Adventure Game Hotspot keeps the A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale coverage coming, following up their earlier interview with a podcast. The featured guests are Šarūnas Ledas and Žilvinas Ledas – the brothers behind Tag of Joy, who are co-developing the game with Autumn Moon. Bill, to be fair, has a lot of drawing to do.
Though the episode runs an hour and a half, the AVS2 substance seems to be concentrated in the first thirty minutes. Listen, we command you.
Source: Adventure Game Hotspot
“I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so."
This sporting sentiment from Jimmy Maher gives you a decent idea of what you're in for in his latest entry at The Digital Antiquarian, dedicated to Tim Schafer’s 1998 classic. Fans of hot takes rejoice -- or does he speak for the silent majority? Whether you read it in outrage or validation, you know you’re always getting the good stuff over there.
Our CEO, who just happens to be the webmaster of The Grim Fandango Network, was last observed sharpening knives, but we’re sure it’s perfectly innocent.
Source: The Digital Antiquarian
In the SCUMM catalog, there are three early games that found themselves produced during a transitional era of graphics cards, where VGA (256-color) was most definitely around, but EGA (16-color) still had the dominant install base.
As a result, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Loom, and The Secret of Monkey Island initially shipped as EGA versions, but had their art retroactively redone (often within a year) in elitist fancy VGA form by other artists.
Over the years, the argument from purists that the EGA originals should be privileged has grown louder -- and also more tragic, as those most definitely don’t tend to be the versions offered by Lucasfilm. Regardless of individual preferences, for which there can be no right answer (Footnote: EGA is the right answer), the comparison is always interesting, and a typically Norwegian hero has made this inspection easier than ever.
Though he hasn’t gotten to Monkey 1 yet, you’ll have a lot of fun hovering your mouse over backgrounds from Indy 3 and Loom. Check out how much bigger that Sam & Max totem pole got in Indy’s office (and is that a subtle ode to the Great Monkey Head added to the top shelf there?), or how superior Loom was in its original form in every way. Above all, bow down before the one true Cobb:
Source: SuperRune
We’re a good twenty years past the heyday of Monkey Island fan games, but you can only really contain the disease, never cure it. The latest confirmed case comes out of Italy. Behold The Booze of Monkey Island:
I mean, it sure doesn’t look like something that was slapped together over a lunch break. Go forth and download before the LucasLegal of 2001 somehow catches wind.
Source: Bean Adventure Agency
To go along with this morning’s announcement, Jack Allin of Adventure Game Hotspot (Footnote: And who you may remember from Adventure Gamers) had a chat with Bill Tiller of Autumn Moon and Šarūnas Ledas of Tag of Joy (co-developer) to learn all the details behind the long-in-the-making revival of A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale.
How do you envision the distribution of responsibilities for a shared game? Will you be very hands-on, Bill, or more in an advisory, consultancy role?
Bill: We are sharing the development duties 50/50. Autumn Moon will focus on our core competency, the creative side, with a lot of input and ideas from Tag of Joy. And they are going to focus more on the technical and business side, with some of our input, though we don’t program so I am wisely very hands-off there. We have been working together for a while now and we got our process and working relations working very well. It’s been honestly great, and very smooth.
Šarūnas: Personally, I love this collaboration, because both sides are very hands-on, and it wouldn’t be as fun if Bill wasn’t actually doing what he does best. It’s an equal partnership in many regards – workload distribution, creative control, etc. Of course, it’s still Bill’s concept and story, but both sides share ideas and feedback with each other on all aspects of the game. Naturally, though, there are some areas that each side covers more, as Bill mentioned. Bill and Dave Harris are the lead writers/designers, and Bill is obviously the lead background artist. From our side, we bring the tech and framework, and so we set up the scenes and script the logic too. And then we share other responsibilities: e. g. Bill makes sketches and storyboards, we make 3D models and animations for the characters, and so on.
There’s a heck of a lot more in the full interview, including the somewhat sobering reveal that we may still be years out from release, but nevertheless it's all exciting stuff. Maybe even life-affirming.
