We reported on a Firewatch movie back in 2016, and now it seems things are gaining traction.
Snoot Entertainment and Campo Santo are joining forces this time around to produce a movie, nay, piece of cinema, centered around the 2.5-million-copies-sold game. Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman – no introductions needed – will receive production credits.
Meanwhile, the rest of Mojo staff is still doing Mojo, because we’re not sell-outs and not at all questioning certain life choices.
Way back in 2002, LucasArts.com, which was a site that once existed (ask your grandparents), underwent a revamp as the studio was celebrating its then 20th anniversary. In an effort that arguably represented the only substantial content the official site ever laid claim to, a 20th anniversary section was launched with all sorts of multimedia goodies. Aside from the immediately looted concept art gallery, most of that stuff has been lost to time, presuming you can't be motivated to board The Wayback Machine.
Among the offerings were three nice features -- one a four-part history of the studio, one a collection of employee memories, and one a series of profiles of five veteran developers: Jon Knoles, Sean Clark, Eric Johnston, Mike Stemmle, and Larry Holland. Thinking that these pieces deserved better than being lost to the ages, we went ahead and ported them to Mojo for posterity:
As you might expect, not all media survived the Wayback Machine crawls, and LOL on trying to match the LucasArts.com layouts in MojoEx to any pleasant effect. But whatever, at least they're essentially intact, and can now be enjoyed for centuries to come. Or until Zaarin misses a payment next Tuesday.
What could possibly be better than watching Jake and Marius's [and Dom's] Twitch stream yesterday? How about reading us watching it?
It's the third installment in our Excerpts from the Slack series, and it's available here in a global launch for all browser platforms.
One of the more insane and popular features this site has ever published was the tenth anniversary article by Gabez in 2007 -- a particularly fruitful year for the mischievous staffer. When it ran originally, the celebration/exposé garnered over a hundred comments. Even DJG himsef got in on the act.
Six years later, Remi re-published the article, but his effort to import Gabez's abusive HTML into the far less tolerant MojoX was predictably compromised. Today, we've gotten it into more faithful shape, and thought that would be an excuse to milk Gabez's deranged opus a third time. It's still a mess, but what can you do? Read it.
It just isn't Lent without an anniversary of the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police.
Kind of weird to keep marking it every year like a bunch of creeps, I'll admit, but Mojo never was good at letting things go, and the event is, for better or for worse, an inextricable part of the site's history. And we'll be exploring that link in some depth soon.
I've recently let the cat out of the bag that we're at work on a big fat Sam & Max 2 feature. And when I say this article has got a calorie surplus, I'm talking President Taft, here. And we can't wait for you to see it, but unfortunately we need even more time to address a few...complexities...between now and publish time. And, to be frank, some of them were pretty darned avoidable. I don't why, for example, Remi insisted that the totality of the White Album be licensed for continuous streaming on each page of the article, but there's just no getting him to budge on his artistic principles. Your patience is appreciated.
In the meantime, make the most the occasion by reheating a Glazed MacGuffin or two and getting your pre-order of those deluxe figurines in. And have a thought for a graphic adventure that was guillotined amidst that bloody period of revolution in the Spring of 2004.
So here's the deal. Mojo may or may not be gearing up to publish a massive feature to commemorate the fifteenth sixteenth fifteenth anniversary of the canceled Sam & Max: Freelance Police.
So massive, in fact, that we thought it deserved more than one header. Perhaps, thought I, with unwonted optimism, there could even be a unique piece of art crowning each one of the feature's numerous pages?* That's where you come in. We are inviting all artists, professional and amateur, to contribute artwork related to Sam & Max 2 for display in the article, which we are arrogantly approaching as the final word on the subject. We ask that it somehow be related to the cancelled LucasArts sequel specifically. What that means is for you to intepret. Go nuts.
If you are interested in making such a contribution and achieving immortality, please email your work to webmonkey@mixnmojo.com. And tell your artistically inclined friends, because statistically speaking, they are unlikely to be Mojo readers.
Get drawing!
*In the unlikely event that we get more original art than there are pages, we promise that any work we accept will be given a place of prominence somewhere in the article.
To spite Temple-shading elitists like Remi and Thunderpeel, I decided to follow in the footsteps of Shiva by consecrating the 35th anniversary of the second – and, according to the sexual endowed, best – Indiana Jones installment with a three-page valentine as feverishly out-of-control as its endlessly rewatchable recipient.
