The International House of Mojo

I’m the kind of LucasArts fan that likes merchandise. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I can’t help myself. When I see things like a sealed boxed copy of The Secret of Monkey Island, I want it - there’s nothing conscious about it, my brain just immediately determines that having this object will please me, satisfy me, make me complete.

I do have some LucasArts merchandise. I have copies of all fourteen original adventure games in their original boxes, I have the Day of the Tentacle triangle box, I have the Maniac Mansion poster. I have a Full Throttle mini soundtrack CD, Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of The Dig, and even a LucasArts 20th anniversary coffee mug. These items please me, satisfy me, but they don’t complete me. For some awful reason, they just make me yearn for more - but there’s the problem. There is no more.

The LucasArts games are now ridiculously old. Maniac Mansion came out over 30 years ago. When this website first came online, Maniac Mansion was barely a decade old. And the games industry moved fast in the 90s, faster than many of us may remember. The technical leap from EGA games like Secret of Monkey Island to VGA, to full 3D games like Tomb Raider took place over the same kind of timeframe as the most recent console generation - about 5 years.

There was a golden window for this stuff, and it quite simply disappeared in the early-to-mid 90s.

When I look back through old copies of the Adventurer magazine that LucasArts used to include with their early-to-mid 90s US releases, I find myself drawn to the company store section far more than the interviews or the previews. This is where you can see the kind of merchandise that was once available, and, if you’re like me, fantasise about what it would be like if this store still existed and still sold these wares.

You could have had a Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and Loom t-shirt bundle for $15. You could pick up a poster for The Secret of Monkey Island for $5. Ordering Full Throttle would net you a free Corley Motors keychain and a Polecat bandana.

Even if you’re not a materialistic person, and you don’t care about this old corporate tat, it’s still worth noting these would have been canny investments. Alone, any one of those items listed above would sell on eBay for well over $100 today.

This has led to a feeling of carpe diem whenever there’s any kind of opportunity to acquire new merchandise, as few and far apart as it is these days. So no matter what my personal circumstances at any given time, from prosperity to dire lows, I have paid enormous sums of money for things like the Broken Age boxed edition, the Thimbleweed Park boxed edition, a frankly stunning new Monkey Island artwork by Steve Purcell (originally commissioned as the cover art for a Monkey Island book, published in France by Mojo-friend Nicolas Deneschau) and even third party material like Bitmap Books’ The Art of Point and Click Adventure Games collector’s edition.

So, obviously, when Limited Run Games announced they were re-releasing all of the classic LucasArts Monkey Island games as part of their 2020 selection, I was immediately put on high alert. This is an official release of the Monkey Island games specifically targeted towards nostalgic collectors - in other words, it’s the kind of once-in-a-lifetime moment that last ended when LucasArts sold the last of the Secret of Monkey Island posters to some lucky schlub for $5.

Here it is. Drink it in. Official Monkey Island merchandise for the first time in ten years.

Needless to say, Mojo knows you want the lowdown on this thing just as much as we do, so we reached out to Limited Run Games and they were generous enough to answer some pressing questions.