The International House of Mojo

Just because we slow down doesn’t mean the rest of the world does the same.

First, as you’re well aware, we’re quickly approaching ReMI’s first anniversary. And during the last few weeks, Terrible Toybox has gotten quite busy on the sosh. Today, for example, over on their Facebook page, Rex has tossed out a piece of concept art alongside a short anecdote. (It’s also over on Xitter, so pick your poison.) Keep an eye out for more.

Speaking of the sosh: We’re on Bluesky! Expect the same quality content you find on Mastodon. Our handle is mixnmojo.bsky.social—rolls right off the tongue.

Finally, elTee has started doing god’s/the CEO ’s work, gathering information for all of LEC’s international releases. It’s... a project. Learn more here.

And that’s all!

If you missed out on the last few episodes of Conversations with Curtis (as we have), it’s time to catch up. And what better place to start than with this Kyle Balda interview? Balda is mostly famous for being the intern behind the DOTT credit screen (our CEO’s favorite game ) and also directed small indie features like Minions.

What else have you potentially missed? Hal Barwood; Mark Ferrari; Ronzo himself. Maybe even more! So go check it all out.

If you frequent our forums—and why wouldn’t you?!—you will have seen this thread from bot-meister JP LeBreton. Entitled “a comprehensive collection of all LucasArts background art (1987-2000),” his current project is... Well, let the man describe it himself:

Read the whole thread for more, or, if you’re more of the passive type, go check out the bot that posts the backgrounds to Mastodon: LucasArts Places. While we can’t confirm elTee broke down in tears after seeing this EGA scene, odds seem good that it happened.

Looking for more passive entertainment? We post a daily screenshot both to Mastodon and M. And even ol' SCUMM Bar has gotten in on the fun: Follow @scummbar for a daily Monkey Island scene. (“More to come,” we have been told.)

Over to Marius:

Some of you may remember Jake and Marius’ stream of the two original Monkey Islands—we documented the first one right here Now, they’re doing it again, albeit with SeMI.

That’s tomorrow (Saturday), 11am PT/8pm CEST. Be there—the cool kids are sure to be.

Mojo’s German bureau chief, Marius, has just finished an impromptu Twitch playthrough of the first part of The Secret of Monkey Island. Dubbed A walk through monochrome Mêlée Island on the Atari ST you can stream it here:

Of note is his platform of choice: An OG Atari ST with monochrome graphics and three channels of bleeps. Presumably, it’s not something many have witnessed, so now is your chance.

Update! Marius has YouTube-d up a highlight reel and gave us a controversial statement: The Secret of Monkey Island is really good.

Last year we brought some attention to the work of one @ScrungusCrungus, who has apparently devoted their time on Earth to reverse-engineering the Psychonauts source code, and more broadly to the discovery and collation of every fragment of esoterica related to the classic game. Certainly, Mixnmojo should be the very last to judge such an obsession.

The ongoing quest has included the search-and-seizure of rare pre-release media, which means the disreputable archives of certain fan sites and communities active in Double Fine’s earliest days are being plumbed, to the justifiable horror of us all. Mixnmojo, the Idle Thumb forums, and Thrik’s dedicated yet sadly unmaintained (Footnote: Not to get political, but I find this delinquency fairly reprehensible in light of the fact that CEOs are currently posting record profits.) fan site Razputin.net (which today redirects you to an Archive.org snapshot) are but a few of the resources that have fallen into the crosshairs of this Robert Caro-esque level of research:

ScrungusCrungus even politely noticed that The Grim Fandango Network (another milestone from Thrik’s executive training days) underwent a rather yawn-inducing theme change, leading to a bonding moment that international relations could stand to benefit from looking to as inspiration.

You can find some of ScrungusCrungus’ most notable findings collected on this blog dedicated to the purpose, but you’ll want to work up some loyalty toward the Twitter account if you want the minute-by-minute updates. And let’s not kid each other: you do.

