The International House of Mojo

You may or may not recall how we introduced a virtual LeChuck’s Revenge code wheel replacement a few months back. While not particularly relevant to most—DREAMM and the Special Edition bypass the code screen fully—those with exquisite taste may still prefer to play the game on an Amiga emulator. (Or, if you’re Benny, the actual Amiga!)

Which all is to say, we now have a new Secret of Monkey Island code grid for your hacking pleasure. Mojo’s beta testing has, of course, been axed by the CEO , meaning... This should work, but who knows?! No money-back guarantee.

Your late-nineties self sure will appreciate this!

We had grand plans for Mojo's 25th anniversary last year, at least until Return to Monkey Island was announced. And, as the CEO had made necessary cuts to our features department (“preparations for emerging financial realities”), we could only focus on one. Needless to say, ReMI won out over Remi.

But: We're still in our 25th year, and there is plenty of time left to celebrate. (Months!) To kick it off, Jason put his mean face on and made all staffers pick their favorite Mojo articles from our vast back catalog.

And he didn't stop there.

For those who really want to reminisce, former staffers Spaff and Jake get meditative as they look back on their glory years. Even telarium gets in on the fun, sneaking in a small Tales of Monkey Island trivia.

Check out the whole 12-page extravaganza and relive some true relics from our past. And more to come, maybe.

In the end, it was fifteen days of downtime for the forums, which you’d think this community could weather standing on their heads after we’d let them rot for several years. But movingly enough, some of you genuinely seemed to miss what you didn’t have, as evidenced by your concerned messages and bricks thrown through the windows of zaarin’s home.

All of which is to say the boards are repaired, or anyway on a failure hiatus. So make with the Mojole crowing and Dial of Destiny trailer commentary like the last two weeks were just a bad dream. And have a thought for zaarin, who had to brave unspeakable depths of silliness to get the jalopy coughing out its signature blue smoke once again.

It was on a short hiatus, but as most have noticed, The Adventurer made its triumphant return last week. And if you’re one of those precious holdouts who haven’t subscribed to our newsletter yet, well, get over yourself and do so right now.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Substack has also launched its Twitter alternative called Notes. After having given the service a once-over, the CEO put forth a decree instructing Mojo’s social media staff to initiate a pilot program utilizing it as a potential Mastodon replacement. This is to say, if you subscribe to The Adventurer, not only will you receive our newsletter, but you’ll also get to enjoy our social presence. That’s a win-win for you and us!

(Rumors that the CEO is using Mojo’s Notes metrics to strategically place his new endeavor, Insert Disk 64, are still unsubstantiated.)

Back in the day, LucasArts included a trade-in form inside the box of The Secret of Monkey Island that allowed you to mail in your purchased version of the game (plus a nominal fee) to exchange it for another. So for example, if you had the VGA version on 3.5” diskettes but decided what your heart really desired was the EGA version on 5.25” diskettes, you could fill out the card and send it off along with a check and your diskettes. Within two business weeks, you’d find yourself with the replacement disks and, presumably, happiness ever after.

In June 2002, our own telarium wrote up a personal odyssey of redeeming that Monkey Island coupon a decade after the fact, to test the extent of the company's honor. When we undertook a mission to restore all our old features, we were never able to find the two photographs that telarium included in this particular one, which is kind of lethal given the premise of it.

In the end, the retired staffer said “eff it” and reproduced the photos, and now the classic feature rides again without compromise. While we were at it, we submitted a copy to the Library of Congress for reasons of redundancy. Weirdly, they only accepted it on the condition that we send them a $10 money order.

You probably noticed that the forums have been down for the past day. Rest assured that our crack staff of technicians, plus zaarin, are at work on it now, and that before you know it you’ll be exchanging favorite EMI moments with cyberspace’s most refined minds once again.

In the meantime, why not read Remi’s ReMI article forty more times? It was met with Ron approval, which more or less makes it holy writ.

You think Musk is a character? You should get a glimpse of what the Mojo workplace is like under the brutal thumb of our Chief Executive Officer. No, really - visuals get the message across in ways that words could never hope to.

There are those who would contend that a cultural mismatch was to some degree inevitable, what with a top-down management style being imposed upon an environment that traditionally thrived under a bottom-up approach that came to be seen as signature, but even still.

Why should we generate content when you do it for us?

