The International House of Mojo

You may recall that Limited Run Games threw in a plush hamster as part of their big honking collector’s package for Day of the Tentacle Remastered, but do you really think hamster perfection happens in the first iteration? Literally millions of hamsters had to be rejected to achieve what wound up in the hands of over-salaried fanatics, and one of those valuable hamsters-that-weren't is now up for auction on eBay.

It's part of the annual Winter Fundraiser for the Video Game History Foundation, so don’t be motivated only by the fact that owning this prototype with marginally different colors is absolutely essential to any well-appointed home – know also that it’s downright conscientious as well.

Thanks to Mojo founder Spaff for the heads up on this.

Source: eBay

Another Tech Talk has arrived, this time with multifaceted audio engineer Larry the O, who worked at LucasArts around 1995-2003 on a bunch of Star Wars titles as well as Escape from Monkey Island. When you’re done listening to his stories, you might also check out his web site, Toys in the Attic.

Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu

We’re a good twenty years past the heyday of Monkey Island fan games, but you can only really contain the disease, never cure it. The latest confirmed case comes out of Italy. Behold The Booze of Monkey Island:

I mean, it sure doesn’t look like something that was slapped together over a lunch break. Go forth and download before the LucasLegal of 2001 somehow catches wind.

Source: Bean Adventure Agency

As a game designer, Dave Grossman is celebrated, while as a pumpkin villain he remains unarrested. But we benefit from that, as he's carved up his annual entry for The Pumpkin House of Horrors to delight and disturb one and all. Behold "Mutual Assured Destruction":

As they do (mostly) every October, Skunkape has invited fans to submit Sam & Max fan art for the chance to win Big Prizes, which this year includes plushies and soundtrack keys for The Devil’s Playhouse (which I take as a hopeful sign that the soundtrack will in fact exist). You’ve still got a week to enter, so review the details and do us proud. We’ll only feel entitled to the usual 40% of your winnings.

If you think that’s the extent of Sam & Max Halloween news, then you must be one of those poor dears who didn’t even know that Steve Purcell auctioned off some new Sam & Max art as part of the Hero Initiative. Even if you hold the embarrassing position of not being the winning bidder who plunked down $5,500 to own the physical art, you can still enjoy it in cyberspace:

By the way, if you weren’t around for the piece Purcell contributed to the annual benefit last year, it was no slouch itself:

There’s no reason to ostracize Double Fine from the Halloween fun. Their claim on the occasion would be their trick ‘r treat RPG masterwork, Costume Quest, which is celebrating its fourteenth birthday. I think you know what to do.

All things considered, I’d say the only thing holding back October 2024 from perfection is that there sadly seem to have been no new developments on the A Vampyre Story front. But you’ll certainly want to find the time to play the still-unsequeled 2008 graphic adventure, what with its recent re-introduction to Steam in more stable form.

Seeing as your life quite properly consists of watching long-form video interviews with occasional interruptions to touch grass in the form of Amiga Monkey Island playthroughs (Footnote: Such allusions constitute a practice known as “Remi-baiting” on the street.) you’ll be only too happy to learn that Steve Purcell was the latest guest on Pencil to Pencil, a web series in which comic artists interview comic artists.

Purcell can trace a decent line and all, but personally I’m awaiting an interview with the visionary behind MojoComics himself, Gabez. Maybe they don’t want to frontload the obvious guests.

Special thanks to Jake for taking time out of not inviting us to Skunkape events to give us a heads up on this one.

Who reads anymore, right? Luckily, RETURN Magazin's latest issue is packed with glorious screenshots and custom character art from classic point-and-click adventure games. This special edition, touting no less than 154 pages, dives deep into the golden era of adventure gaming, featuring per-game-stylized articles, reviews, and retrospectives on iconic titles that shaped the genre.

You can expect lots of games covered here, including the Monkey Islands, Indiana Jones 3 and 4, Full Throttle and the others. And for the point-and-click connoisseur, feast your eyes on more exotic titles of the era such as Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria. To get a sneak peek, check out the review flip-through video below!