The day actually came. Check out the announcement trailer for A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale (Footnote: Except it looks like they dropped the 2, possibly to avoid alienating people who haven't played a fifteen year old game.), which will be released by Autumn Moon games alongside a new partner, Tag of Joy.
The full press release can be read here, you can check out some new screenshots over on the Steam page, and last but not least there's Autumn Moon's relaunched web site. Let's hope they're able to bring Pedro Macedo Camacho back.
No doubt there's more to come, but for now let's just luxuriate in the fact that Halloween is saved.
As they do (mostly) every October, Skunkape has invited fans to submit Sam & Max fan art for the chance to win Big Prizes, which this year includes plushies and soundtrack keys for The Devil’s Playhouse (which I take as a hopeful sign that the soundtrack will in fact exist). You’ve still got a week to enter, so review the details and do us proud. We’ll only feel entitled to the usual 40% of your winnings.
If you think that’s the extent of Sam & Max Halloween news, then you must be one of those poor dears who didn’t even know that Steve Purcell auctioned off some new Sam & Max art as part of the Hero Initiative. Even if you hold the embarrassing position of not being the winning bidder who plunked down $5,500 to own the physical art, you can still enjoy it in cyberspace:
By the way, if you weren’t around for the piece Purcell contributed to the annual benefit last year, it was no slouch itself:
There’s no reason to ostracize Double Fine from the Halloween fun. Their claim on the occasion would be their trick ‘r treat RPG masterwork, Costume Quest, which is celebrating its fourteenth birthday. I think you know what to do.
All things considered, I’d say the only thing holding back October 2024 from perfection is that there sadly seem to have been no new developments on the A Vampyre Story front. But you’ll certainly want to find the time to play the still-unsequeled 2008 graphic adventure, what with its recent re-introduction to Steam in more stable form.
Remi must have missed this interview with Dan Connors and Jonathon Sgro of Skunkape Games last week, and it’s too bad, because it’s quite good. Most of the discussion focuses on what went into the development of the Sam & Max remasters, including throwing Jake under the bus at one point. But if I know you, you probably want to know what they said about The Future™:
Time Extension: With the Sam & Max games done, it would be interesting to hear what's next for the studio — what have the conversations been like internally regarding Skunkape's future? Do you anticipate working on more remasters like this or do you envision yourselves making something else entirely?
Connors: Well, we've developed something that's really powerful, which is the ability to remaster games in the Telltale engine, and there's a lot of stuff there, but they all have tricky situations around them because it's not like four years ago.
Now there's different ownership around a whole bunch of it, so we're trying to develop the right relationships there, because that's super interesting to us, and we're the right people to do it. I think the Sam & Max stuff has shown that. You know, aside from that, that's something we've got to figure out because everybody's too talented to not be working on something cool. So we just gotta figure out what it is.
Time Extension: A big thing that I've seen people say online in terms of Skunkape's future is, 'I hope they do this for Tales of Monkey Island' or 'I hope they do this for another Telltale game'. We definitely think Tales, in particular, is a game that definitely could benefit from this kind of treatment, with new lighting and things like that. It would look amazing. And I guess Disney has kind of shown some interest in doing stuff with Monkey Island again: reuniting with Ron and letting him kind of do his thing with Return to Monkey Island, but then also like doing the Sea of Thieves' crossover as well.
Connors: Yeah like we would love that. That would be amazing.
Time Extension: Yeah, I think it would definitely help introduce those games to a new audience and get the message out, 'Hey, you know these Telltale Monkey Island games are fun to play'. What do you think?
Connors: Yeah, there are things in Tales that I think we might have rushed or concepts that we thought were gonna work, that we got to a certain point, and then kind of failed before we had fully executed them. And even on Sam and Max, there were a couple of those, and when we do this process, we can say, 'Those two or three last things that we wanted to do to make this sing, we can do now.' And I think that's one of the subtle things that makes these remasters so great.
Sgro: Yeah. I love working on these things because back at Telltale — like I worked at every game on Telltale — there were always things that we couldn't have done because of the technology or the budget or time or all of that stuff combined.
You look at the final result and it's like, 'Yeah, it's great, it could be better.' So now it's just been fun taking the Sam & Max games and trying to make them the best that they could possibly be and improve all those things that we didn't have a chance to do originally. So, personally, I'd love to do that to any Telltale product pretty much. But it's limited on what we could do.
