… we have the choice to cry into the pillow over getting old or celebrate a stellar game. And, since we finished the former, you can now reap the benefits from the latter: Enjoy yourself with these newly unearthed 2009 SCUMM Bar reviews of Tales of Monkey Island.
OK, so not the grandest of gestures, but we probably will do more, maybe. Because the game truly deserves it. Check out the Mojo review, too.
Fifteen years, seriously…
Daniel Albu’s interviews continue to deploy at a rapid clip, and his latest is with Mike Stemmle. On the Freelance Police front, the designer acknowledges that the source is “floating around” (oh really?), and as far as I know reveals for the first time that the Gytgo stood for Genial Yet Troubling Gaming Organism. It’s all but a taste of the full interview, which explores Stemmle’s whole thirty year plus career:
Unfortunately, TellTale Games in its current incarnation has had to do what many gaming companies have had to do this year and layoff a percentage of employees, some now experiencing this from TTG for the second time.
With their recent release of The Expanse coming to a close it is possible the layoffs could be related to the ebb and flow of staffing, or not, but TellTale Games responded to the news stating that layoffs did indeed occur but their current pipeline of projects (The Wolf Among Us) are still in production.
We wish all the developers who have been laid off to quickly find new positions and get back to stable work.
Source: PCGamer
A bit of a bummer this morning: Telltale is delisting Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People from Steam; it appears to have already disappeared off of GOG.
Telltale announced the delisting on the game's Steam page—not standard practice in the games industry, but appreciated—explaining: "We no longer have the rights to the IP and so we can no longer sell or support the game series."
It's unclear how long the game will remain available for, so, if you've been holding off for whatever reason, grab it now.
Reported rumours of physical media purists in the wild saying, "I told you so!" remain unconfirmed. If spotted, proceed with caution.
We’re not at our best when we’re acknowledging deaths two years past, but punctually or not we must give a proper salute to voice actor Doug Boyd, who passed away in 2021. Boyd was a go-to talent for Telltale Games, a relationship that stretched all the way back to the dawn of the studio, when he nailed the role of Smiley Bone in Out from Boneville and The Great Cow Race. Anchoring a game wasn’t beyond his talents either, as he went on to voice Nelson Tethers himself in that gem of a series Puzzle Agent. And when it comes to all the roles he played in the Sam & Max games, they’re almost too numerous to list. Fortunately, as it often does, the Sam & Max Wiki has us covered:
Reading that list makes me feel all the more grateful for the work that Skunkape and Bay Area Sound do on the remasters, as the higher sample quality they achieve by going back to the original recordings preserves these wonderful performances.
Boyd’s game voiceover reel (which, in a Small World moment, was put together by fellow Telltale regular Adam Harrington) remains online, and offers a nice encapsulation of his resume:
We’ve possibly become a bit entitled, having been delivered superb Sam & Max remasters two Decembers in a row. The third and final – and, let’s face it, best – season from the Telltale archives is obviously requiring a bit more elbow grease, but Skunkape has offered official assurances today that it’s most definitely on its way:
Just as Mojo was ready to embrace the sweet release of death, it’s condemned to afforded another welcome lifeline.
Source: Youtube
If you’re not paying attention to samandmax.co.uk, you’re decidedly not part of the cool crowd. The site’s latest feature is an interview with voice actor Chuck Kourouklis, a recurring cast presence in the Telltale catalog. His more notable roles were Mr. Norrington in Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse and the Ferryman to the pirate crossroads in Tales of Monkey Island.
What were the recording sessions like for Sam & Max?
Damn difficult in one respect – like many of the best-written projects, you fall apart like Harvey Korman in a Carol Burnett skit (am I giving you all some wild stuff to Google and YouTube or what?) Seriously, you just break up and collapse laughing in the most inopportune moments, and Sam & Max was MURDER that way. I hope at least there was a writer gratified to hear how he wrecked my professionalism, somewhere in the creative chain…
Read his recollections in full, and look forward to re-experiencing his Sam & Max performance in higher quality whenever Skunkape can get that Season 3 remaster to you.
And speaking of Sam & Max voice actors, let me quickly work in this month-old tweet of a fan’s happy run-in with Bill Farmer, the original Sam and parenthetically the voice of Goofy.
