I mean...
Still, we always support Loom love, so we salute you, Eurogamer.
Image Credit: The Point and Click Store.Source: Eurogamer
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Mojo continues its laudably recessive approach to journalism by letting those desperate, needier outlets get first dibs since they’re in such a damned hurry. But now that all the carrying on has blown over, we’re ready to calmy and safely catch up on the latest bits and bobs surrounding Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, while signaling all turns and obeying the speed limit within a generous margin of error.
Since the Xbox showcase, a few new gameplay clips have emerged. We really have to give the credit on this one to reader Threepwood4life, whose unthinkable willingness to look at social media platforms made the discoveries possible:
Lost in the shuffle of the showcase was this podcast (also fully transcribed) by Xbox Wire, which featured as guests the Game Director and Production Director of Great Circle, Jerk Gustafsson and John Jennings, who both do a pretty credible job at Telling People What We Imagine They Want To Hear game:
XBOX WIRE: Obviously, this is an IP that has been around for decades at this point, so you obviously want to make sure you get it right. Can you talk a little bit about the prep and research that went into making sure that you were bringing an authentic experience?
JERK GUSTAFSSON: In this case, of course, we had a lot of materials to go through, and we spent countless of hours just rewatching the films, especially the two movies, I think, that are closest to the game, which is Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. And looking at the movies both from a broad stroke perspective to get into the mood and why, but also to some extent, scrutinizing them for details and the small hooks that are key to the identity of everything that is Indiana Jones.
And in addition, then, we have one of the best resources through our partnership with Lucasfilm games, and working together with them on this project has been invaluable, just this cave of knowledge about the character, which has been fantastic. And Lucasfilm has been excited about the project from day one and have been incredibly supportive and helpful in bringing the story and the character in Indiana Jones to life through not just our story, but also through gameplay.
JOHN JENNINGS: Yeah. It's been great having access to writers, directors from Lucasfilm, and people who've worked with the Indiana Jones property for decades, having their input. I mean, some of these people know everything that has ever been written about Indy, and having them to bounce ideas off and get some of their own input has been hugely, hugely invaluable. I mean, our writers are huge Indy fans as well and just been scouring all of the countless wikis that are out there written about everything, all of the comics, additional books, and so forth, just to build up their knowledge.
Other things as well. I mean, we managed to get access into some of the Lucasfilm archives as well, which has been-- for Indy fans, has been an absolute dream come true to get access to some of these things that perhaps not so many people have seen, but our artists have been wanting to make sure everything is authentic as possible. We bought replicas of Indy's famous fedora made by the original hat makers who made the original prop from the first film, proper recreations of his iconic jacket, and so forth, just to make sure everything is absolutely spot on.
Lastly, we took the opportunity to update our gallery with the latest screenshots that came out of all the recent hubbub.
The tortoise and the hare, my friends. The tortoise and the hare.
It’s been politely noticed by our dear readers that we’ve arguably fallen a bit delinquent in highlighting Daniel Albu’s latest interviews, always trackable in that dedicated forum thread, despite their objective status as The Most Mojo Things Ever. I guess it never occurred to our constituents that we might still be watching them.
But the point is made, and it’s high time we catch up on the LucasArts developer interviews that have come along after Annie Fox got her due February. Since then, Daniel invited Aaron Giles over for a third session, to discuss the features introduced in DREAMM 3.0…
…before pulling Noah Falstein back into the virtual studio for some further Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis commentary…
…which was in turn followed by a conversation with voice director extraordinaire Khris Brown…
…and then, in keeping with the theme, by a chat with that other legendary voice director, Darragh O'Farrell…
…which might have felt pretty darn lonely if it hadn’t been chased down with a session with Mike Levine:
This latest one has been generating quite a bit of buzz, as Levine used the opportunity to debut rare footage: some fairly unbelievable tests for Indiana Jones FMV sequences using live action, filmed at ILM. Though things didn’t pan out for Indy, the techniques would be leveraged to published success in Rebel Assault 2. It’s unclear if this bit of R&D was part of the cancelled Iron Phoenix adventure game (which is said to have undergone experiments along those lines when a contractor failed to deliver on more traditional animation) or some other project altogether, but regardless of the exact origin you get a decent George Lucas anecdote, so why complain?
