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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

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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

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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. Cover-up image

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:

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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 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.

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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:

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Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu

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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 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?

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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. 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

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I mean...

Still, we always support Loom love, so we salute you, Eurogamer.

Image Credit: The Point and Click Store.

Source: Eurogamer

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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…

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…before pulling Noah Falstein back into the virtual studio for some further Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis commentary…

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…which was in turn followed by a conversation with voice director extraordinaire Khris Brown…

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…and then, in keeping with the theme, by a chat with that other legendary voice director, Darragh O'Farrell…

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…which might have felt pretty darn lonely if it hadn’t been chased down with a session with Mike Levine:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

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Source: The Hollywood Reporter

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As we’ve previously complained, Limited Run’s Loom Collector’s Edition package comes with a USB stick that is conspicuously missing the game’s EGA build. This despite assurances that it would be on there. In fact, it seems they just ended up dropping the grossly insufficient GOG fileset on the thumb stick and calling it a day, as if you didn’t fork over $75 for the damned thing.

Fortunately, the company is prepared to make good, even though it’s all being handled in a weird, coquettish way. What you do is head on over to Support and submit a request, order number in hand, to receive the missing files. You will then be given access to a Dropbox link that could conservatively be called the motherlode -- a 9GB treasure trove encompassing a ton of archival builds of the game, including every international version that a global search could round up, demos, patches, the audio drama, and scans of documentation like manuals and the Book and Patterns (in as many languages as could be uncovered), all of it no doubt cobbled together by the tireless and inconsistently credited efforts of Laserschwert.

It’s quite the nifty directory structure, and also a pretty decent model of exactly what Lucasfilm ought to be offering in the first place when you buy the SCUMM games on digital platforms. But after all, the nine additional seconds they would have had to spend to prepare complete copies of their classics is time they wouldn’t have been able to spend making Guybrush look like a Dreamworks Douche™:

Anyway, I really think you guys could stand to stop being so bitter about this and just claim your files. All’s well that ends well.

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In the realm of fringe dorkdom, few catastrophes resonate more rancidly and/or amusingly than the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police on March 3rd, 2004.

Yup, it’s been twenty years now, and what better way to mark this bittersweet anniversary than by cracking open our pitiful memoir on the topic for a re-read. Or at least to gawp shamelessly at Bill Eaken’s artwork for it, conveniently available with and without text. Frankly, if you don’t already have that thing framed in your house, a question is inescapably raised: Are you even Proper Mojo™?

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Lucasfilm.com is back with more token appreciation of their rich back catalogue, an exercise just unwonted enough to remain suspicious. The latest installment of “Lucasfilm Games Rewind,” which is, one ascertains, a thing, celebrates the 1992 graphic adventure classic Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Sure, it’s a bit thin, but a relationship with an estranged dad, however frigid and uncomfortable, doesn’t have to be without positive gestures, even if it all ultimately sours back to bitterness and despair. Wait, sorry, that was not at all the point I was trying to make.

Anyway, Indiana and the Fate of Atlantis is available from Steam and GOG.com.

Source: Lucasfilm.com

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It’s been a long runway, but it seems The SCUMM Bar, founded in 1996, is finally starting to hit its stride. If it’s escaped your notice that it’s been seriously upping its Trivia game for the past month or so, well, it’s probably a good thing we were here to point it out.

Heck, even ReMI trivia as oven-fresh as this divulgence from Dave Grossman only yesterday has been accordingly filed into the site’s downright show-offy new Trivia Viewer infrastructure. Clearly, our motivational criticism has been heeded. We do what we can. As for you, now could be the time to flatten out the creases of your Phatt Island library card and patronize The Bar as a regular once more and always.

Source: The SCUMM Bar

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Being a Zak McKracken aficionado, you already know that Annie Fox is the namesake of Zak’s principal ally in The National Video Game of Germany, and you may also know that she and David Fox are the forces behind Electric Eggplant.

But if you really want to go deep into Fox’s career as an educator, game designer, and New Media maven – which is inclusive of contributions to the Putt-Putt series for Humongous Entertainment, you’re not going to want to settle for less than her new interview with Daniel Albu. That promo for the Marin Computer Center at 3:47 alone may have more historical value than the Magna Carta.

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You all remember Limited Run Games’ rather promising-looking Loom package back in January of last year. True to the average turnaround time, it began shipping just recently.

Loom has long suffered a pretty compromised position in terms of availability. Like other SCUMM games that debuted with EGA graphics but received a subsequent VGA treatment (Last Crusade and Monkey 1), the latter eventually became defacto. Loom’s VGA version is unique, however, as it was also LucasArts’ earliest foray into “Talkie” editions. This prototypical effort relied on CD audio, which resulted in excellent sample quality (far better than LucasArts games would boast for years afterward, in fact), but with brutal trade-offs: the struggle to animate lip-syncing led to the game’s signature close-up artworks being almost entirely eliminated, while space limitations prompted an economic rewrite of the entire dialog script – without the involvement of its original project leader. In essence, the original game was replaced by what might be called a novelty version; to date, the legal copy of Loom you can buy on Steam or GOG is this CD Talkie revamp, not the game that Brian Moriarty actually presided over in 1990, and which is often considered the apex of what could be wrung out of a 16-color palette.

So you can imagine the relief when it was revealed that the USB stick included as part of the Limited Run Games release would have the EGA build tossed in. Except, not so fast. Two reports from customers who have received their package seem to confirm that this supposed inclusion fell to slaughter, like so many Glassmakers under the Great Scythe.

Heartbreaking. It’s enough to temporarily put one off their arbitrary SCUMM Bar feud.

Source: The Forums

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Getting old ain’t for the cowardly. With bones that crack when we so much as try to lift a yellow flower petal, it isn’t easy for we front page custodians to keep up with the hiatus-free Tech Talk parade, which is why we always recommend keeping tabs on the forum thread.

But the tortoise wins the race in the end, or something, and we’re here to catch you up on Daniel Albu's latest interviews. First up is Ken Macklin, illustrator extraordinaire best known for the Maniac Mansion cover art and his regrettably scrapped backgrounds for the first version of The Dig. Just recently, some incredible promotional art he did during the early Lucasfilm Games years emerged, so it's very much the Month[-ish] of Macklin. Here’s the interview:

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Next up is Charlie Ramos, who served as animator on Outlaws (Lead Animator, in fact), Full Throttle and The Dig. And that's another theme: The Dig war stories. Honor your veterans:

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Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu

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