoverse, particularly tailored to those who don’t want to jump around the various social media services, forums, websites, etc. LucasArts+ news right in your inbox (or Substack app, RSS reader, etc.)
Oh, and if you want to subscribe to some of your favorite Mojoers’ newsletters, check out Karim, Thrik (LOL), and yours truly. All of the esoteric kind.
Do you have a newsletter you’d like to pimp? Sound off in the comments!
Last evening, Huz benched himself in front of his television to enjoy a University Challenge that included a LucasArts round (Footnote: I think that’s what it’s called; I don’t get this British craziness.). And, of course, he recorded it for us.
“Mid,” I believe, is what the kids would call those attempts.
As posted on the forums, it looks like Ackley and Ahern – aka The Curse of Monkey Island leads – are cooking up a new adventure game. To quote Ackley’s Xwitter post:
A surprise post today! My design partner of "The Curse of Monkey Island" Larry Ahern and I have been developing a new comedy narrative adventure.
Our development team is ready to roll, and we'd love to meet with potential publishing partners. Hit me up if you'd like to talk!
Sounds like quite the thrill ride for Curse fans, though it’s probably some ways down the road. Still, imagine a world where it publishes alongside A Vampyre Story 2.
Much has been written and said about the sadly abandoned Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix from the mid-90s. In all that recorded history, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of Dave Grossman’s involvement.
Well, Daniel Albu has invited Dave for another round of Tech Talk, and it turns out that Dave was indeed briefly affiliated with – if not outright helming - Iron Phoenix during a transitional moment when an attempt was made to utilize FMV for the character animation, a gambit which you may remember Mike Levine speaking to Daniel about in a past interview. Anyway, the Iron Phoenix talk begins at 33:36, but why not enjoy the whole thing? There’s even a bit of Cavedog talk toward the end.
The A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale team has been using the game’s Steam page to keep the faithful abreast of their progress on the long (Footnote: Move aside, Psychonauts 2. A new record is being set.)-awaited sequel. In their latest post, they offer a glimpse into the process of bringing Bill’s 2D illustrations into a 3D world, opening the door to such fancy effects as parallax scrolling and dynamic lighting/shadows.
Until you’ve thrown up, you haven’t stared at this long enough.
Be sure to read the full update, which includes more animated GIF action.
You have undoubtedly heard of the catastrophic California wildfires and the toll they have taken on LA in particular. A whole host of disaster relief funds have been set up, and, not surprisingly, Double Fine has joined in on supporting them with a Double Fine Action Auction:
Signed Stacking dolls? Brütal Legend LP test pressing? “Psychonauts 2 Launch Party Assorted Tchotchkes?” Those are just a few of the items you can bid on. So, run over to the auction, support a good cause, and get some cool stuff while you’re at it.
Ron Gilbert has officially unveiled his new game today, called Death by Scrolling, a title decidedly not commentary on internet surfing habits. You may recognise it if you've seen the screenshots and gameplay videos he's been posting on Mastodon and (previously) Twitter. More details on its journey to realisation are in his blog post.
No platforms or details exist yet, although a different blog post (on text sizes) suggests it's "basically an action game" where "players shouldn’t get too deep into stat management for a character that is going to last a few minutes."
Death by Scrolling emerged after his "RPGTBD," an open world RPG made by three people which didn't have the resources to be fully realised, was put on ice last year.
From the “other sites doing our work us” department: Eurogamer has posted an article on David Fox & Co’s Rescue on Fractalus! The game turns 40 this year, or, as we like to refer to it around here, “We’re still doing this?!” Anyway, go read while contemplating your life choices.
The Video Game History Foundation – famous around these parts for their Grade A Ronzo Interrogations – has soft-launched a digital library in early access. It’s basically what you’d expect: A huge collection of video game materials, much of which hasn’t been seen before. Read all about it, then check out some Lucas stuff.