Source: samandmax.co.uk
Skunkape’s exulted remaster of Sam & Max Save the World has long been available from all your favorite digital storefronts, and there were the Limited Run Games collectors editions for those who demanded it expensive and in their hands. You might have thought that accommodated every possible consumer, but that would have overlooked the people who required to see it on Best Buy shelves:
I’ll admit, it hurts that they’d go with a pull-quote from Nintendo Life when Mojo’s contemporary rave, “Is it okay to say that I prefer Bone?” was there for the taking, but everyone sees a different statue in the marble, I guess. Literally go out and buy!
Source: Best Buy
You think the previously announced Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space package is the only big boxed Sam & Max themed income-guzzler you're going to be pre-ordering come May 6th? Think again:
The Unofficial Sam & Max Website, once the go-to hub for Sam & Max news (a role assumed by samandmax.co.uk/ these days) got out of the day-to-day business somewhere around 2008, and you probably didn’t fail to notice its reduction to a static splash screen thereafter. This abandonment was perhaps in part because the staff was too busy making Sam & Max games to cover them, but let’s not trip over ourselves making excuses for those deadbeats.
Well as luck would have it, all these years later, new life has been breathed into the domain. The site has been relaunched and re-envisioned as Sam & Max Headquarters. The idea doesn’t seem so much to be producing content as serving as a flashy jumping-off point for all the online Sam & Max destinations deemed worthwhile through the parochial lens of a Web 2.0 world, though I also got a funny kinda feelin’ that there’s more to come.
Anyway, what’s going on there already is pretty neat-o, so show your support for mouseover hi-jinks and giddy up.
Source: Sam & Max Headquarters
The eminent Jared Emerson-Johnson's work on the Telltale Sam & Max soundtracks is rightly celebrated, and his opportunity to polish it even further for the Skunkape remasters was justly met with excitement.
But in the final analysis, is something truly of any worth until it's been discussed on public radio? To the relief of millions, it's a question that doesn't need to be confronted, as Jared was invited to be interviewed by WSHU. Listen to it, then head over to Bandcamp to buy the soundtracks eight more times.
Source: WSHU
Just as they made a point of doing with Sam & Max Save the World, Skunkape has followed up their remaster of Sam & Max Beyond Time a Space with original builds as gratis DLC* and a bountiful archive of legacy bonus and promotional videos. Here, they’ve pretty much done all the legwork for us with these tweets:
*Unless you bought on GOG, in which case you've already got that.
Source: Twitter
Tomorrow, on Wednesday, February 9th we will be treated to a behind-the-scenes look at how the new TellTale Games has been working hard on Fables: A Wolf Among Us Season Two. They've been in pre-production on Season Two since Dec 2019 using the Unreal engine while keeping a pretty consistent look between the two games.
Geoff Keighley will be our host to bring us this latest coverage of the game, and appears to be simulcast on Twitch, YouTube, IGN, GameInformer, and then later-cast by a late news post on Mojo tomorrow night. So be on the lookout for more Fables information coming to you on Wednesday February 9th at 10am PST, 1pm EST, 6pm GMT.
Source: TellTaleGames Twitter
The resurrected Telltale has leapt back to life after a quiet period, updating progress on The Wolf Among Us 2, revealing it is due early next year and will be a single, standalone, non-episodic adventure.
They also, surprisingly, announced a new game series based on the Amazon TV Show 'The Expanse', with an impressive game trailer. Click through to watch on youtube if you're too young to see it embedded below
Given it takes us at least a week to get around to reporting anything, you could swing by the official site at your leisure looking for the latest updates, should you prefer your news delivered in a timely manner.
Source: Telltale Games
The long-awaited Monkey Island anthology boxed set from Limited Run Games began shipping this month, and fans who have been receiving the apparently gargantuan package have been sharing their reactions to finally having in their hands the irresponsible purchase they made twelve months ago. Some of those reactions have been enthusiastic, some have been heartbreaking, and almost all of them can be found in this forum thread.
Rather than try to recap that ongoing discussion which reveals many more details, I thought I’d at least front page what’s been learned about the actual game builds included. Limited Run’s original product listing mentioned (and in fact still does) that “archived versions” of the first two games would be included, with specifics to be determined.
Well, now that people have begun exploring the USB stick included with the package, we have a clearer idea of what that actually means. It seems that there are a few versions of Monkey 1 and Monkey 2 offered in the form of disk images and KryoFlux streams (for the uninitiated, see here), which is pretty exciting, as it represents the first time those games have been officially available with their original .exe files since the internet age.