Connors: If we had a time machine, we would go back to when we got Sam & Max and try to do more but you know it is what it is.
Well, that all sounds rather definitively…ambiguous. Check out the whole thing, and buy The Devil’s Playhouse eight more times.
Source: Time Extension
Last month saw another welcome entry in the “Lucasfilm Games Rewind” series over in the blog section of Lucasfilm.com, this one being a tribute to Loom.
It’s indeed a nice little writeup on the 1990 classic, but the irony of its devout tone might be a bit too rich for some to digest, considering that Lucasfilm only offers the VGA version of the game - drastically re-written compared to the EGA original, the artwork for which is a high water mark of the 16 color era - through Steam and GOG. It also happens to be a version of the game loathed by creator Brian Moriarty, who is solicitously quoted throughout the piece.
But some things in life just must be accepted, and we should all humble ourselves to the reality that this issue is literally impossible to address.
Source: Lucasfilm.com
Release day has come and gone, and whether you binged your way through Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse: Remastered or you’re making a point of savoring it (or you’re merely employed), the game is pretty much the only purpose your life serves at the moment. And rightly so.
While Remi’s review is really the only one you need to consider, I guess we should point out that critics everywhere are taking the necessary steps to not make fools of themselves by aggressively loving the game. Meanwhile, Skunkape has published its traditional Steam post that goes deep into exactly what they changed in their fastidious remastering efforts. Some of it May Surprise You.
Additionally, they assure that the usual sack of archival content, along with the soundtrack release you’ve all been awaiting since, oh, let’s say 2010, is forthcoming. Where the former is concerned, followers of Skunkape’s social media presence have already gotten a taste, and quite the nourishing one at that for proper connoisseurs of vintage web announcement ephemera:
Speaking of social media, I was happy to see that Chuck Jordan, whose last big contribution (his greatest to adventure games, if I might suggest?) at Telltale was The Devil's Playhouse, registered his thoughts for the occasion:
The three-years-in-the-making revamp of Telltale’s masterpiece (Footnote: Which, not to mention, marks the triumphant conclusion of a damn near five-year saga to remaster the trilogy) is what is termed in esoteric Mixnmojo parlance A Big Deal, and we can naturally be expected to keep squeezing juice out of it for weeks years an appropriate and judicious length of time to come. So get ready to relish every second of it.
You’ve read our article on the subject, sure, but as you’ve confessed to many a psychiatrist, you’ll never truly know a night’s sleep until you can hear Aric Wilmunder talk about Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix – that’s the would-be SCUMM Indy game planned after Fate of Atlantis – for four-and-a-half hours.
Well, Daniel Albu's got you covered in his latest upload. Eat well:
Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu
Sure, he might have pointedly kept Mojo out of the loop when it came to that furtive GDC showing back in April, and you’re right to challenge the morality of that, but the fact is, Jake (Footnote: And the rest of Skunkape Games, presumably) looks to have achieved something pretty darned special with Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse: Remastered: The Omen II, so I say why let his pettiness dominate the discussion?
We’ve got ourselves a release date of August 14th , and that’ll be a simultaneous PC, Switch, Xbox and Playstation launch. You probably wouldn’t be wrong to keep your eye on the official site for more. One assumes that, as with the other seasons, Skunkape will eventually prepare an album release, and in so doing, a historical wrong would be righted. I’ll let our 2021 interview with Bay Area Sound do the explaining for me:
Mojo The-International-House-Of: When Telltale’s first two Sam & Max seasons originally came out, they received pressed soundtrack albums that were sold through the company store. However, Telltale dramatically scaled back on cool physical items by the time they made The Devil’s Playhouse, thus its soundtrack never got a CD release of its own to complete the collection. Is there room to hope that this situation can be redeemed someday?
Jared Emerson-Johnson: I assure you that nobody in the world is sadder about the shift in the merchandise policies at Telltale than yours truly. In fact, I was halfway through preparing season three soundtrack album masters when the policy shift occurred. Without making any promises, I will say that we will hopefully have something exciting to announce in a year or two.
