The International House of Mojo

Update: This has been confirmed to be a hoax.

Rumors have been circulating the Internet in the last day or so about LucasArts resurrecting of the first few Monkey Island games for the Nintendo DS handheld system. Started by this thread on the Gamespot forums, the prospect of using the DS's touchscreen to control these classic point and click games has put some adventure fans in a tizzy.

While the idea of official handheld ports of MI games is an exciting one (and we'll be looking into this a bit more, just in case), close examination of this rumor makes the whole thing look a little shaky...<:MORENEWS:>

First off, looking through the thread in question, any and all "information" brought to light, be it leaked press info, leaked letters from LucasArts, screenshots of online stores showing copies of MI:DS that were "only up fir a bit and are down now," and of course the actual leaked DS screenshots themselves, all originate from the same user, Flamming. Within the thread no other users bring information to the table. One user with one post backs up one thing he said, but that's it.

Second, the initial post that starts it all claims to have a quote from the official NGC magazine. The eyebrow of doubt is raised, however, when the alleged article quotes Tom Sarris as a representitive from LucasArts. Tom Sarris used to be the Public Relations director at LEC, true, but he stepped down almost a year and a half ago. It's doubtful that a year and a half ago Tom Sarris was giving quotes to official Nintendo magazines about unannounced ports of Curse of Monkey Island for unannounced handheld platforms. The second thing that makes that article seem a bit shady is the fact that, upon reading these Gamespot forum rumors, the journalists over at Computer & Video Games have gone out of their way to ask the editor of NGC magazine if they'd be running an upcoming article about Monkey Island DS ports, to which he replied "Not that I'm aware of."

To the left there, is a screenshot posted by Flamming in the thread. While this and a handful of other screens might be seen by some easily excitable fans as "definitive evidence," looking closely at the areas where they differ from actual CMI screenshots shows that they could very easily just be Photoshop jobs. The "verb coin" interface is not sitting on top of a decorative pile of coins and other loot in the chest, but is instead sitting on top of a pile of scaled down clones of the same verb coin artwork. And the new added divider between the coin interface and the inventory has a bad tiling effect as if done with a lot of cutting and pasting, or use of Photoshop's Clone Tool.

There are a couple other things about this rumor that made me scratch my head a little bit. For instance, the screenshot allegedly taken from dvdboxoffice.com shows Curse of Monkey Island appearing in their Nintendo DS store (the game was of course "taken down" from the store moments after the screenshot was taken), but for some reason, even though Curse of Monkey Island has had final box art for eight years now, the dvdboxoffice.com screenshot uses placeholder artwork from CMI's opening cutscene for the box art instead.

Basically, this whole thing seems like a very nicely executed hoax by an excited fan. That said, we'll try to harass some people to find out more, if at all possible. Whether or not this particular instance is a hoax or not, the idea in general of seeing the old SCUMM games ported to the Nintendo DS is a pretty appealing one.