The International House of Mojo

Gamasutra released an article detailing the effort to rebuild and preserve the world's first commercial graphical massively multiplayer online game, Lucasfilm's Habitat.

The original Habitat, which had an interface and graphics similar to the adventure game Labyrinth, was released in beta form by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) for the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 from 1986 until it was shut down in 1988. A sized down version was released as Club Caribe on Quantum link in January 1988. Fujitsu later licensed the code and released Fujitsu Habitat in Japan in 1990. Habitat and Club Caribe was highly influential, and it's code still lives on through WorldsAway, which premiered on CompuServe in 1995, and moved to the public internet in 1997. WorldsAway had multiple worlds, two of which survive today and are now known as Dreamscape and NewHorizone. Dreamscape was Fujitsu's first virtual world, and appeared when WorldsAway premiered in 1995. NewHorizone was originally Club Connect when it was launched by Fujitsu in 1998 and New Radio World when the WorldsAway worlds were sold and became part of an online world known as VZones in December 1998. New Radio World was renamed VZConnections in December 1999, and then newHorizone in September 2001. These two worlds are still a part of vZones, and the WorldsAway software has also recently been licensed for use in MetroWorlds.

The preservation project was spearheaded by Alex Handy, founder and director of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. The project has official permission from Fujitsu, the company that purchased Habitat from Lucasfilm, to get the Habitat software working again. In order to get the project off the ground, Handy enlisted the help of the creators of Habitat, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, and Stratus, the company who made the Nimbus servers that Habitat ran on. They were given a Stratus computer, manufactured in 1989, and upgraded to use a 1999 era TCP/IP protocol.

On September 25, 2014, Morningstar and Farmer, and over a dozen hackathon attendees at the MADE video game museum, as well as people working remotely through IRC, set out to get Habitat running again. The hardest part was the Quantum Link code, so they utilized the Quantum Link Reloaded open source project.

There is still a ways to go, as they don't have access to all the support libraries that are needed for the Quantum Link server, so those need to be emulated in order to work properly. But, they have come a long way, and still intend to finish. Once the project is complete, anyone will be able to log in using a C64 emulator.

You can read more about the effort, and donate to the cause if you so desire, over at the Habitat Preservation Project page at the MADE website.

Double Fine's remastered version of Tim Schafer's magnum opus of his LucasArts years, Grim Fandango, was demoed at Indiecade. Game journalists have played that demo and shared their thoughts.

IGN describes the new version as follows:

You have the ability to toggle back and forth between how the game originally looked, and how it looks now, and holy moly the difference is night and day. Thanks to the new lighting, shaders, and other technical enhancements that flew way over my head, Manny and company now look incredible. Their in-game models appear to be nearly identical to their cut-scene counterparts, which is great. The game is still presented in 4:3, but you have the ability to stretch it to widescreen (for the love of everything good, please don’t do this). The borders are black right now, but I was told that the developers are toying with some ideas for what could stand on the two sides of the screen.

In addition, Double Fine has also added some bonus features to the game:

The final big change I stumbled across was the awesome inclusion of nodes scattered throughout the world that contain small snippets of commentary from Tim Schafer, Peter Chan, Peter McConnell, and a ton of other folks who helped make the game so special back in 1998.

Polygon has also shared their thoughts on the demo, and have confirmed that the original's tank controls will be an option for the purists who prefer to play the game that way.

It looks like Grim Fandango Remastered is shaping up to be great. The rest of us will get a chance to play it for ourselves once it's released in early 2015.

It be that day again! Talk like a pirate and hoist your sails to go over to Steam to pick up a load of pirate booty at sale prices, including the two special editions and Tales of Monkey Island at 75% off each! Arr!

Double Fine is going to be holding a panel at this year's Penny Arcade Expo, entitled Grim Fandango: Bringing the Dead Back to Life! The panel will be jam packed full of people who worked on the game, including creator Tim Schafer, artist Peter Chan, musician Peter McConnell, Double Fine Productions executive producer Matt Hansen and Sony’s Gio Corsi as moderator.

They will discuss development of both the original game and the new remastered version. They will also be unveiling a new development documentary episode from 2 Player Productions. If you are going to PAX this year, you won't want to miss the panel. It is happening on Saturday, August 30th at 4:30 in the Main Theater.

Since we're always on top of things (this forum post from last month and this comment from Rum Rogers telling us about the project totally don't count), Mojo is here to let you know about a fan project to re-create the SCUMM Bar in Lego form. If 10,000 people vote on the project, it could become an official Lego project, assuming Disney gives the OK to use their IP. I guess it's worth a shot to give it your vote, as Disney does seem to be at least aware now that they own the LucasArts adventure game catalog, and not just Star Wars.