The fearless correspondents at Pixel Refresh decided the time had come at last to puncture the veil of the sordid, rock’n roll world of LucasArts poster restorations by chatting it up with Jan Hofmeister (the unlikely handle of your friend Laserschwert), who requires no introduction here. Put aside an hour you don’t have and listen to what goes into his masterpieces of masterpiece-conservation:

Next up is the ongoing “Conversation with Curtis” series hosted by Daniel Albu, who previously brought you interviews with such luminaries as Brad Taylor and Aaron Giles. This time his subject is ScummVM’s project leader Eugene Sandulenko (again, you better know him by the name on his birth certificate: sev), and they dive deep into the twenty-year history and ever-expanding future of a project that some of us would still call miraculous. You can even hear the official ScummVM perspective on DREAMM if you scrub over to 1:16:28.

Incidentally, Remi decided to climb off the tanning bed long enough to do something useful, and the forum now has a catch-all thread for these increasingly frequent hour-plus long interviews.

Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders have been irreversibly tied together ever since that can of chainsaw gasoline was found on Mars, but a new fan game is taking it to a whole other level. Below is the spiel for Zak the Maniac - An Interactive Music Video:

You can download the game and the cover tune that suggested it right here.

Source: Error 47

If you don’t keep at least semi-regular track of the LucasArts posters thread, you’re missing out. Just over the last few months, Laserschwert has gifted to the world dazzling new versions of Peter Chan’s Day of the Tentacle Star Wars parody, Zak McKracken’s cover art, and, in a direct valentine to mine own heart, some marriage-threateningly seductive Maniac Mansion alternatives. Freshly endowed with some superior Outlaws source material, he’s promising to bring that one to similar heights in the future as well.

It’s all there for the taking in the internet’s finest forum thread. Sleep on it at your own peril.

Meteor Mess 3D, the 3D fan remake of Maniac Mansion that began development in 2008, was released just three weeks ago. In other words, it still needed less gestation time than an Indiana Jones sequel.

The phrase “labor of love” gets thrown around a lot, but I think a number of recipients of it would be well within their rights to feel embarrassment in the face of this victory, which Gabez’s coverage can surely only claim some responsibility for. Investing this long toward bringing a fan game to its finish isn’t merely dedication – it’s downright hardheaded. So celebrate the occasion by grabbing your very own download of the game, and be inspired by Mojo’s solidarity in updating its gallery – yes, we had one! – with more representative screenshots.

Amberfish Arts: There’s hope for you yet.

Source: Meteor Mess 3D

You are already familiar with sometimes-Mojo-contributor Nicolas Deneschau’s Les mysteres de Monkey Island: à l’abordage des pirates!, a French tome dedicated to Monkey Island. But what if you don’t speak French? Not to worry: Now you, too, can read the book thanks to an upcoming English translation on Kickstarter.

Named The Mysteries of Monkey Island the book has already racked up $7,955 in pledges, and that’s within an hour. In other words, it will be funded. $35-ish will get you the hardback, while $100-ish will toss in a Steve Purcell poster to boot. $12-ish for the ebook version—there are other, less obtainable tiers, too.

In the eternal words of Robin Thicke: you know you want it, so go Kickstart now.

Screw the ReMI trailer, Marius once again delivers the goods. An epic retelling of Monkey Island 2 in the style of his old “I Wonder What Will Happen…” flash films, this is… I mean, just watch the thing! (I don’t actually know what it is, as, as I said, it’s live… literally right now!)

When community mainstay and poster restoration maven Laserschwert isn't scouring the globe for ever-better sources to feed his scanner, he's trying to sell you on the potential of AI upscaling technology.

You might have caught his case for training such tools on the barely-in-need-of-remastering CMI, a taste of the future which was enough to challenge an orthodoxy or two. Further beliefs may be shaken in the wake of his latest proof of concept, which tackles Sam & Max Hit the Road:

More examples can be found in the forum thread (at the above link) he made elaborating on this experiment.