Read my truth, then respond with yours in the comments.
You might have seen this posted in the comments by the suspiciously named “custard,” but in case you haven’t, this Twitter thread by contracted In the Valley of Gods writer Duncan Fyfe is worth a read.
We do, of course, sympathize with Duncan -- we got woefully little left to write around these parts, although Jason is pushing hard for more Larry content. But hey, there’s always an opening for you at Mojo, Duncan. We pay in love and hugs.
When Valve swallowed up Campo Santo, Zaarin predicted Jake would jump on a Steam overhaul project. Turns out that was closer to correct than what we had expected.
In a statement accidentally sent to Polygon instead of us, Jake said:
To fans looking forward to In the Valley of Gods, it’s probably clear that the optimistic “2019” at the end of the announcement trailer isn’t going to be accurate. In the end, Valve Time makes fools of us all. But yes, developers from the former Campo Santo team have joined other projects at Valve, including Half-Life: Alyx. As you can imagine, our experience in the first-person adventure genre is pretty relevant. You hear a lot about how at Valve you can work on what you want. It turns out that’s true, and there’s a lot of work available. As we integrated ourselves into Valve it became clear there was a lot of valuable work to be done on Half-Life: Alyx. Some of us starting lending a hand, and have since become full-time on the project as it approaches launch. Similarly, some ex-Campos are working on Dota Underlords, some are on Steam, and so on. So to answer your question as of today, In the Valley of Gods development is on hold—but it certainly feels like a project people can and may return to. And when that happens, we’ll find an exciting way to let fans know.
And that's all we got.
Source: Not Jake
Days of arguing brought us to this: Which one is better, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Temple of Doom. I said the former, and to prove it, I sat through it, and live-Slacked it. Some would call that a huge mistake, and some might be right.
Read the result. Or don't. But do.
Some of you may have had little to no luck subscribing to the MojoCast through Apple Podcasts, after we unceremoniously were kicked out from the directory by who we can only assume was Tim Cook himself. After an arbitration period, we can now happily announce that Mojo Legal has managed to negotiate our way back in, and you can once again subscribe to our casts. And that's about it.
“Mojo does what Idle Thumbs don't.” -AlfredJ
Jason, Zaarin, and myself got together sometime last year and recorded a tearful, in-depth* good-bye to Telltale, in the third episode of People With Unrelated Accents, "Toldtale." We reminisc about everything from Texas Hold 'em to The Walking Dead and even some of the games released in the later years. Run and listen to the MP3, or subscribe for continuous fun:
Disclaimer by Jason: Though I haven't listened to this, I should acknowledge that my side of the conversation was accidentally recorded through an internal laptop mic, hence the awful fidelity. Apologies, and it will not happen again, until it does.
Hey, it only took us, what? Half a year or so to release the second episode of our People With Unrelated Accents series. This time, join Jason, Remi, and Zaarin alongside podcast O.G., elTee, as we discuss Loom, without really knowing a whole lot about it. At all.
Is it any good? Who knows?! I haven't listened to it, but Zaarin had to spend months massaging it into a listenable state, so how bad could it really be? Check out the MP3 or FLAC file, or subscribe, like a good person would do:
Over the years, a number of Mojo’s articles have been casualties of various badly handled transitions (like the one you’re enjoying now), leaving them only partially accessible via frustrating trips to The Wayback Machine. This isn’t a handful of features we’re talking about here – well over fifty percent of Mojo’s celebrated, and now twenty year strong, body of work evaporated over time, including some of the site’s best material, like the entirety of its E3 2002 coverage (including Sarah’s infamously unsporting preview of Gladius), Cooking with Spaff, and a trove of valuable interviews.
(The years also spawned some content we’re less proud of, like that pompous Sam & Max: Season 1 uber-review that concluded with The Tingler collating a didactic list of dubiously reasoned flaws for Telltale to address (Posing the breathless question: “You want a perfect 5 review Telltale?”) that piqued Chuck Jordan; that description-defying Christmas 2008 Contest Results article that Gabez punished us with; also, everything I’ve ever written – but we’re not gonna go all George Lucas on our history by gouging out the less flattering parts. We can’t learn from Vietnam if we whitewash it.)