From recording tests with Noah Falstein as Bobbin Threadbare in 1992 to her present work voice directing Broken Age, Khris Brown has played a crucial role in making your favorite Mojo classics talk.

In a new interview with Gamastura, Brown discusses her career, sharing insights she gained from her decades in the field:

I'm not sure I agree - everyone knows that Doug Lee's best work comes after twenty-five takes, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Anyway, read the full interview.

Source: Gamasutra

The latest release of ScummVM, the interpreter that lets you play classic adventure games on modern (and not so modern) systems, is now available. This release adds support for 5 new games: The Neverhood, Mortville Manor, Voyeur, Return to Ringworld, and Chivalry is Not Dead.

In addition, the MT-32 emulator has been updated, an OpenGL backend has been added, many aspects of the GUI have been improved, the AGOS engine has been enhanced, Urban Runner's videos are now less CPU-demanding, tons of bugs have been fixed in dozens of SCI games, the Adlib sound in Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has been made to sound more like the original, and platform portability for the Tony and Tinsel engines has been improved. The Steam versions of the four LucasArts adventures that were released on that platform are now supported as well.

You can pick up the latest version for your platform of choice at the ScummVM homepage.

The Double Fine Action News page has been updated with news that the remastered version of Grim Fandango will will be releasing simultaneously on Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, and Vita.

Not sure what you did to deserve this, but the internet has published another one of those excellent interviews with the Lucasfilm Games elders for the likes of us to enjoy. It was conducted by Jaz Rignallm, who'd visited the studio in 1985 on behalf of ZZAP! 64 when games like Koronis Rift and The Eidolon were the hot titles in the pipeline.

The article mostly reads like a transcripted discussion between Rignallm and the following: Steve Arnold, David Fox, Ron Gilbert, Peter Langston and Chip Morningstar. There is rare art and fascinating anecdotes aplenty, including a proposed sequel you surely weren't aware of:

This discussion took place around GDC 2014, before this Grim Fandango remastering business came to light, so here's hoping the missed opportunities stand a chance at being, you know, un-missed in the future.

Source: US Gamer

Remember that Star Wars Fight Simulator "Attack Squadrons" game Disney was working on? Well, they've gone all LucasArts on it and cancelled development after opening it up to a closed beta

Here's the inside word from CNET.

Damn those current market place realities and underlying economic considerations...

Source: CNET

ScummVM, the program that allows you to run many adventure games from many different developers, such as LucasArts, Sierra, Revolution, Coktel Vision, and more, on modern operating systems, phones, tablets, and consoles, is gearing up for their latest release. That means that they have made quite a few improvements, and added new games, and they need your help to test them to make sure they play as they should.

The new games that will be added in 1.7.0 are Chivalry Is Not Dead, Mortville Manor, Return to Ringworld, The Neverhood, and Voyeur. They have also changed their Adlib player for the DOS floppy versions of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Loom, so they need your help testing these games as well.

If you own any of these games and would like to help out, then fire up ScummVM on your platform of choice and test. Let them know how you made out on the ScummVM forums and if you find any bugs, submit them on the ScummVM bug tracker. The results of testing will be posted on the ScummVM wiki.

In related news, keep an eye on the ScummVM Planet. The Google Summer of Code is going on now, ScummVM is a part of it again, and this year their sister project ResidualVM is involved too (with ScummVM acting as an umbrella for both projects). GSoC students are adding support for Sfinx and The Prince and the Coward to ScummVM, as well as improving support for Escape from Monkey Island and improving the TinyGL renderer in ResidualVM. They've already accomplished a lot on these tasks, so it will be really interesting to see what they manage to get done by the end of the summer.

Well, hell, Double Fine is remastering Grim Fandango -- what can you do to sustain this high?!

First, you can stop whining about it not being released for PC up front. You know it'll be available for non-Sony platforms soon enough.

Then! Then you can bask in nostalgia heaven!

For example, you can check out our various screenshots. Concept art, in-jokes, covers… It's all there. And you probably want to re-watch the trailer and enjoy a G4 special on the game too, right in our video section.

This is probably a good time to re-read Jason in-depth Secret History article too. (LEC might not have acknowledged Grim's existence, but, bizarrely enough, Disney has.)

Word has it that Thrik is resurrecting his Grim Fandango site. You should nag him to get that going.

And the soundtrack! Go listen to the soundtrack!

2 Player Productions has a retrospective too. What the hell?

Feel free to link to more Grim in the comments, or on Twitter. Tweet it to us and we shall retweet.

This is happening.

DOTT next?
Update: Video!

