The International House of Mojo

Remember how LucasArts teased us with Sam & Max: Freelance Police and rapidly made us go from ":-D" to ":-(" and then to ">:-("? Of course you do, and a crazy time it was.

With three seasons of Sam & Max now available from Telltale, it might be time to take a look at what could have been. Our ancient preview is once again available, as is our angry manifesto. The latter has been padded with some crazy hate-art from the gone but never (never!) forgotten Wibble-Wobble Hatstand.

One that might be a bit more obscure is our Freelance Police retrospective, now imaginatively (re-)titled " The Kinda, Sorta, But Not Really Secret History of Sam & Max: Freelance Police." In it we take a look at the history of the game, and show some of the test-animations from the game. Remember the Max butt-shave? If not, you should probably revisit it.

So yes, roll back in time, and think what could have been.

LucasArts may be announcing nothing, but they're certainly committing something to that nothing. They've just announced via press release that they have signed the popular (some might say "ridiculously overused") Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games, as used in such titles as Gears of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bioshock and a fair few others, for use in the long term in whatever games they're not telling us about.

Zak Phelps, technology director at LucasArts, had this to say:

Mark Rein of Epic also says:If it's an Indiana Jones game, that'll do me.

Back in February, The Angry Video Game Nerd did an episode where he took on a batch of Star Wars games. You might ask why we didn't report this in February, to which I might respond, "Hey, shut up." Oh, but what might have been.

Anyway, the games he tackles begins with some Atari games from the days before LucasArts could be bothered to do anything with the Star Wars brand but license it out, but the rest are LEC-developed: Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back for the NES, the Super Star Wars trilogy for the Super NES, and Shadows of the Empire for the N64.

Since those latter two selections in this very narrow subset of the three trillion Star Wars games ever made are actually pretty good, this is a fairly toothless episode in the Nerd's caustic arsenal. I was surprised to find Rolfe so charitable toward those NES games - Star Wars in particular is pretty universally reviled. I guess, like the rest of us, he's unfortunate enough to have a good day every now and then.

Source: Cinemassacre

Something Craig Derrick, Monkey Island Special Edition producer and self-proclaimed adventure genre re-inventor, wrote on the wall of the official Monkey Island Facebook profile on April 7th has captured the attention of TalesOfMI.net and others. It went a little something like:

What could he be referring to? Does he simply speak retrospectively of the Monkey Island special editions in an unintentionally cryptic way, or is he teasing something for the future? We circulate this with the irresponsible desire to see you invest emotionally in the assumption of the latter. What the hell else to you think this site is for? Promoting LSD?

Source: Monkey Island Facebook profile

I am sure you, as me, have been camping outside your local cinema, excitedly waiting for the first part of the (I can only assume) epic Atlas Shrugged saga. Because if the teaser poster is anything to go by, it is all about how The Man keeps LucasArts down.

Just something to chew on while waiting for Behind Mojo to make its triumphant return.

It's been speculated recently that LucasArts could be coming to the excellent site Good Old Games, something everyone's been wanting since the site launched.

Well, CD Projekt (creators of The Witcher and owner of the site) have just finished their hour-long conference, and it could be happening. Maybe. There were five publishers teased: LucasArts, Microsoft, Square Enix, EA and T2. One of them will be coming to the site with 25 games this summer, and another two are "close to being signed". I like those odds.

If every Mojo staff member has a heart attack at the exact same point this summer, you'll know what caused it.

Source: Good Old Games

Bill Tiller has uncovered an old pre-production sketchbook of his work on the celebrated Curse of Monkey Island - and despite the concerns of some, he's uploaded some scans for us all to enjoy!

Each image comes with a tweet's worth of backstory, but it's interesting stuff. For example: at one time, the shipwreck occurred on Duck Skull Island instead of Blood Island, and the windmill was there as well. Don't believe me? Look!

There are several other treasures to be found, so don't delay.

Source: Jason "lost password" Harang

Could this scandalously obscene neglect have been the impetus for some LEC vets jumping ship to form a new studio? Unlikely!

Gamasutra reports that four veterans from LucasArts and EA have founded November Software in the Bay Area. Apparently the folks in question were involved in the tech for both Force Unleashed titles. Jumping on the lucrative social gaming craze, the company "aims to bring streaming 3D content to web and mobile-based social games."

