The International House of Mojo

The Big Sites - Booty Island
The following images apear courtesy of their creators.

As i said before, EVERYONE had a site. but there were several that stood out above the rest. These sites were considered to be the greatest sites on the internet, and now im going to talk about them.

The first one is Snesgirl's Booty Island. Unfortunatley this site no longer exists, and it was quite a mission to find any images from it. But Snesgirl managed to dig out some realy old ones for me !
The main things i can remember about her site, are that she had a cool section entitled "you know youv'e played monkey Island too much when.." with readers sending in their ideas - things like "when you start selling fine leather jackets" etc. She had her pet rats as guards on the front of the page, and had a funky design :)
I thought it more appropriate to talk to the webmonkeys involved in these sites rather than sit here and talk about them, speculate on ideas they had etc - so here we go!. !

<me> How did your site evolve over the years? (a brief history)

<SnesGirl> I can start out in the late 96-beginning of 97 when I first got internet. I was mostly surfing around until I found The MI Scumm bar, and I really liked the page. I was mostly interested in that Character Index he was going to do, but it never seemed to get started, so I got this stupid idea..."Hey, I should maybe do a MI page, and as a special feature I'll get the web's most complete MI Character Index", and I did.
(which included a "vote for your favourite MI character" ongoing poll).

I also had this special feature with screen captures from the CMI video, and I even recorded the all the sound from it to a wave file! Hey, sure, I had crazy ideas, but I think I was a bit original :P Then I got midis on my page, and got this little music program
"Hey, I can change instruments and the speed of the midis...let's do midi remixes!". Probably by now, I also learned some basic knowledge in Klik & Play too.
Sometime in the summer, I got pissed at my brother, and started to make him into a three headed brother and started to animate him...and I got another stupid idea "Hey, let's do a parody of Monkey Island, starring my brother!". Brother Island and Always Plywood was born. I put it on my Monkey Island page and it got pretty good response, considering it was one of the first MI fan games (or parodies more likely).
A sequel, Brother Island 2, that was more like a real point 'n click adventure (but poorly programmed) was made during the beginning of 98, and some people are wondering if a third game ever will be made...

Maybe sometime around now, I started to have "the sound of the month". I simply recorded some music from a LucasArts game with my mic (I think you could hear a clock tick in some of the wavs, or cars driving by outside), and I took requests. I think it was a quite good idea too.... By now, I think I started to dislike "Jennys Monkey Island Page", and wondered what I could change the name into...hmm...Booty Island!
I don't know really why I just chose that Island, maybe because none of the other pages had that name :) So I did, and tried to theme the page after that. I think the page by now also had two colours, one in the main frame and another among the links, and I started to add small pictures before the links too.
I started to experiment with design and update the page frequently (I think one/week or so? Every Saturday, the same day as the Monkey Meetings on IRC :). Then, suddenly CMI was released in the States, and I got a lot of mails from people asking for hints about the game...you can't guess how annoying it was getting mails from people asking about hints, even though I said on my page that they shouldn't do so...it would take a month or so before the game would arrive to Sweden! Anyway, I finished CMI, got up the characters from that game, and suddenly, I realized that I didn't feel the same way about updating...back then it was fun, and I always had something new to put up. Now, I felt more forced to put anything up, and I couldn't find anything new to update with. So, I simply closed it down.

<me>why did you close it down ?

<SnesGirl>As I wrote before, I couldn't find anything new to add to the page, and to just leave it like it was...if I left it, I'm sure people would mail me and ask me why I'm not updating, and the page would probably be a page among others in the end. To bury the page felt better than leave it to rot slowly in the bushes, if you know what I mean :) It actually had a grave stone for a year sor something too, that was pretty nice.

<me>so, what are you doing now?

<SnesGirl> Right now, I'm having too much in my hand than I can carry, but I'm always like that :) At first, I'm now compleating a game with StolleSoft called "The Adventures of Orvar". It will be an action/adventure-rpg, and for the first time the game will have almost all original tunes, just created for this game, and voices, of course, hehe :)
But, I'm also working and sketching on some other StolleSoft titles at the moment, what titles are still a secret. During the years, I've also taken up interest in anime and manga, and since I've always been interested to draw things, I've also actually made an online comic, and finished it too after almost two years and 225 pages. So, I'm trying to start up a new comic project too which I'm roughly sketching on right now. I'm also running a Swedish anime site and a small Tweek shrine. I've also started in a Film/TV/Video school where I will learn to make films, music videos, animations and stuff like that. I think I will learn a lot from it, and will have three pretty enjoyful years ahead of me...it would be cool to do a Monkey Island fanspoof sometime in the future too :D

<me>Which was your favourite design of your site?

<SnesGirl> I have two favourites....I liked the concept when I had the booty Island map, and by clicking on it, you could go to different sections. People didn't like it though, and i guess I should have worked harder to make it work better. But, I think the last design was my very favourite one, with my two pet rats guarding my page (they're both dead now togeather with the page though). If I would have run Booty island today, I guess I would have had the page in some pretty purple (or maybe brown) colours though ;)

<me>whch was your favourite monkey island site - other than the ones belonging >to you 3?

<SnesGirl> Oh, gee, that was a hard one...it was such a long time ago when I frequently visited MI pages...but I guess Plunder Island was a page I liked to visit, togeather with The World of Monkey Island...I also remembering visiting a MI fan club that was told to be opened pretty soon and be the ultimate one, but I never opened, hehe...

Thanks Snesgirl! And now for embarrassment purposes are some questions she answered in a n interview about 2 years ago

Whats your ambiton in life?
To be a famous cartoonist or to do music in a game (play a instrument).

F favourate L.A quote?
"You and what army? -Why...THIS army!" (Day of The Tentacle)

Why did you choose your nick name? or who did and why? I should get a nickname on my first own homepage service...I didn't like my school name (Jennula), I wanted something more cool! Then I thought "Hmm...SNES is a really nice machine...I'm a girl....SnesGirl!".