Over at the forums, Gins’ is doing god’s work by kicking off the “Mojo Book Club” with the Monkey Island-adjacent On Stranger Tides. If you haven’t read it, this is a great—and community-centric—time to do so. And if you have already finished it, why not revisit it? It’s an entertaining read.

The book club kicks off this Thursday, with a new chapter studied and reviewed every week. Make sure you check out this simple outline for more details. Now you, too, can be an intellectual on Thrik’s level.

(Oh, and if you think you can cheat by watching the movie, don’t. The two are barely related.)

Look, we know this isn’t much of an issue anymore: The code-wheel-protected Monkey Island 2 isn’t available for purchase, and even if it was, DREAMM hacks straight through it. Like butter. Furthermore, there are virtual code wheels out there that emulate the tactile feeling of flimsy nineties cardboard.

Which is to say, why not try yet another tool to hack through LeChuck’s Revenge? Introducing The Monkey Island 2 Code Grid. Does it work? Who knows! It was something I developed for the Amiga version of the game a good while ago, and it has gotten me past the copy-protection screen on multiple occasions. (Using those virtual wheels is a true pain.) Maybe it’ll work for you, too? Or maybe it won’t. Either way, give it a shot if you so like.

There’s a lot of chatter both on and about social media today, and for good reasons. Today marks the major shift everyone was anticipating with various degrees of dread and excitement. The takeover has happened: Mojo has moved The Adventurer from Revue to Substack!

“Why” is a whole thing that will be laid out in the next issue—publishing in a few minutes. If you haven’t already, you probably should sign up. Why? Well, you can never have too much Mojo in your life! (And if you already signed up for our Revue newsletter, don’t worry. Your account was ported over to Substack.)

It was meant to be a simple beta release, but after Ronzo couldn’t contain his excitement, we decided to make it public: The Return to Monkey Island Trivia Card Game.

If you played ReMI-proper, the core should be familiar: One hundred cards, four options each, a trivia game for the ages. Of course, ours is a Frankenstein-ed version: Run and play, and see how you rank on the MojoMeter!

Needless to say, this game will contain some ReMI spoilers, so enter at your own risk.

Something that came up in the Mojo interview with Ron and Dave ahead of ReMI’s release was the promise of multiple endings:

Well, it turns out that Ron was off by at least a factor of two, because our team of interns count no fewer than ten endings. Did you find them all? You may wanna refer to Mojo's handy breakdown to compare notes. And it goes without saying, folks who haven’t finished the game yet should stay far away.

Since April they’ve taken questions from the professionals, mitigating the risk of death with regulation harnesses and safety nets, and now at last they’ve worked up the nerve to go BASE jumping. Or as the hobbyists and civilians call it: a Mixnmojo interview. Don’t bother releasing your Monkey Island game without one.

Join acknowledged heartthrobs elTee and Marius (in his Mojo debut!) as they chat up Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman about their much-ballyhooed return to the shores of Monkey Island -- a sequel which is so hotly anticipated, we’re actually starting to have to consider paying our server costs up through its release date (Footnote: You know, the one that’s days away, for goodness sake?). I’m rather excited myself to see how much of the interview ended up making it past the Lucasfilm brand director, so let’s all enjoy it together.

In the wake of DREAMM, our resident Luddite Jason has sharpened his pen and thrown a critical look at obtaining uncompromised versions of original LucasArts classics. Some poor saps* might think the Special Editions of the first Monkey Island duology contain the classic versions of the games—these people are sadly incorrect.

So, what’s the deal then? Are the differences that big? Jason investigates in “The Poxy Custodianship of Monkey Island”—the first of many articles planned for this topic.

* Not my words, nor really Jason’s, but he strongly implies it.

This is a rather momentous year, and was shaping up to be that way before we came down with an aggravated case of Return to Monkey Island. That announcement would have been enough to dine out on through December 31st, but you might recall that we were already celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Curse of Monkey Island*, the third and in some respects most influential Monkey Island game.

And while we can’t speak for how you were celebrating it, we were doing it the Mojo way: By kidnapping Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, trapping them in a giant bottle, foisting 600 questions on them to answer in longhand, and occasionally reminding them that air holes are for closers. The end result is right here for your discerning entertainment. If Lucasfilm doesn’t see fit to give this game a remaster, you know who not to blame.

*Not to mention Mixnmojo itself, as the fan scene and CMI are very much joined at the hip in that babymaking heyday of early internet access that was the mid-to-late-90s.