Despite valiant efforts undertaken by just about every staffer at some point, the restoration of Mojo's body of work has been one of the modern world's most intractable problems due to tons of lost media and irreproducible formatting. The process of dragging those old HTML features into the world of BBCode is a torturous one, particularly given the creative use of mark-up Gabez seemed intent on making the staple of his articles, leaving them about as easy to translate as coffee-stained Sanskrit ciphered into reverse Wingdings. Not to speak ill of the dead.
What we did in the end as an alternative to ritual suicide was preserve at least the text of all missing articles. Where we could, we went beyond that. The individual results of anguished, nonstop compromise range from borderline pointless (like an article exploring various versions of the Gold Guy logo that doesn’t actually contain images of the Gold Guy logo), to hard-won success stories made possible by the discovery of virus-laden FTP backups.
What you’ll discover quickly is that the work is still very much ongoing, but given that every article sitewide is knackered to various degrees right now thanks to formatting bugs MojoEx introduced, we figured there was little point in holding back what we have. Their actual condition aside, we do believe every article is accounted for, and do let us know otherwise. To the extent that they can be improved, it'll just have to happen on the same time table as everything else in this dump.
So what are you waiting for? Click around the Features section and reacquaint yourselves with old classics and embarrassments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have forgotten that half this stuff was ever published. And who knows? Maybe that Mojo CD Jake supposedly has buried in his closet is more than an old legend, and we can get everything looking as it actually should. But don’t count on it.
OK, so that server update took a bit more than what we expected—what are a few weeks among friends?—but Zaarin got it back and running. More or less. If something doesn't work, well, then that's how it'll be for now.
And, hey, MojoEX has finally gone live, in all its Alpha glory. This first phase is known as "Works Kinda OK On Your Phone." Enjoy! Or don't. Mojo loves you all the same!
The fossilized LucasArts Fan Network was Mojo’s home and hearth for many a mutually productive year, but awhile back the grown-ups in charge decided we needed to break away from our notoriously unstable guardian for greener, Patreon-financed pastures in keeping with Zaarin’s newly inaugurated article of faith: If Mojo’s is going to go down, it will be by its own doing.
To this day the LFN domain can be seen to flicker off and on, and right now we’re in one of those “on” times, presumably because somebody’s credit card got auto-charged. While many of the sites LFN hosted were long dead anyway, a number of beloved destinations are temporarily available again due to the oversight, and it might be worth revisiting sites like IndyJones.net while you can.
And just so you know, LFN: It wasn’t you; it was us. :~
Source: LFN
In honor of Willow’s 30th anniversary, I sportingly elected to use it as a cudgel to beat on other movies with. Check out my new rant that decries the way movies look nowadays, using Willow as a tortuously coerced polestar in a desperate attempt to be able to market the piece as Mojo-relevant.
Thanks to Remi for the header
Look, I'm as shocked as you are. In the 15+ years I've known elTee, aka LucasTones, I have never known him to be a con. But now? That Monkey Island EGA to VGA image? Fake news! And I'm clearly not to blame, as Tones admits in his introduction…
I can only apologise. I wasn't trying to trick anyone, it was just a bit of fun. Then after a bit of joking around on Slack, one thing led to another, and suddenly the damn image ended up on the front page of Mojo. I guess that’s what happens when you promise Remi you’ll deliver an article, but instead go to the pub, and then four years elapse.
OK, so maybe I'm partly at fault. Even close to fully. However! It wasn't really a fake screenshot, was it? It was from a genuine, playable moment in The Secret of Monkey Island, with the EGA graphics ported VGA style. So how did it happen? And how can you do it yourself?
Read Tones's glorious Mojo comeback, in what I personally find to be our most fascinating article in years. (Granted, the competition isn't stiff.) Read, and then forgive us. We did it out of love.
The 10th anniversary of the lovely but underappreciated - not to mention unfinished - Insecticide is upon us, and if anybody is gonna do something about it, shouldn't it be us?
Hey, I agree with you. That's why I decided to reach out to the game's creators, Mike Levine and Larry Ahern, and the result of said harrassment is a new feature to celebrate the beleaguered game's milestone.
Really, it's just a new Q&A with Mike and Larry. But because I knocked together a little introductory page and shamed Remi into donating a header image, it is an officially sanctioned feature, damn you.