So, what versions of the five Monkey Island games wound up on that flash drive in the end? The breakdown appears to be as follows:
Beyond obscure/translated versions of the games which probably would have been too much to ask for, the main absences appear to be the CD version of Monkey 1 (though that’s essentially included in the Special Edition as “classic mode”) and CMI’s original interpreter, the latter being a huge, and hugely addressable, bummer from a preservation perspective despite the fact that it’s notoriously helpless on modern Windows. Really pleased about EGA Monkey 1*, though, and if you’re gonna get one version of VGA Monkey 1, surely it’s just that it be the one with the stump joke.
Among the physical extras, the book was the biggest unknown and also sounds like the biggest highlight. At over 200 pages, it’s said to contain a lot of terrific content (including new interviews) especially for the first two games. It’s a shame to think of it as being exclusive to a mega-priced collector’s box that won’t be re-issued and is destined in many cases to sit shrink-wrapped in temperature-controlled cabinets, so here’s hoping Limited Run finds a way to make those pages available on their own some day for the enjoyment of fans who aren’t pulling in Jazz Age incomes.
Special thanks: Jan.
*Don't worry though, we can Glass Is Half Empty that one too: zaarin points out that it's lacking the Roland MT-32 upgrade disk.
It happened for Save the World last year, and the joined forces of Skunkape and Bay Area Sound weren’t about to drop the ball on the even more ambitious soundtrack for the second season. What I'm saying is the re-release is available now from Bandcamp and Steam for a ludicrous ten bucks. (The old release is still up as well, so don’t be getting confused.)
As you know well from playing the remaster fifty times already, it includes eight all-new music tracks, extending an already gigantic score. It looks like the album cover got some rethought lettering as well (old versus new), though the comparison mostly just serves as a reminder of how awesome Purcell’s artwork is. One wonders: Since The Devil’s Playhouse never received a proper album back in 2010 and Skunkape seem to possess the kind of taste that would make addressing that an imperative, might we see the trilogy completed at last? I guess we’ll find out in a year or so. For now, exercise the privilege of owning Jared Emerson-Johnson’s staggering opus for Beyond Time and Space.
Yesterday brought a new video of the Skunkape crew playing twenty minutes or so of their latest Sam & Max remaster, commenting on some of the new stuff they've added:
One of the highlights is the much larger hole blown through the wall separating the Freelance Police's office and Flint Paper's, allowing the opening office scene to be cinematically shot through it. In fact, it's already the talk of the forum. But as a member of the "in" crowd you knew that already.
Source: IGN
Loyal readers who dug into our Bay Area Sound interview from April will not have been shocked to notice in Skunkape's announcement this morning that Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space Remastered will be boasting eight new music tracks. That's up from the five additional cues the first season received.
You might be wondering if these bonus arrangements will be of similarly high production values replete with live instruments. Well, let this tease that Skunkape just uploaded to their Youtube channel put that question to bed:
While it's been confirmed by implication nine different times now, Skunkape has officially announced their expected remaster of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, aka the second season of Telltale's better-with-each-installment take on Purcell's property after LucasArts fatefully said, "Nah, give us Thrillville."
Knowing you, you're probably still coming off the high of thwarting Hugh Bliss's hypnosis conspiracy in painstakingly re-lit HD, but Skunkape doesn't see your recovery time as their problem. They're ready to start hyping you up for the next mission in Sam and Max's oeuvre, which you may recall involves improbable excursions to the North Pole, Easter Island, a zombie rave in Stuttgart, the malleable fourth dimension, and the middle management bowels of Hell itself. Behold what these once poly-starved destinations look like in all their newly uprezzed fury by checking out the trailer:
Don't forget to start saving up for some absurd physical editions from Limited Run Games that history has sculpted us to anticipate are sure to follow this launch, and of course you'll want to get loudly and pre-emptively outraged about whatever CENSORSHIP! is sure to be committed by those known vandals of art over at Skunkape -- the better to impress your friends on the Steam forums.
Whatever you've gotta do to prepare your body and soul, be quick about it: launch is December 8th.
Source: Skunkape
Speaking of October traditions, an old Telltale classic just got dug up by the custodians at Skunkape. Submit some Halloween themed Sam & Max fan art for a chance to win Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space Remastered, a game which will exist by implication. Just follow the link below for all the details.
Source: Skunkape