Physical or no, the arrival of an official soundtrack of any persuasion would be redemption. The gears of justice turn slowly, my friends, but oh do they turn. (Footnote: Well, except in the case of Thrik’s unbelievably brazen LFN embezzlement scandal, but you can’t expect cosmic judgment to score a perfect bowl.) Now that the third, final, and best of Telltale’s Sam & Max seasons (and/or entire damned library) has been tarted up for the ball and will soon be in your grubby hands, the question remains: What does the future hold for Skunkape? And would they bother telling us if they knew? You’d hate for them to put themselves out.
Source: Skunkape
I mean...
Still, we always support Loom love, so we salute you, Eurogamer.
Image Credit: The Point and Click Store.Source: Eurogamer
It’s been politely noticed by our dear readers that we’ve arguably fallen a bit delinquent in highlighting Daniel Albu’s latest interviews, always trackable in that dedicated forum thread, despite their objective status as The Most Mojo Things Ever. I guess it never occurred to our constituents that we might still be watching them.
But the point is made, and it’s high time we catch up on the LucasArts developer interviews that have come along after Annie Fox got her due February. Since then, Daniel invited Aaron Giles over for a third session, to discuss the features introduced in DREAMM 3.0…
…before pulling Noah Falstein back into the virtual studio for some further Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis commentary…
…which was in turn followed by a conversation with voice director extraordinaire Khris Brown…
…and then, in keeping with the theme, by a chat with that other legendary voice director, Darragh O'Farrell…
…which might have felt pretty darn lonely if it hadn’t been chased down with a session with Mike Levine:
This latest one has been generating quite a bit of buzz, as Levine used the opportunity to debut rare footage: some fairly unbelievable tests for Indiana Jones FMV sequences using live action, filmed at ILM. Though things didn’t pan out for Indy, the techniques would be leveraged to published success in Rebel Assault 2. It’s unclear if this bit of R&D was part of the cancelled Iron Phoenix adventure game (which is said to have undergone experiments along those lines when a contractor failed to deliver on more traditional animation) or some other project altogether, but regardless of the exact origin you get a decent George Lucas anecdote, so why complain?
Mojo will soon return to cover the upcoming release of Afterlife.
Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu
You don’t pass the twenty-five year milestone in the fan site business without learning a few tricks of the trade. One of them is to maintain a “rainy-day fund” of news items that have an evergreen quality, unburdened by topicality. And on a fine, quiet Sunday like today, why not fish one out of the sack?
Back in 1991, a gamer wrote in to Nintendo Power magazine to report an exploit involving Nurse Edna in the NES version of Maniac Mansion, getting his finding published in the May issue. Today, and by today I mean five years ago, “Agent #912” took to Reddit to claim credit for his five minutes of fame, and he brought along the receipts:
Now then: what have you done?
Source: Reddit
A bunch of Gary Winnick’s concept art from his Lucasfilm Games days is up for sale over at Heritage Auctions. I don’t know how this came to pass or how that site works, but you’re still going to want to browse the lot. Probably the most intriguing item is this early set of character designs for The Secret of Monkey Island. Who knew Gary did concept art for that game?
I couldn’t even tell you what characters those are supposed to represent. The leftmost one is presumably an early take on Guybrush, and the guy on the right is a credible match for that Governor Phatt-esque character who was found in the resource files but didn’t make it into the final game:
Anyway, you’ll want to check all of it out, and to pass judgment on the mislabeling of Maniac Mansion pieces as belonging to Day of the Tentacle. Such humiliations are the sort any business runs the risk of when they’re too cheap to spring for The Mojo Audit.
Source: Heritage Auctions
We try to keep track of the fantastic work Jimmy Maher does over at The Digital Antiquarian, especially when his comprehensive inquiry into the totality of video game history (because that’s more or less what his efforts amount to) leads him to LucasArts’ sizable contributions to that story.
The Herodotus of interactive amusement, who’s been at this since 2011, has arrived at the mid-to-late-90s in his ongoing chronicle, and in LucasArts terms that has brought us two terrific articles just this month: one examining Jedi Knight and another published only yesterday in evaluation of The Curse of Monkey Island. As usual it’s good stuff and inspires good engagement from commenters who might already be familiar to you.