You’ll sometimes see people bellyache about how the post-Ron Monkey Island games got the personalities of certain characters wrong. Elaine was never that lovey-dovey, they’ll say. “There was never any precedent in LeChuck’s psychological profile to suggest that he would favor slaw so much, by Jove!” We’ve all heard that at some point. “Wasn’t Wally a lot hornier in his original depiction, what with the love bomb and all?” Ten times a day, I think I get that one.

Of course, it’s all the raving delusions of the hoodwinked, because the fact is that ruining characters isn’t the province of subsequent teams – the practice goes all the way back to Monkey Island 2, at the hands of the original writers. The victim: Stan. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Prepare your innocence for departure and read our new indictment, which like all formal charges are brought with the aid of EGA screenshots. Be warned: we don’t pull punches.

The appendix of the Freelance Police folio threatened that it would be a “living document” to be updated if new material ever came to light. Though successful in nabbing most of the key team members for interviews that would inform the article, I was unable at the time to make contact with Steven Chen – a regrettable omission, as he was Lead Designer on the game.

You may be familiar with Chen from his work on Indiana Jones and Infernal Machine; his Indy bona fides were later leveraged on Staff of Kings (the cancelled, good version). In the middle there, he also had a dalliance with Double Fine where, as one of the original employees, he worked on Psychonauts for the first two of its sixty years in production.

Well, now you’re about to be more familiar: Mojo bumped into Chen by chance at a monster truck rally the other day, and, after being plied with enough candy and cheese popcorn, he agreed to dredge up his memories of working on two of the most promising games LucasArts put on the docket in its post-2000 era. Both of which were of course killed, because, you know, LucasArts. Consequently, there’s a new inclusion in the Freelance Police interview compendium here, while the article itself has been quietly nourished with the designer’s insights.

Now then, who’s left?

Special thanks to retired Mojo staffer telarium for helping us get in touch with Chen. And of course, extra special thanks to Steven himself for taking time out for us.

History tells us that it’s always a mistake to expose staffers Benny and elTee to information of any kind. Naïve to their indefatigably compulsive ways, Dave Grossman had no idea what he was unleashing when he innocently mused in 2014 about an unlisted monochrome graphics mode for Monkey Island 2.

But those familiar with the personalities involved found it all too unsurprising when this ignited a near decade-long saga that even the most confirmed of basement-dwelling obsessives would go on to call, “rather sad.” Unmoved by pleas from concerned friends to walk back from the brink, the two defiantly embarked upon an unsolicited quest to resolve this most unremarkable footnote in SCUMM esoterica that guaranteed no wider interest and could only ever end in anticlimactic frustration – all the qualities that make for a classic article, in other words.

One of the bummers that goes along with most of the old hosted sites being lost to time is that a number of them were home to valuable interviews. Where possible, we like to try to import such orphaned archival content to that greatest of rescue shelters: Mixnmojo.

Today's rescues are interviews from the late, great iMuse Island. They were all conducted by the site’s able webmaster Luc Gilbertz and come from the period of 2000-2003. Improve your education and relive historical conversations with…

• Clint Bajakian, fresh off his work on Escape from Monkey Island.
• Peter McConnell, talking all the things that were relevant in 2003. Hey, remember that incident when he and Michael Land started a software company?
• Jeff Kliment, the then-manager of the LucasArts Sound Department, with a few welcome intrusions by voice director Darragh O’Farrell.
• Daniel “Wolk” Strandberg, composer of “Zak 2,” which, unique among Zak McKracken fan sequels, didn’t actually get finished. If that’s a subject that interests you, by the way, there’s no better resource than The Zak McKracken Archive.

This might be a good time to mention that such resurrections are not Easter exclusive, and that any retired webmasters who would like Mojo to keep their legacy content alive (or even to help you relaunch your site altogether) should pick up the phone and dial 1-800-ZAARIN, or for actual results reach out via webmonkey@mixnmojo.com or Twitter.

The hits keep on coming—though this one arrived a bit late at Mojo’s newsdesk: GamesBeat has published an interview with Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman, one that has some meat on its bone. For example:

Conversely, The SCUMM Bar, everybody’s favorite website on the internet, is quasi-consistently being updated, landing-page style, with the latest ReMI factoids. Rumors (from me) suggest there might even be a few nuggets coming in later today.

Relatedly, our Adventurer newsletter already downright broke the GamesBeat news—we can’t be expected to update two sites at the same time after all. (Madness!)