The International House of Mojo

One of the primary complaints (Footnote: Second to using ReMI as an abbreviation for Return to Monkey Island.) we routinely hear around here is that you want to log in and comment on news, but have forgotten your credentials. A problem that has plagued humanity since creation.

Well, fear not, Mojo loves you and Mojo brings solutions, plural.

First, we’ve joined 2015 and added magic-link logins. Type in your email address, receive a link, tap it, and, boom, you’re good to go.

Still the old-fashioned type who prefers usernames and passwords, while routinely forgetting their password? Reset it, just like you did in (conservatively) 2002.

This does, of course, require a Mojo account, so sign up if you haven’t already.

(Also note that this is all beta (at best), so breakage is not only expected, it’s all but set in stone.)

The Secret of Monkey Island turns thirty-five (35) this year, which means some… many, actually… of us should take a long look in the mirror and contemplate how we’ve spent the last three-and-a-half decades.

But screw that – instead, we decided to post a short article with some of the weird secrets and easter eggs found in the first Monkey Island game.

It has been interesting learning over the past few years that the small trivia we thought was common knowledge apparently isn’t. Which, again, is why we should take a minute or two and ask ourselves if we’ve lived our best lives.

That’s for another day, though! Now go read!

Some say 2024 ends at 23:59, December 31st, and to them, we say, pfffffft. The year does, of course, end when we publish our end-of-year article, which is today, 14:58, the 26th.

Who was awarded Mojo’s coveted “Game of the Year?” Who won the Double Fine Extravaganza? How on earth did Jason not win the snarkiest Mojoer? Only one way to find out...

Read!

So, this isn’t actually new content, but you may recall that as part of our “Secret History” series (Footnote: That would be our string of big retrospectives on each of the fourteen LucasArts adventure games, originally published on a sort of monthly basis from 2008-2010.), we often had developer interviews included as bonus material, located on one of the later pages.

Thereby integrated into those features rather than being standalone, they couldn’t be found under our Interviews category, leaving them repressed and poorly searchable. It’s been a longstanding black eye on the organizational integrity of our archive and raised hell for the literally millions of research students who rightly use Mojo as a primary source.

Well, thanks to our proprietary MojoDB technology that Remi’s been refining at a frightening pace, this stubborn shortcoming is now addressed, and all those interviews can be reached under, well, Interviews, rather than having to be dug for. Personally, I’m partial to The Passion of Bill Eaken (halfway down the page), in which the artist delighted us with his limited but not uneventful time [attempting to work] on The Curse of Monkey Island, but why not browse the newly comprehensive Interviews section to rediscover such gems yourself?

The year is coming to a close, and so we’re opening the polls for you to vote for the good, the bad, and the ugly of 2024. Best game. Snarkiest updater. The usual.

To sweeten the pot, we are putting up three Double Fine LRG games and the coveted triangle box for one of you to win:

I mean, what?! Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle, all boxed up? The triangle?! And participating is easy:

First, sign up for a forum account unless you already have one.

Then, vote in one or more of the following polls. Each voted-for poll gives you another entry in the contest:

Polls are now closed.

We treat you so fine.

Restrictions apply, of course – no employee of The Mojo Corporation will be eligible for the prize (but vote anyway!) and yada yada yada. You know how all of that goes.

Good luck!

So, now that you know what they think, it’s time to read the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review that counts: Ours.

Spoilers are kept to a minimum, and only some small details from the first part of what is a large game are revealed.

Read!

You might have noticed that for the last fourteen years or so (but who’s counting?), turning more than one page back on front page news led to Mojo generously pulling the totality of the news archive, leading to browser crashes and rumoredly the occasional homicide. It’s just the kind of unadvertised fun you don’t get from regular web sites, aimed at the flavorless mainstream.

Well, Remi decided that the fun’s over, so he just fixed it, which I’m guessing took all of eight seconds. It’s almost sad to reflect that Mojo is otherwise rock solid and literally devoid of issues to fix. What do we even have to chase now?

Rightly fearful of a world where Escape from Monkey Island magazine coverage gets lost to the Mysts o'Tyme, our own Scummbuddy blew the dust bunnies off the scanner and preserved the feature story that graced the Sept. 2000 issue of Computer Games Magazine.

You may already be familiar with the cover of this issue, as it’s been universally acknowledged since the game came out to be objectively superior to the actual box art the geniuses in Marketing saw fit to approve in the end, but the preview itself by Cindy Yans is some proper journalism, and the pre-release quotes from Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark will take you back to those innocent, anticipatory days when we thought we had another classic coming our way. (Footnote: And we were right. Don’t want to hear it.)

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Source: Mojo Forums

No, not that Adventurer – this Adventurer. You know the one. The newsletter we unleashed with a roar and then kind of forgot about because of a shiny object that flew by. (The has taken an unhealthy interest in Duke Nukem Forever, for example.) Anyway – it’s back and you should subscribe…

… because we’re totally gonna keep it going this time, maybe. Hell, even if we did drop the ball, the worst thing that would happen is that you’d receive fewer emails. Which is kind of a bonus.

So, don’t be a butt – subscribe!

Double Fine published their appropriately loving tribute to their sophomore release last week, so why shouldn’t Mojo get in on the action on this most prestigious anniversary?