Mojo will soon return to cover the upcoming release of Afterlife.
Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu
This weekend was The Xbox Showcase, and it was a natural venue for showing off more of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. That’s probably why they up and did it:
The release date remains merely “2024”, so the odds seem good that this will be dropped just before the ball in Times Square does.
Source: Bethesda Softworks
You don’t pass the twenty-five year milestone in the fan site business without learning a few tricks of the trade. One of them is to maintain a “rainy-day fund” of news items that have an evergreen quality, unburdened by topicality. And on a fine, quiet Sunday like today, why not fish one out of the sack?
Back in 1991, a gamer wrote in to Nintendo Power magazine to report an exploit involving Nurse Edna in the NES version of Maniac Mansion, getting his finding published in the May issue. Today, and by today I mean five years ago, “Agent #912” took to Reddit to claim credit for his five minutes of fame, and he brought along the receipts:
Now then: what have you done?
Source: Reddit
A bunch of Gary Winnick’s concept art from his Lucasfilm Games days is up for sale over at Heritage Auctions. I don’t know how this came to pass or how that site works, but you’re still going to want to browse the lot. Probably the most intriguing item is this early set of character designs for The Secret of Monkey Island. Who knew Gary did concept art for that game?
I couldn’t even tell you what characters those are supposed to represent. The leftmost one is presumably an early take on Guybrush, and the guy on the right is a credible match for that Governor Phatt-esque character who was found in the resource files but didn’t make it into the final game:
Anyway, you’ll want to check all of it out, and to pass judgment on the mislabeling of Maniac Mansion pieces as belonging to Day of the Tentacle. Such humiliations are the sort any business runs the risk of when they’re too cheap to spring for The Mojo Audit.
Source: Heritage Auctions
Return to Monkey Island—more commonly known as ReMI on various Discords—is set to hit Apple’s subscription service this June. Or, more specifically, Return to Monkey Island+ will. My guess is that the + indicates the game will be playable on both Mac and i[Pad]OS.
Everybody needs more ReMI in their lives, so check it out on June 6th.
Update: The 
has bestowed upon his wisdom and informed us that the + indicates that downloadable content was included. That could mean that a) the Mac version includes the horse armor or b) as the iOS version has a sandboxed demo, the full game could be the +.
Source: The Verge
Matthew Shell, a long-time LucasArts and then Disney employee credited on over 60 video games, has suddenly passed away.
Described as an “incredible person with a huge heart,” Shell was primarily an ambassador for Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, most recently 2023’s Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.
Ray Almeda, Global PR Lead for the EA SPORTS portfolio, wrote : “We will miss his jokes, love for Sticky Toffee Pudding, BBQ expertise, celebrating Warriors championships the night of, and of course his profound fandom for his SF Giants. Rest in Paradise my friend and May the Force be with you, always.”
Our condolences go out to his loved ones.
We try to keep track of the fantastic work Jimmy Maher does over at The Digital Antiquarian, especially when his comprehensive inquiry into the totality of video game history (because that’s more or less what his efforts amount to) leads him to LucasArts’ sizable contributions to that story.
The Herodotus of interactive amusement, who’s been at this since 2011, has arrived at the mid-to-late-90s in his ongoing chronicle, and in LucasArts terms that has brought us two terrific articles just this month: one examining Jedi Knight and another published only yesterday in evaluation of The Curse of Monkey Island. As usual it’s good stuff and inspires good engagement from commenters who might already be familiar to you.
If you’re unfamiliar with the site itself, you may well want to check out all the LucasArts-related posts over the years, the links for which we collect here for your convenience. Or you can just, you know, stop stagnating at the junior varsity level and read it all from the beginning.
Source: The Digital Antiquarian
On April 1st, Lucasfilm.com ran a little commemoration of their Monkey Island series. And in keeping with the spirit of April Fools, they used the Special Edition cover art as the header.