As recently mentioned, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is basically all about Monkey Island, something StarWars.com has decided to double down on in a brand-spanking new story:
“I was taken aback to hear from Doug since it would have been decades since we had crossed paths at Lucasfilm,” Purcell tells StarWars.com. Purcell’s career has included creating the Eisner Award-winning Sam & Max franchise as well as work in games and animation, illustrating the cover art for the first two Monkey Island games and working on stories for Pixar including writing the screenplays for Brave as well as Cars on the Road. On the phone with Watts, Ford, and Skeleton Crew producer Chris Buongiorno, Purcell learned about the team’s influences for the latest Disney+ Star Wars series. “I wondered how they came up with my name to do a Star Wars piece and they mentioned my Monkey Island game covers for LucasArts. I hadn’t really done [anything] Star Wars themed besides my parody Sam & Max strips for the LucasArts newsletter, back in the day. What a pleasure and privilege it was being asked by this creative team to contribute something that ties into this fun, nutty and enthusiastic series.”
We've been apathetically tossing lumps of sand at the beached, bloated corpse of Star Wars for so long that it releasing anything pleasant was going to be a surprise. Count on Steve Purcell to find some blubber on that bone, yanking this poster for the Disney+ show Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and endearing us to whoever's commissioned it.
Polish adventure game enthusiast “vicek83”, maintainer of The World of Adventure Games YouTube channel, has rung in the new year by inviting various adventure game developers to talk a little about the projects they’re working on in 2025.
Bill Tiller is on hand, representing A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale, and conveniently his bit comes right at the start of the hour-long video:
The Secret of Monkey Island turns thirty-five (35) this year, which means some… many, actually… of us should take a long look in the mirror and contemplate how we’ve spent the last three-and-a-half decades.
But screw that – instead, we decided to post a short article with some of the weird secrets and easter eggs found in the first Monkey Island game.
It has been interesting learning over the past few years that the small trivia we thought was common knowledge apparently isn’t. Which, again, is why we should take a minute or two and ask ourselves if we’ve lived our best lives.
I will admit that here in the year of our lord, 2025, I would not have expected web games to still be a “thing.” Yet, a “thing” they are, and recently, two Monkey Island games have popped up – the first of them right here at Mojo. Introducing Monkey Island Frantic, a screenshot guessing game that’s, well, frantic.
It’s a simple concept: Small pieces of a screenshot fly across the screen, and you have to guess which location it is from. And, of course, you can share your score over on the forums.
While Hothead wasn’t technically one of The Mojo Companies, it was the home Ron Gilbert found for DeathSpank when he shopped it around in the 2008 arena, and he was with them for the duration of its development (not unlike how he squatted at the Double Fine offices for The Cave), so their reported demise merits a mention.
Hothead picked up DeathSpank, which was released in 2010, after dabbling in the episodic realm with the Penny Arcade games. DeathSpank itself consisted of two parts – at least, Ron’s proper opus did. For whatever reason, Hothead produced a third game without Ron’s involvement a year later, called The Baconing. The Vancouver-based studio later focused on free-to-play mobile games and sports titles. After a run of more than fifteen years, it now joins the growing list of game studios that have fallen in these rather brutal times for the games industry, but we'll always remember the good times.
Despite what Remi would have you think, 2024 hasn’t quite come to an end, and neither has its collection of Daniel Albu interviews.
Two await your viewership. Below is a conversation with Greg Hammond, producer at LucasArts in the early 90s, followed by another with Yves Borckmans, a programmer whose principal LucasArts credit is Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.
At nearly five hours, Daniel boasts the latter to be his longest interview yet, but frankly, I don’t think he’s showing enough deference to the possibility that we are all merely subjects in the ongoing Daniel interview called life.
Some say 2024 ends at 23:59, December 31st, and to them, we say, pfffffft. The year does, of course, end when we publish our end-of-year article, which is today, 14:58, the 26th.
Who was awarded Mojo’s coveted “Game of the Year?” Who won the Double Fine Extravaganza? How on earth did Jason not win the snarkiest Mojoer? Only one way to find out...
No, Mojo has not stopped posting on Bluesky. Instead, Bluesky has stopped Mojo from posting there by no longer showing our quality content. Why? Who knows, but it’s probably part of – we’ll see what Bluesky’s support has to say.
– we’ll see what Bluesky’s support has to say.