We talk with Jordan about his history with LucasArts and Telltale and ask him all of our adventure-game questions. He also helps us tackle the week’s big news stories, like ArmA III being announced and Guild Wars 2?s new profession!
Hold on to your hats boys and girls, because they just might be blown off. As any regular long-term readers of Mojo will know, one of my favourite LucasArts games is Indiana Jones and Infernal Machine. I've spent many happy hours playing that game, and I'd thought I'd uncovered all its secrets. Apparently not!
One of the things that always bugged me was the identity of this little boy wearing an Indy hat in the minecart switching hut. Well, out of the blue today I received an email from Paul LeFevre, who worked at LucasArts from 1992-2000 (the wonder years) and was Lead Programmer on Infernal Machine. This is what he said:
On this page I noticed the "Indy loves the kids" entry -- but you didn't know who the kid was. That's my son, who I snuck into the game, when he was 3 years old (he's now 14!). Just thought I'd fill in one of your blank spots :)
Hooray, mystery solved at long last! But wait, there's more:
Incidentally, my wife is also in the game. She's Filipino, and doing the Palawan level (in the Philippines) was my idea. Inside one of the caves, there's an image on a wall of her as a "Filipina Princess" hidden away, but nobody seems to have found that easter egg (or at least commented on it). Oh, well :)
There's a secret in that game that I didn't know about?! Apparently so. At least one person seems to have found it inadvertantly. In the Palawan Volcano level, behind the huge gong in the lava/statue/Russians room there's a block you can push. Push it to the end and you'll find some treasure... but if you push the bare bit of wall opposite you can find the "Filipino Princess"!
Incidentally, in the N64 version of the game (which was found first) there's a stone carving of an N64 instead. Much less fun.
Impressed? I was!
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:
"Unreal Engine 3 is a forward-looking solution that shortens the path between inspiration and execution on a wide variety of gaming platforms. We are thrilled to add another exceptional tool to our technology mix."
"LucasArts is now primed to capitalize on Unreal Engine 3's ability to scale across platforms, from mobile, through PC and console all the way up to the next generation of games. We can't wait to see what happens when LucasArts combines their talented workforce and amazing intellectual properties with Unreal Engine 3."
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:
So...how's it going? =) Thanks to everyone here for keeping the love for Monkey Island going! Great things come to those that wait.
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.
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
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:
Calls yesterday and today to LucasArts, the Star Wars company's video game division have not been returned.
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:
“We think this is a very good indicator for success in the UK,” Lace Mamba Global’s head of marketing Claas Wolter told MCV.
“There is huge demand for a boxed release of Tales of Monkey Island, as proven by the amount of pre-orders and positive feedback. Monkey Island is one of the top adventure game brands in the world.”
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!).
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