We try to be pretty “It’s the thought that counts” when it comes to these valentines that the copyright holder has been willing to throw toward its legacy titles, so let’s remind ourselves that it wasn’t so long ago that even these passing mentions were seemingly verboten as a matter of company policy. And while the write-up may be on the fluffy side, I do see something noteworthy in this paragraph, emphasis mine:
The original game was followed by Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge the next year. A total of six games in the series would be released over the decades, bringing the tale of Monkey Island™ to a close in Return to Monkey Island in 2022. But that wasn’t the last we’d see of Guybrush Threepwood; players got to experience another tall tale of his adventures in a 2023 crossover event with the swashbucklers in Sea of Thieves.
Lucasfilm never was able to get its own story straight when it came to whether they saw Return as a series conclusion or not. Guess they’re back to their original stance. For today.
Source: Lucasfilm.com
That risen phoenix of Monkey Island fan sites, The Legend of Monkey Island, continues to walk the walk by resurrecting the long-offline web comic adaptation of The Secret of Monkey Island by artist Paco Vink. Like a number of masterpieces, it stands unfinished, but that only compounds its mystique.
Legendofmi.com’s coup was accomplished by brokering a deal with Dalixam, the webmaster of the defunct World of MI fan site (the comic’s original custodian), a brutal negotiation that sources say took an army of attorneys eighteen months to hammer out. But in the end, the unwholesome favors were exchanged, the blood debts were paid, and the copyrights transferred. Better still, the comic is being offered in higher resolution than was the case in its first-run presentation, so you really need to check it out with some urgency.
When it comes to the (apparent) arms race of hosting legacy fan content of premium caliber, The SCUMM Bar is hardly going to allow itself to fall behind. That’s why it’s now the licensed home of Marius Winter’s celebrated Monkey Island flash videos. These include the one man band's adaptations of the first two games along with his breakout “I Wonder What Happens in… Tales of Monkey Island” speculation videos, a tightly scheduled bit of inspiration that Telltale itself wisely made part of the series’ official hype machine throughout its episodic release back in 2009-2010.
As they say, healthy competition benefits the consumer. As for unhealthy competition, like the sort we’re witnessing? Well, I think the sky’s the limit.
Source: The Legend of Monkey Island
According to The Hollywood Reporter, comedic actor/writer Joe Flaherty, best known as a cast member of the brilliant Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, has died at the age of 82.
In Mojo World™, Flaherty has the distinction of starring in the polarizing live action television adaptation of Maniac Mansion, which ran for three seasons on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel (replete with an artificial laugh track) in the U.S. As we once attempted to chronicle, the show began its life as a pitch that was said to be along the lines of The Addams Family or The Munsters, with the Edisons naturally assuming the role of the kooky spoof of a gothic horror household. Though there aren’t really any details to go on, the impression is that it would have been a fairly loose but recognizable adaptation of the game.
However, the project was ultimately offered to SCTV alumnus Eugene Levy who, when he expressed disinterest in the series bible he had been handed, was told he had creative carte blanche to shape the show into whatever vision he liked. What resulted was a self-aware parody of the conventional sitcom (think It’s Garry Shandling’s Show) and something of an SCTV reunion project - with Flaherty’s casting as Dr. Fred being only the most obvious connection - rather than anything that resembled the story, flavor, or really much at all beyond the title, of the computer game. The show nevertheless attracted a cult following and squeaked past the magic 65-episode number that led it to be regularly syndicated in Canada for years after its cancellation. No proper home video or streaming release has materialized to date.
Flaherty is also known for the many appearance he made in movies and other television shows. To people of a certain age group, he might be most immediately recognizable as the Western Union guy at the end of Back to the Future Part II:
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
As we’ve previously complained, Limited Run’s Loom Collector’s Edition package comes with a USB stick that is conspicuously missing the game’s EGA build. This despite assurances that it would be on there. In fact, it seems they just ended up dropping the grossly insufficient GOG fileset on the thumb stick and calling it a day, as if you didn’t fork over $75 for the damned thing.