Their first project will be called Inemeri: A Familiar World, which will be "coming to the web as well as iOS devices," and will have a closed beta during the summer. And so concludes The International House of Mojo's coverage of this company. Best of luck, you guys!

Update: Sorry if any of you witnessed a code blow-up in this news post earlier. I ran into a "divide by number of new LEC Steam releases" error that had to be fixed.

Source: Gamasutra

This week there's a sale on a few Xbox Live Arcade games, including a couple of favourites: Costume Quest and Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Both are half-price for this week only - Costume Quest is 600 Microsoft Points and Monkey Island 2 is 400.

Costume Quest is excellent, but I presume everyone's already got Monkey Island 2 on PC. And if you haven't, well, I can't really recommend buying it as it'll mean giving money to LucasArts, and they really hate it when people do that.

Source: Xbox Live

Whatever it is that LEC isn't working on right now, they're working on it hard. Gamasutra reports a new high profile hire by LucasArts - Tim Longo, best known as the "creative and franchise director" for the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics.

He is said to be serving LucasArts in the capacity of Creative Director on "an unannounced project." A certain fedora wearing tomb raider springs immediately to mind as the likeliest subject of this project (and it would certainly be nice for the Indiana Jones game series to be elevated from its painfully ironic perception as lower grade Tomb Raider games in the first place), but I guess we can't be surprised if he turns out to be making light-saber Kinect games either.

Incidentally, the other day some crippled orphan asked me where he could buy The Curse of Monkey Island. I told him to check eBay and to screw off. Just thought that was too good a story to keep to myself.

Source: Gamasutra

As you probably suspected, this post was an april fools gag. Apologies to Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, Vince Lee and RePlay Magazine ?

Treasure, it seems, is buried in unlikely places. Somewhere hidden, sure, but also accessible – the kind of place the average guy might walk past every day but wouldn't take a second glance at. That's just the way it goes, apparently.

For example: this week Mojo was alerted to a story that was published over a decade ago, in the summer of 2000. It's an innocuous little story in an innocuous little magazine, but there is no doubt that it is indeed great treasure. It was just hidden in plain sight, all along.

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Source: RePlay (via XeroCool)

Not content with releasing potentially their last ever game in Lego Star Wars III, LucasArts thought it would be a good idea to stop people buying other games too.

Basically THQ had the Star Wars licence to produce Star Wars games for iPhone and iPad, including the cool Falcon Gunner which turns the iPhone's camera into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. By tomorrow, Friday 1st April, the licence would expire and LucasArts would stop this and three other Star Wars games from being sold on Apple's store. This would mean that LucasArts would release one game and take away four, equalling minus three games being released. That's impressive even for LucasArts.

Fortunately however, sanity has prevailed and the games are safe on the App Store. However, this quote from Kotaku needs to be restated:

That's phoned, not emailed. I think it's safe to say that no one works at LucasArts anymore.

Source: Kotaku

As you know, Ron Gilbert gave a postmortem about Maniac Mansion at GDC, and it, along with a bunch of postmortems for other classic games, has been archived online at the GDC Vault. Ron's talk is pretty much exactly the same as the one he gave in Germany prior to GDC, which has also been posted online, but at the very least the Q&A is different, so why not hear about Maniac Mansion's fascinating development again?

Those other postmortems are an embarrassment of riches, too.

Source: GDC Vault

No doubt because we were all that excited, we flat-out forgot to trumpet the fact that LucasArts released LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars this week for these platforms. Of course, the notable thing here is that this game is a Nintendo 3DS launch title, probably. You might think that with the stress of watching Traveller's Tales make this game over, LEC could surely find the time to upload Day of the Tentacle to Steam, or announce a new Indiana Jones game or something. That's just where you're confused.

As picked up on by talesofmi.net, the German retail release of Tales of Monkey Island (which, as you'll recall, is optionally offered in a big ol' deluxe version of comparable size to the old school boxes) has apparently sold very well in the country where copies of Zak McKracken are worshiped like monoliths and Ron Gilbert comes to you.

Lace Mamba, which we've already reported will be doing TMI's retail release in the UK on April 8th (as they did around the same time last year for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island), believes that the performance in Germany bodes well for their own launch:

You'll recall that the UK version's packaging will boast unique covert art. While the German release bears the Steve Purcell painting that Telltale pre-order customers got in the form of an insert for their Collector's DVD, the UK box uses an unused Purcell design fully painted by Telltale concept artist Ryan Jones. It's rather cool-looking, though the reaction to this multitude of cool covers must surely be bittersweet for the Monkey Island completest with a mortgage to pay off.