Reading in German might be a challenge for some, but nostalgia is universal and pricing is modest!

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.

By now you should recognize Cressup as the UK task force in this internationally bustling Interviewing Adventure Game Adjacent Humans For A Long Time genre. She has notched another great interview, this time with voice actor Bill Farmer. Best known generally as the voice of Goofy for Disney, Farmer is most treasured by us as the original voice of Sam in the multimedia debut of Steve Purcell’s characters, Sam & Max Hit the Road. It stands as the only published instance of Farmer voicing the character, though as we all know he was reprising his role in LucasArts’ ill-fated sequel before the assassin’s bullet found its mark. (Footnote: We’ll always have that trailer, though.)

Farmer discusses both of his Sam & Max experiences as well as his broader career in the enjoyable conversation, available in full below. We're above giving Cressup any grief over the misleading choice to put the Telltale/Skunkape version of Sam's model in her video's preview image, so that's why I'm not even gonna bring it up.

Source: Cressup

We’re a little late (Footnote: Our thanks to faithful reader Scott S for not being too polite to point this out.) to acknowledging Dave Grossman’s tradition this year, but nevermind that and behold what the 21st century Picasso of pumpkin mistreatement hath wrought for 2023: “Eye Infection”.

Source: Phrenopolis

It's been every iPad owners dream to be able to play classic LucasArts adventure titles on their device, and while several of them do exist for that platform (thanks DoubleFine), ScummVM has steadfastly remained an Android exclusive (unless you were willing to build and install ScummVM yourself).

That is, at least... until now: The ScummVM team have just announced that the iOS port of their monumental VM is in testing!

There's still a question mark around whether Apple will allow software they will likely view as an emulator on the App Store, but when questioned about it, ScummVM team leader, Sev, said, "we are yet to see". Hopeful! (?)

Source: ScummVM Website

News post for a slow week: Writer Simon Parkin's podcast My Perfect Console has guests pick five games for a perfect console, discussing these games as well as their careers. Each episode's about an hour.

One Dominic Armato joined Parkin about a month ago for an interview (episode 31), and one Erik Wolpaw (who co-wrote the first Psychonauts) joined previously (episode 13). Both episodes are good and representative of the show as a whole.

Listen to them on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Spotify, etc. It's been a staple of my low intensity cardio days, although fair warning that the podcast does make you want to go out and play video games afterwards.

Rock Paper Shotgun continues its annual "Top 100 PC Games of All-Time" shenanigans. Last week, Tales from the Borderlands came at #93, Return to Monkey Island made it to a respectable #85, and Knights of the Old Republic was at #79.

Now the second half of that list is out. Interesting choices all-around, with Firewatch at #39 and The Walking Dead: Season One hitting #22. (Honourable mention to Half-Life: Alyx, which some Mojo graduates worked on as part of the subsumed Campo Santo.)

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Hey, psst, want a book recommendation? We asked pretty much every writer and designer who’s worked on a LucasArts, Telltale, Terrible Toybox, Double Fine, Autumn Moon, etc. game on here for good recent reads, then added a few of our own. (Every writer, that is, except Chris Purvis, Sean Clark, and Brendan Q Ferguson, whom we couldn’t find. We assume they’re mythical creatures now, living off the grid, somewhere in the northern wilderness, swept up in starlight.)

Some people never got back to us (understandably), and some said they would but hadn’t by the time the article went up (also understandably), but we’ll happily (to crib video game dev parlance) patch in any updates to the article should they reach out. (Sincerely, we'd love that. Unlike, say, Jim Ward, the brows being furrowed over here aren't over silly things like deadlines, but books. And I don't joke when I say we reached-out to all the designers/writers.)

Happy reading!