Fortunately, the company is prepared to make good, even though it’s all being handled in a weird, coquettish way. What you do is head on over to Support and submit a request, order number in hand, to receive the missing files. You will then be given access to a Dropbox link that could conservatively be called the motherlode -- a 9GB treasure trove encompassing a ton of archival builds of the game, including every international version that a global search could round up, demos, patches, the audio drama, and scans of documentation like manuals and the Book and Patterns (in as many languages as could be uncovered), all of it no doubt cobbled together by the tireless and inconsistently credited efforts of Laserschwert.
It’s quite the nifty directory structure, and also a pretty decent model of exactly what Lucasfilm ought to be offering in the first place when you buy the SCUMM games on digital platforms. But after all, the nine additional seconds they would have had to spend to prepare complete copies of their classics is time they wouldn’t have been able to spend making Guybrush look like a Dreamworks Douche™:
Anyway, I really think you guys could stand to stop being so bitter about this and just claim your files. All’s well that ends well.
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™?
Lucasfilm.com is back with more token appreciation of their rich back catalogue, an exercise just unwonted enough to remain suspicious. The latest installment of “Lucasfilm Games Rewind,” which is, one ascertains, a thing, celebrates the 1992 graphic adventure classic Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
Sure, it’s a bit thin, but a relationship with an estranged dad, however frigid and uncomfortable, doesn’t have to be without positive gestures, even if it all ultimately sours back to bitterness and despair. Wait, sorry, that was not at all the point I was trying to make.
Anyway, Indiana and the Fate of Atlantis is available from Steam and GOG.com.
Source: Lucasfilm.com
Eurobricks have had some hands on time with the forthcoming Nightdive Studios remaster of Star Wars: Dark Forces. There's lots of context on the history of the game and how it stacked up against contemporaries like Doom.
Every inch of the game's artwork has received a complete revamp. Whether we're talking about weapon sprites, enemy characters, world textures or cutscenes, everything has been recreated in higher resolution. The artwork retains the pixel art aesthetic, but sees a dramatic increase in resolution that better fits modern displays. I think it looks gorgeous and is among the best work Nightdive has done in this space. When you gaze upon the new skyboxes, for instance, you'll instantly recognise each one from its original design, yet each is also so much richer in detail. It's a true love letter to the original art design.
Pew pew pew, it'll soon be time to get your pre-Jedi Kyle Katarn on. Also hello Remi, it's me, JP!
Source: Eurogamer
It’s been a long runway, but it seems The SCUMM Bar, founded in 1996, is finally starting to hit its stride. If it’s escaped your notice that it’s been seriously upping its Trivia game for the past month or so, well, it’s probably a good thing we were here to point it out.
Heck, even ReMI trivia as oven-fresh as this divulgence from Dave Grossman only yesterday has been accordingly filed into the site’s downright show-offy new Trivia Viewer infrastructure. Clearly, our motivational criticism has been heeded. We do what we can. As for you, now could be the time to flatten out the creases of your Phatt Island library card (Footnote: Yes, I know that reference would make more sense for a site called The Bloody Lip Bar. Calm down. We're doing the best we can here.) and patronize The Bar as a regular once more and always.
Source: The SCUMM Bar
Enough of the YouTube videos I hear you say. We want to read. We want to read about the development of LucasArts classic point and click adventure "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", and we want to hear it from the director and co-designer Hal Barwood.
We want quotes such as:
Yeah, so what happened is that they had a rejected script by Christopher Columbus for another Indiana Jones movie and they thought it was good enough for a game.
Noah was kind of my mentor on this project a little bit, and we realized that it was a terrible script for a video game. It was obscure it was all going to take place in Africa where there was a Chinese influence and it was going to be about something called The Monkey King. We just couldn’t figure out how that was going to be very interesting.
Fine, here you go.
Source: Time Extension
Being a Zak McKracken aficionado, you already know that Annie Fox is the namesake of Zak’s principal ally in The National Video Game of Germany, and you may also know that she and David Fox are the forces behind Electric Eggplant.
But if you really want to go deep into Fox’s career as an educator, game designer, and New Media maven – which is inclusive of contributions to the Putt-Putt series for Humongous Entertainment, you’re not going to want to settle for less than her new interview with Daniel Albu. That promo for the Marin Computer Center at 3:47 alone may have more historical value than the Magna Carta.