For us, the fun was revisiting what it was like to follow the game’s development all those years back, and it was quite the odyssey. In fact, we think it all played out a bit spicier than you may have mellowed it down to in your headcanon, though we should probably speak for ourselves given our well-established signs of mental deterioration. Anyway, join us as we travel back to the Age of Metal and relive the ecstasy and pain of Brütal Legend’s storied forging. Embrace your inner Doviculus, and you may recognize there is no distinction.

I mean, not in the classic sense, but rather that we’ve added another section to MojoDB Preview Edition: Cover Art. Frankly, LucasArts Posters is where you want to go for high-quality scans (Footnote: thx jan!), but then, do you really want to forego browsing classic artworks like this?

That’s the kind of bespoke content you can only find at MojoDB, your friend in LucasArts+ covers.

Got your plans set for the weekend? Cancel them, as your next few days will be spent traversing Mojo’s recently resurfaced podcast archive. Forty-two nuggets of gold from 2008 through 2019.

If you follow MojoCast in your favorite podcast software, you already have the updated feed, including a dozen episodes that were, until now, lost to time. And you can, of course, find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Podcast Index, through RSS, and so on. It’s even on YouTube if that’s your jam.

As for new podcasts? You got 20-odd hours to go through as it is, stop bothering me until you’ve listened to them all. >:

LucasArts soundtracks: You love them, you listen to them, and Mojo has hosted an unseemly amount of them over the years. Some, like the straight rip of The Secret of Monkey Island CD-ROM, are classics in their own right, but the real gems are the ones painstakingly mixed and/or recorded by sites like Highland Productions and Soundtrack Island (RIP (for now?)). And so, we’re trying to collect both types of soundtracks and make them accessible through our new YouTube list: The LucasArts+ Soundtrack Collection.

We’ve only put up fourteen videos so far, but the number should slowly but surely rise (unless another shiny object is dangled in front of us). And we hope some small details will make these soundtracks stand out just a little bit. For example, we’re trying to gather proper credits for the compositions—who wrote what for Escape from Monkey Island? We got a scoop of the scoop. On the flip side, who created those lovely MT-32 recordings of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and Sam & Max Hit the Road? Mojo’s very own server admin: Zaarin! (Seriously, those Woodtick synth pads are true chef’s kisses.) To top it off, we’ve tried to up the nostalgia factor for at least some of the albums by adding screenshots and concept art for the various tracks.

It’s all a work in progress. But it’s a start.

Do you have any information pertinent to any of the albums? Credits? Anything? Sound off. We’re agile around these parts.

Now go browse the collection.

“The soundtrack uploads on Youtube are quality work. I really like the diverse mixes, and every thumbnail design” —Marius, giving his stamp of approval.

We’re just a tick behind schedule on this—what’s a year or four amongst friends?—but MojoDB is starting to come together. Sort of. At least enough so we can give you, our privileged core readership, an exclusive preview of the MojoDB Trivia section. Enjoy a mix of ancient content from our current not-at-all-outdated trivia section as well as gems from the excellent SCUMM Bar. Hey, it’s a bit more readable than what we currently have, at least. And you can rediscover gems like this—Raz appearing in Alice: Madness Returns.

This is all to whet your appetite and expect practically everything to change as we move along. But, for now, enjoy our new Trivia section—just another bespoke service from your friends at Mojo.

It’s quiet days, so we might as well toss an old-school trivia nugget your way. This time, a perennial elTee favorite.

Mark Ferrari, what a pro.

Look, I’m not gonna lie. This post is probably about trying out a beta feature. Probably? Entirely. But why not do so with a classic piece of trivia to do so? Double the fun if you so like.

Sure, most of Mojo’s esteemed readership recognize that little chestnut, but you’d be surprised that many aren’t familiar with the alternate ending.

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™?

For years* your Max plushie had to alone put up with your unregulated private detective skills and musings.

Finally the day has come for these crime-fighting and life partners to adorn your computer shelf together.

Now open for preorders on Uncute is the Sam plushie, for a seemingly high $50 pricetag. But you can't leave Max alone can you? That's ill-advised.

*if you could afford the import/shipping costs...

Source: Uncute Plushies

It's been two years since our inquiry into the public access TV show Fiction by Louie was published and we took home all those Pulitzers. Like any artistic masterpiece, it included a single imperfection to avoid offending the divine. Alerted by Remi’s cynical-minded promotion of the article on Bluesky this week, Dave Grossman caught the mistake and brought it to our attention.

One of the tidbits that appears in the article is that a MIDI track used in the show was composed by the familiar name of Patrick Mundy. Thinking that I could trust my memory of The Secret of Monkey Island opening credits, I styled him as “Patrick Mundy of Earwax Productions fame,” but Dave points out to us that the composer was in fact separate from the Earwax guys. A quick revisit of the game's opener shows that I was indeed blending credits in my head:

Dave further notes that Mundy was the composer of the music heard when navigating Guybrush around the top-down views of Mêlée Island and Monkey Island. I didn’t know that before, and as we’ve established I know everything, so it seems this all worked out profitably in the end. Though it will be your instinct, I assure you there is no need to thank me.

Remember in 2003, when all the Domino bricks started falling, and we learned that, yes, a Monkey Island movie was in production at some point? In 2013, we published a short article about it on The SCUMM Bar, and it has now resurfaced here on Mojo.

In 2021, Polygon published its own story with a lot more official-ish information, of course, but it never really caught the zeitgeist angle quite as vividly. So, go read and relive the movie that thank god never was.