The International House of Mojo

You’ve already heard the whole three-hour album last night (how about the 20-minute “Dark Dimensions” suite?), but now it’s time to exercise your inalienable right (Footnote: Once the incredibly reasonable asking price is paid, of course.) to play it again and again in optimal quality, whether your vendor of choice be Steam or Bandcamp (Footnote: ”Tonight” – Jake).

And for God’s sake, that new Steve Purcell art serving as the album cover is what’s known in street lingo as: a really good album cover. At last, the trilogy is complete:

Update! Bandcamp version is now live.

As promised, Skunkape will be celebrating tomorrow’s debut of the Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse soundtrack album with a live “listening party” on their YouTube channel tonight. Tune in to the embedded YouTube stream below at 5pm PT / 8pm ET, and as a result you will be able tell people that you have both “been there” and “done that.” Note also your first glimpse of the brand new artwork by Steve Purcell that will serve as the album cover.

It’s been typical of Skunkape to follow up each of their Sam & Max remasters with a re-release of the season’s soundtrack album, itself a remaster and expansion of the original disc release Telltale put out in the olden days.

The Devil’s Playhouse is a little different though, because it didn’t actually get a soundtrack pressing in its day -- the casualty of a shift in merchandising policy (specifically, from a policy of not sucking) that happened abruptly enough that it interrupted Jared Emerson-Johnson’s work putting the album together.

With that in mind, Skunkape’s announcement today of the The Devil’s Playhouse OST release next Thursday should be treated, roughly speaking, as humanity's salvation.

Until he let the domain expire, Wilmunder.com was the longstanding web presence of SCUMM Lord Aric Wilmunder. Today, the URL will finally work for you again…as somebody’s World of Warcraft site. That’s like a guy coming along and exhuming your loved one’s grave just so they could fill the hole with pog slammers instead.

Around ten years ago, Aric had started using his site to make the most constructive contribution to humanity since penicillin: uploading his irreplaceable treasure trove of LucasArts design documents. Fortunately, the stuff he did get around to posting seems to be preserved by snapshots, but he had so much more to offer that was meant to be on the way, like the Forge pitch documents (Footnote: Yes, there were apparently two separate ones.), a proposed Star Trek SCUMM game, and even a Maniac Mansion II that was not Day of the Tentacle, which he held up at one point for Daniel Albu during their last interview:

Aric, come back to us. Continue your noble work. Light a candle, rather than curse our darkness. ‘Cause I really wanna know how pissed the Meteor is.

As posted on the forums, it looks like Ackley and Ahern – aka The Curse of Monkey Island leads – are cooking up a new adventure game. To quote Ackley’s Xwitter post:

Sounds like quite the thrill ride for Curse fans, though it’s probably some ways down the road. Still, imagine a world where it publishes alongside A Vampyre Story 2.

Much has been written and said about the sadly abandoned Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix from the mid-90s. In all that recorded history, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of Dave Grossman’s involvement.

Well, Daniel Albu has invited Dave for another round of Tech Talk, and it turns out that Dave was indeed briefly affiliated with – if not outright helming - Iron Phoenix during a transitional moment when an attempt was made to utilize FMV for the character animation, a gambit which you may remember Mike Levine speaking to Daniel about in a past interview. Anyway, the Iron Phoenix talk begins at 33:36, but why not enjoy the whole thing? There’s even a bit of Cavedog talk toward the end.

Source: Tech Talk

The A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale team has been using the game’s Steam page to keep the faithful abreast of their progress on the long (Footnote: Move aside, Psychonauts 2. A new record is being set.)-awaited sequel. In their latest post, they offer a glimpse into the process of bringing Bill’s 2D illustrations into a 3D world, opening the door to such fancy effects as parallax scrolling and dynamic lighting/shadows.

Be sure to read the full update, which includes more animated GIF action.

Polish adventure game enthusiast “vicek83”, maintainer of The World of Adventure Games YouTube channel, has rung in the new year by inviting various adventure game developers to talk a little about the projects they’re working on in 2025.

Bill Tiller is on hand, representing A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale, and conveniently his bit comes right at the start of the hour-long video:

Source: The World of Adventure Games

Despite what Remi would have you think, 2024 hasn’t quite come to an end, and neither has its collection of Daniel Albu interviews.

Two await your viewership. Below is a conversation with Greg Hammond, producer at LucasArts in the early 90s, followed by another with Yves Borckmans, a programmer whose principal LucasArts credit is Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

At nearly five hours, Daniel boasts the latter to be his longest interview yet, but frankly, I don’t think he’s showing enough deference to the possibility that we are all merely subjects in the ongoing Daniel interview called life.

They're up there with Sam and Max in holiday postcard game:

Source: A Vampyre Story Facebook page

It’s been a surprisingly vibrant year for Monkey Island fan games, but we can’t forget our history, so it’s nice timing that a complete playthrough of The Fate of Monkey Island has been uploaded to YouTube.

Too young to remember The Fate of Monkey Island? Built in 1999 (Footnote: Jesus Christ) by “Scurvyliver” using the then-ubiquitous Klik & Play game-making tool, it was considered the criterion example of fan games, mostly based on the following unique features:

• It got finished

One-a dem dere “sidequels,” the game takes place during the events of Monkey Island 2 and helps fill in some backstory for Curse by depicting what the monkeys had to go through when LeChuck went into the amusement park business. Yes, the game sees you playing not as Guybrush, but as a monkey named Squinky. (Spielberg would approve.)

The success of the game led Survyliver to embark on a more ambitious sequel, complete with a SCUMM-like interface, but progress was halted when LucasArts cried copyright infringement. Obviously, it wasn’t the best look for the studio, but it’s impressive that they could take some time out of not bug-testing Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles to fire off the cease-and-desist. The scandal even reached the awareness of print media:

While you can still download Fate (and for that matter, the abandoned sequel) and hope your modern operating system can fathom its charms, the following video may satisfy the requirements of those who wish to know their history without necessarily getting it stuck on their shoes.

Source: YouTube

Vince Lee, whom even those practicing Star Wars ostracism probably know as the principal behind the pioneering Rebel Assault and its FMV engine, INSANE (leveraged also by such games as Full Throttle and Outlaws) is Daniel Albu’s latest subject:

You, and definitely not us, probably need to catch up on the two Tech Talk interviews since the session with Larry the O. First up is James ‘Purple’ Hamilton, playtester extraordinaire from LucasArts’ olden days:

Then there’s Elaine Marley herself, Alexandra Boyd, whose long-form chat with Cressup only awakened her appetite for streamed interviews rather than bedded it down.

We should also point out that Daniel’s past interviews with Mike Levine and Aric Wilmunder, which uncovered a number of new anecdotes about Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix, have done much to inspire a new article about the cancelled game by the folks at Time Extension.

Staying faithful to the theme of occasions gone unmarked, how about Steve Purcell busting out some hugely justifiable re-runs in honor of Thanksgiving, and now the yuletide season?

You may recall that Limited Run Games threw in a plush hamster as part of their big honking collector’s package for Day of the Tentacle Remastered, but do you really think hamster perfection happens in the first iteration? Literally millions of hamsters had to be rejected to achieve what wound up in the hands of over-salaried fanatics, and one of those valuable hamsters-that-weren't is now up for auction on eBay.

It's part of the annual Winter Fundraiser for the Video Game History Foundation, so don’t be motivated only by the fact that owning this prototype with marginally different colors is absolutely essential to any well-appointed home – know also that it’s downright conscientious as well.

Thanks to Mojo founder Spaff for the heads up on this.

Source: eBay

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.

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.