While I personally am frightened, triggered and dehumanized by the very concept of imitation brush strokes and machine-learned artwork (not to mention the horseless carriages that the kids are into these days), I have to admit I'd have preferred these results over what the Day of the Tentacle remaster achieved (and which in turn I found way more desirable than the no doubt well-meaning efforts of the Monkey Island special editions), and it's not a bad punt on an approach to such a project if the reason Disney is holding back is on the basis that it shouldn't exceed the cost of a 12oz. soda.

So betray your values, knuckle under in the presence of The Algorithm and behold what dispassionate 1s and 0s can accomplish when put to work on the true issues of the day.

Source: The Forums

Marius Winter - Flash animation extraordinaire, celebrated intern of Telltale and Double Fine, co-conspirator of livestreams with Jake, reaction video artisan, reluctant imbiber of root beer, and unanimously elected* mascot for all of Monkey Island fandom - was not about to allow basic human needs like eating and sleeping apply any kinda deacceleration on his ever-escalating contributions to your happiness.

In fact, after coming down with an aggravated case of being awesome, he's putting the final touches on his greatest achievement yet: a Flash film version of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Stare directly into the burning bush by checking out this sneak peek ahead of Monday's premiere:

*Not that it was gonna stop Germany were it otherwise.

Source: MajusArts

The Unofficial Sam & Max Website, once the go-to hub for Sam & Max news (a role assumed by samandmax.co.uk/ these days) got out of the day-to-day business somewhere around 2008, and you probably didn’t fail to notice its reduction to a static splash screen thereafter. This abandonment was perhaps in part because the staff was too busy making Sam & Max games to cover them, but let’s not trip over ourselves making excuses for those deadbeats.

Well as luck would have it, all these years later, new life has been breathed into the domain. The site has been relaunched and re-envisioned as Sam & Max Headquarters. The idea doesn’t seem so much to be producing content as serving as a flashy jumping-off point for all the online Sam & Max destinations deemed worthwhile through the parochial lens of a Web 2.0 world, though I also got a funny kinda feelin’ that there’s more to come.

Anyway, what’s going on there already is pretty neat-o, so show your support for mouseover hi-jinks and giddy up.

Source: Sam & Max Headquarters

It's testing time again for ScummVM!

This time there's a boatload of new games supported: Alice: An Interactive Museum, The Crimson Crown: Further Adventures in Transylvania, Crusader: No Remorse, Grim Fandango, L-ZONE, Little Big Adventure, The Longest Journey, Myst III: Exile, Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy, Oo-Topos, Private Eye, Red Comrades Save the Galaxy, Red Comrades 2: For the Great Justice, Spaceship Warlock, Tri-3D-Trial, and Transylvania.

It also includes dozens of text adventure games created with Glulxe and hundreds of games created with Adventure Game Studio.

So get out your Grim Fandango discs, download Maniac Mansion Deluxe, or try any of the other hundreds of games that need testing during this testing period and report any issues you find on ScummVM's issue tracker.

You begged, you bartered, and as Mojo loves you, Mojo has provided the Mojo Forums. That’s right, party like it’s 2001 with good, old-fashioned posting boards.

So what do we got? Well, these are a continuation of the old LucasForums, so if you had an account there, you’re good to go here. Otherwise click the "Sign Up" button (it’s under the hamburger menu if you’re using your phone) to get rocking. All the old forums can be viewed in read-only mode; for new stuff we have a brand new board.

So why are you reading this when you could be posting your heart out? Be part of the Mojo Community – we are sure it will be very, very active!

And remember, these kind of updates would not be possible without the help of you, our dear Patreon contributors. If you still haven't had the chance to love Mojo back, why not do so now, with a healthy contribution to the Mojo Fund!

Do you remember Legend of Monkey Island? Of course you do, and as you probably know, the site has been offline for nearly a decade. Until now. The web site, possibly best known for its library of Monkey Island animated GIFs, is back with a new design, one that even is responsive. A first among the old Monkey Island fan-sites, and what I can personally only consider a slap in my face.

So, that means two of the classic fan-sites are alive -- The SCUMM Bar too, of course. Get World of Monkey Island going again, and we really can party 2002-style.

Source: Jake

For those who don't Twitter:

That's two hours from now, so find a comfy chair.

Source: Twitter