Did “springing forward” this morning leave you feeling bitter, outraged, and dispossessed? Then it may be time to revisit Dave Grossman’s time-honored, Pulitzer-dodging rant against the institutional handsiness your clock is subjected to twice a year by participating countries.

Those who want to take it to the next level might even try placing an order for Dave’s attendant schwag, to see if that old Cafepress store can still phone home. Report back with your results!

Source: Phrenopolis

More news outside the usual Mojo purview, but Telltale stalwart Jared Emerson-Johnson—you may remember him from Sam and Max, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us—crooned out an album. Jared Emerson-Johnson's One-Man Skeleton Revival's album 1924 released in December and it is pretty sweet, and is available on Bandcamp, YouTube, Amazon, Apple Music, and Spotify.

LucasArts and Telltale alumnus Graham Annable (of Nelson Tethers fame) did the cover art, with design furnished by some guy called Jake Rodkin.

I've listened to the album twice since discovering it last night—Mojo was timely for a while, I guess!—and it makes me want to dance. It's a new favourite, and (I suspect) absolutely phenomenal played live. Good stuff, Jared!

This is tangentially related to Mixnmojo's usual purview, but we thought it was worth breaking protocol for: If you love adventure games, you owe it to yourself to buy the Wadjet Eye Humble Bundle, which goes for anything over $10, with money heading to charity (specifically, the JDRF, which does Type-1 Diabetes research).

The games included are the Blackwell series, The Shivah, Primordia, Gemini Rue, Unavowed, Technobabylon, Resonance, Shardlight (which, uh, was quite the experience during the pandemic), and Strangeland, with a 30% coupon for their latest, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow.

You need the Mojo stamp of approval? You got it. While some of the earlier games are a little rough around the edges—specifically, the first Blackwell game and The Shivah—the rest are gold. Wadjet Eye's games constantly reinvent themselves and their mechanics, but have unique identities, are beautifully written, and forego both death and dead ends. While not comedies, their games have authenticity.

And Dave Gilbert, who heads Wadjet Eye, is just a really nice person. Anyway, get clickin'. You won't regret it.

Source: Humble Bundle

Variety is reporting that Earl Boen, who memorably provided the voice of the villainous ghost pirate LeChuck in the Monkey Island series up through Tales of Monkey Island, has passed away at the age of 81.

Though his voice work was particularly prolific, the veteran actor was well known for his appearances as Dr. Peter Silberman in the first three Terminator movies among countless roles across film and television. Though Boen had been retired since even before Tales, it was said that his enthusiasm for performing as LeChuck led him to nevertheless reprise the character for that project and the Monkey Island special editions that were produced around the same time. His contributions as Guybrush's arch-nemesis will endure. R.I.P.

Source: Variety

In November, Hit Point Films released Tales of Melee Island, the charming fan-film directed by Julian Stamboulieh. Mojo got to talk with Julian not long after. Like a pirate shanking a privateer, get some insight into the inner workings (by reading the interview). We cover inspiration and making of, plus gain a glimpse into Montreal's film and TV industry. Get readin', then rewatch the film below. (Also be sure to read our interviews with Monkey Island head honchos Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman, plus artist extraordinaire Rex Crowle.)

While Disney may have sunk its new Pirates of the Caribbean film, Tales of Melee Island, a lovely little Monkey Island fan-film helmed by Montreal-based Julian Stamboulieh, is happy to be flying its flag:

Starring Fred Nguyen, Simon Peacock, Shawn Baichoo—all appearing on video games credit lists (and, in Ngyuen's case, HBO's The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-winning novel)—the short film docks at this port courtesy of Hit Point Films, a just-launched YouTube channel dedicated to fan movies.

Stamboulieh even provides some BTS material. It's fun stuff.

It's a rare day you get new Monkey Island, and a rare year you get a new Monkey Island game, but this is 2022: Japan has beaten Germany, Saudi Arabia has beaten Argentina, and we, improbably, have both Return to Monkey Island and, now, this.

Show them some love.

Source: YouTube