Source: MCV

So GDC has come and gone, and with the dust having settled, there are two panels from the conference to point out to you that we did not report on at the time.

The first is Video Games as Art: An Apology for Roger Ebert. This was a lecture delivered by none other than Brian Moriarty (of Loom and, in an alternate universe, The Dig fame), the subject of which you could probably guess. By all accounts the talk was worth hearing, but unfortunately there are nothing but a few quotes reprinted online. Keep an eye out for the content of the speech to appear on Moriarty's official site someday.

Then there was a panel by Clint Hocking, LEC's big profile hire from last year and the studio's current Creative Director, whose creativity we hope to see imbued in an LEC game should the day come that they choose to make games again - but let's not get greedy. He gave a presentation about meaning in games, and this is the best write-up I found on it.

Ron Gilbert apparently also spoke about Maniac Mansion, but from what I know it was a repeat at most of the talk he gave in Germany (which, need I remind you, is fully streamable online!).

David Fox of the olden LucasArts days wrote in to tell us that the Smithsoniam Museum is looking to select 80 games for its upcoming The Art of Video Games exhibit. You can vote for your favorites from the pool of candidates, which have been organized into five "Eras," and then by system and four genres.

What David rightly wanted us to be aware of was the fact that amongst the nominations you will find the following seminal works and Mojo darlings: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (Era 2 - Commodore 64 - Adventure Genre), Grim Fandango (Era 4 - DOS/Windows - Adventure Genre), and Psychonauts (Era 5 - Microsoft Xbox - Action Genre).

So make your voice heard, and do your part to ensure that these classics may bask in the eternal prestige they deserve. "It belongs in a museum!"

Update: As Kroms (not to mention Ron Gilbert) notes, Monkey Island 1 will be playable at the exhibit, having leapfrogged the entire voting process due to its inherent worthiness.

Source: The Art of Video Games

Has Mardi Gras come three days early or something? Bill Tiller spent his afternoon sharing scans from the game design documents to The Curse of Monkey Island and Full Throttle via twitter, giving you all kinds of rare stuff to look at. It's like finding the baby in the king cake!

For the most part, the design doc glimpses include some cool early sketches, like a flaming LeChuck concept by Steve Purcell and some rough background drawings. Aside from the pictures, it's also just interesting on an obsessive fandom level to get a sneak at some of the verbiage from the actual design docs. Oh, and did I mention that the Full Throttle batch includes two deleted scenes, complete with dialog text? One involves a lost puzzle where Ben must evade Maureen's Uncle Pete at the mink farm, and the other is an extended sequence at the Smash-a-Torium. Do not wait for ATM to compile these on his web site - check it all out now!

Bill also verifies what you probably already assumed: that A Vampyre Story: Year One is a project the Autumn Moon team is working on for free. Whether this is something they're doing in the hopes of eventually landing a publisher (a la AVS1) or if they're planning on self-publishing (not unthinkable, given that it's headed for the iPad in chunks), it would explain the slow development, lack of publicity and the implication that the developers are taking other gigs in order to eat.

Source: Bill Tiller's twitter

The guys behind the music of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition, Jesse Harlin and Wilbert Roget, II, discuss composing, arranging, the perils of iMUSE, and being suave in this exclusive interview over here.

In what is to my knowledge the most Mojo-relevant session to take place at this year's GDC thus far, folks from Bioware discuss The Old Republic's localization process which, like everything else relating to this game, is enormous, expensive, and also costs a lot. Don't take my word for it, though - reading Gamasutra's write-up reveals that the effort being mounted is so considerable, it could very well take more than an Excel spreadsheet to accomplish:

It's a sad state of affairs when the best thing we can do to keep LEC on the front page is make asshole-ish remarks about articles covering the most mundane aspects of game that the company doesn't even appear to have anything to do with anymore. I don't know what we'd do without all those exciting games LEC itself has in the pipel- oh, wait.

Better news: Tim Schafer is currently exploiting a well-deserved invite to host the GDC for the second year in a row. There's probably already some good footage on the net somewhere, and maybe we can be bothered to find it for you once the show's finished.

*Figure may have been confused with the population of Chicago

Source: Gamasutra