If you’re unfamiliar with the site itself, you may well want to check out all the LucasArts-related posts over the years, the links for which we collect here for your convenience. Or you can just, you know, stop stagnating at the junior varsity level and read it all from the beginning.
Source: The Digital Antiquarian
On April 1st, Lucasfilm.com ran a little commemoration of their Monkey Island series. And in keeping with the spirit of April Fools, they used the Special Edition cover art as the header.
We try to be pretty “It’s the thought that counts” when it comes to these valentines that the copyright holder has been willing to throw toward its legacy titles, so let’s remind ourselves that it wasn’t so long ago that even these passing mentions were seemingly verboten as a matter of company policy. And while the write-up may be on the fluffy side, I do see something noteworthy in this paragraph, emphasis mine:
The original game was followed by Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge the next year. A total of six games in the series would be released over the decades, bringing the tale of Monkey Island™ to a close in Return to Monkey Island in 2022. But that wasn’t the last we’d see of Guybrush Threepwood; players got to experience another tall tale of his adventures in a 2023 crossover event with the swashbucklers in Sea of Thieves.
Lucasfilm never was able to get its own story straight when it came to whether they saw Return as a series conclusion or not. Guess they’re back to their original stance. For today.
Source: Lucasfilm.com
That risen phoenix of Monkey Island fan sites, The Legend of Monkey Island, continues to walk the walk by resurrecting the long-offline web comic adaptation of The Secret of Monkey Island by artist Paco Vink. Like a number of masterpieces, it stands unfinished, but that only compounds its mystique.
Legendofmi.com’s coup was accomplished by brokering a deal with Dalixam, the webmaster of the defunct World of MI fan site (the comic’s original custodian), a brutal negotiation that sources say took an army of attorneys eighteen months to hammer out. But in the end, the unwholesome favors were exchanged, the blood debts were paid, and the copyrights transferred. Better still, the comic is being offered in higher resolution than was the case in its first-run presentation, so you really need to check it out with some urgency.
When it comes to the (apparent) arms race of hosting legacy fan content of premium caliber, The SCUMM Bar is hardly going to allow itself to fall behind. That’s why it’s now the licensed home of Marius Winter’s celebrated Monkey Island flash videos. These include the one man band's adaptations of the first two games along with his breakout “I Wonder What Happens in… Tales of Monkey Island” speculation videos, a tightly scheduled bit of inspiration that Telltale itself wisely made part of the series’ official hype machine throughout its episodic release back in 2009-2010.
As they say, healthy competition benefits the consumer. As for unhealthy competition, like the sort we’re witnessing? Well, I think the sky’s the limit.
Source: The Legend of Monkey Island
According to The Hollywood Reporter, comedic actor/writer Joe Flaherty, best known as a cast member of the brilliant Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, has died at the age of 82.
In Mojo World™, Flaherty has the distinction of starring in the polarizing live action television adaptation of Maniac Mansion, which ran for three seasons on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel (replete with an artificial laugh track) in the U.S. As we once attempted to chronicle, the show began its life as a pitch that was said to be along the lines of The Addams Family or The Munsters, with the Edisons naturally assuming the role of the kooky spoof of a gothic horror household. Though there aren’t really any details to go on, the impression is that it would have been a fairly loose but recognizable adaptation of the game.
However, the project was ultimately offered to SCTV alumnus Eugene Levy who, when he expressed disinterest in the series bible he had been handed, was told he had creative carte blanche to shape the show into whatever vision he liked. What resulted was a self-aware parody of the conventional sitcom (think It’s Garry Shandling’s Show) and something of an SCTV reunion project - with Flaherty’s casting as Dr. Fred being only the most obvious connection - rather than anything that resembled the story, flavor, or really much at all beyond the title, of the computer game. The show nevertheless attracted a cult following and squeaked past the magic 65-episode number that led it to be regularly syndicated in Canada for years after its cancellation. No proper home video or streaming release has materialized to date.
Flaherty is also known for the many appearance he made in movies and other television shows. To people of a certain age group, he might be most immediately recognizable as the Western Union guy at the end of Back to the Future Part II:
Source: The Hollywood Reporter