Source: E3

IGN is celebrating a year of adventure by playing through the classic point and click graphic adventure games of the genre throughout 2014.

So far they've hit the most popular of the early batch of adventures from Sierra and LucasArts, looking back at King's Quest I, King's Quest II and III, Space Quest I and II, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

There's still eight months left, and a lot of classic adventures to cover, so it will be interesting to see what other games IGN plays through. They certainly can't go wrong with playing through any of the LucasArts adventure catalog, as we so thoroughly showed in our own LucasArts Secret History features from a few years back.

April Fools! What do you mean you already knew? Apologies to those on Twitter who took it seriously! And apologies to Yaguete who we stole the art from without asking for permission. Check out his deviantART page.

It's well know that LEC was producing a special edition of Day of the Tentacle just before they were swallowed up by Disney, after which the game disappeared in a black box. We assumed work on it had been terminated, which, now, turns out to be wrong. Day of the Tentacle: Special Edition is finishing up within Disney, and will hit iOS and Android devices this July!

Judging by the accompanying concept art (or "cover" art?) this will be a looker, not a million miles away from the style of MI2:SE. A new touch interface and re-mastered voices have been promised, as has a fully digital soundtrack. Click past the cut to read press release and to see the art.

Keep Reading

Back on March 20, six LucasFilm Games alumni (Steve Arnold, Noah Falstein, David Fox, Ron Gilbert, Peter Langston and Chip Morningstar) gathered together and took the stage at the Game Developers Conference to discuss the early days of LucasFilm Games.
There were also several early (and early-ish) games, including the word's first MMO Habitat, plus Afterlife, Ballblazer, Loom, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and Maniac Mansion available to play, plus the Star Wars games Episode 1: Racer, Rebel Assault, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter. There is an hour long video of proceedings here on Gamespot and embedded below for your convenience.

Source: GDC

Grim Mouse, the modification of Grim Fandango and ResidualVM that allows you to play through Grim Fandango with just a mouse, has been updated to 0.4. All of the bugs that kept it from being played through with just the mouse should now be fixed. I've played through all parts of Grim Fandango with Grim Mouse (albeit, in separate playthroughs), so Grim Fandango should be completeable with just a mouse now.

If you get a crash in year 3 when entering the engine room, you might have to compile Grim Mouse from source, as it is caused by a bug that was fixed in ResidualVM, but isn't in the new Grim Mouse build (although it is in its source tree). The author said he'd release a new version of Grim Mouse with the fix for this problem. It only seems to affect a small amount of people (which did include myself, so I can confirm it plays fine when compiling it yourself from source), so you can try playing through 0.4 now, since it's possible this bug won't affect your playthrough.

A programmer named Tobias Pfaff has released Grim Mouse, a modified ResidualVM and Grim Fandango so that the game can be played completely with point and click mouse control.

Grim Fandango can now be played with point and click control in all scenes, including the scenes where the camera shifts to close-up view. It also has a new point-and-click inventory system. In order to accomplish this feat, Tobias had to make major modifications to both the ResidualVM code and the game source. Luckily, ResidualVM's PatchR code allows for fan patches to be applied at run time, so all that is required to run this is the original game, just as the main ResidualVM branch.

Tobias has released a Mac and Windows build of Grim Mouse, and the sourcecode is freely available if you want to compile it to try it on other platforms. It is currently in early alpha phase, so there are likely to be bugs present since it hasn't been fully tested yet. If you want to participate in the testing, or just want to try it out for yourself, head over to the Grim Mouse thread on the ResidualVM forums.

The currently North American exclusive closed beta period for Area 52 Games and Disney Mobile's Star Wars space combat simulator Star Wars: Attack Squadrons has been going on from January 21st and will continue to January 28th. If you already signed up for the beta, you should be receiving a code soon, if you haven't already. I just received mine, but I can't comment on the game yet, as the beta currently runs from 11AM to 9PM PST, and I entered my code a little late.

If you didn't sign up for the beta (or didn't yet get a code), but are in North America and still would like to join, keep an eye on their Facebook page. They have posted first-come-first-serve beta codes on there in the past, so it's possible you could get lucky.

Note also that this is currently the second closed beta period (the first beta period started on January 14th). So if you missed this beta, if they do a third beta test, it's possible you'll receive a code then. If they do continue doing closed beta testing, hopefully they'll open it up to worldwide gamers the next go-around.

In what is largely a passionate tirade directed at the careless mishandling of classic titles when re-released on modern platforms, the A.V. Club spares some room toward the end to rail against the complete failure of certain treasured games to be made available at all:

I feel like he may be painting with too broad of a brush by indicting hot glue in this, but his point stands firm.

Source: The A.V. Club