Mojo asked and GDC answered: Jenn Sandercock’s ReMI has made its way online. And to save you the click, here it is.
I haven’t had the chance to watch it yet, but will very much carve out the hour to do so ASAP. As should you—what else do you really have going on if you’re reading this?
Update: After clearly exceeding their streaming limits from hoards of Mojo views, the embedded video looks to have been blocked from outside GDC’s site. So, go view it there.
It was on a short hiatus, but as most have noticed, The Adventurer made its triumphant return last week. And if you’re one of those precious holdouts who haven’t subscribed to our newsletter yet, well, get over yourself and do so right now.
Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Substack has also launched its Twitter alternative called Notes. After having given the service a once-over, the CEO 
put forth a decree instructing Mojo’s social media staff to initiate a pilot program utilizing it as a potential Mastodon replacement. This is to say, if you subscribe to The Adventurer, not only will you receive our newsletter, but you’ll also get to enjoy our social presence. That’s a win-win for you and us!
(Rumors that the CEO is using Mojo’s Notes metrics to strategically place his new endeavor, Insert Disk 64, are still unsubstantiated.)
Well, here’s something: Broken Age’s Kickstarter campaign launched ten years ago. To either mourn time passing us by or to celebrate the occasion (depending on your point of view), Game Informer has put together a roundtable interview with the development leads behind the game.
Tim Schafer, Greg Rice, Lee Petty, and Anna Kipnis are all there, and there’s even a “special thanks” to one James Spafford. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but the odds of it being good seem good.
And what was Mojo up to ten years ago today? “LEC old timers submit to creepy Youtube interviews”—strangely related-ish. (Update! Other than the fact that the news post was from 2012—look, I can’t be expected to know that it’s 2023. In 2013 we were doing zilch on this day.)
And it’s 2 hours and 22 minutes. That makes it the longest of the Indy movies, but not to the extent of outrageousness. And it is a finale, after all. What with movies beginning only after nineteen hours of ads, though, you still pretty much need to clear your day.
In other Dial of Destiny news, it turns out that attendees of the Star Wars Celebration panel, where the new trailer debuted, were also treated to a six-minute set piece from the middle of the movie. Inevitably, it’s leaked out in phone quality. While that’s more continuous footage from the film than I personally need to see outside of the proper context, the reactions have been good. And that’s good.
Source: Collider
Back in the day, LucasArts included a trade-in form inside the box of The Secret of Monkey Island that allowed you to mail in your purchased version of the game (plus a nominal fee) to exchange it for another. So for example, if you had the VGA version on 3.5” diskettes but decided what your heart really desired was the EGA version on 5.25” diskettes, you could fill out the card and send it off along with a check and your diskettes. Within two business weeks, you’d find yourself with the replacement disks and, presumably, happiness ever after.
In June 2002, our own telarium wrote up a personal odyssey of redeeming that Monkey Island coupon a decade after the fact, to test the extent of the company's honor. When we undertook a mission to restore all our old features, we were never able to find the two photographs that telarium included in this particular one, which is kind of lethal given the premise of it.
In the end, the retired staffer said “eff it” and reproduced the photos, and now the classic feature rides again without compromise. While we were at it, we submitted a copy to the Library of Congress for reasons of redundancy. Weirdly, they only accepted it on the condition that we send them a $10 money order.
Because he likes breaking my heart, Steve Purcell’s official Sam & Max presence these days remains…a Facebook page. Though he often uses it to re-run vintage Sam & Max art, he’ll occasionally slip in a new piece.
Trouble is, you pretty much have to be as diligent as samandmax.co.uk to notice such things in a timely manner, and who could be expected to be their equal? So if you keep up with them (as you should), you already know that Purcell rang in the new year with this gem:
Hey, why not? With the as-of-yet-undated release of The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered due out sometime this year, it will indeed be a noteworthy year for Max. It’s also the 30th anniversary of Sam & Max Hit the Road, so maybe someone out there should get cracking on the retrospective? We did ours 15 years in, so now it’s your turn. We’ll even host it for you.
Update: It's been brought to my attention that the Twitter account https://twitter.com/samandmax does a reliable job of posting any new art that Purcell puts out, so you may want to be keeping tabs on that as well.
Source: Sam & Max Funhouse
You probably noticed that the forums have been down for the past day. Rest assured that our crack staff of technicians, plus zaarin, are at work on it now, and that before you know it you’ll be exchanging favorite EMI moments with cyberspace’s most refined minds once again.
In the meantime, why not read Remi’s ReMI article forty more times? It was met with Ron approval, which more or less makes it holy writ.
Sure, the announcement anniversary just passed, and the seven-month anniversary of its release is two weeks away. So, consider this either a dessert or an amuse bouche: “Remi Returns to Return to Monkey Island,” a look back at the game now that the new-car smell has worn off.
And, there isn’t much more to say about it. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t. Either way: read it! You know you want to!
Over in London today is the Star Wars Celebration, an annual convention during which Star Wars, as I understand it, is celebrated.
Lucasfilm still found the time to squeeze in a panel for Indiana Jones in the Dial of Destiny, where audiences were treated to the official trailer. This follows the teaser trailer back in December and the Super Bowl spot in February. Volunteer yourself to be more Twitter Trend than human by checking it out yourself below.
Disney has also shared a new poster for the movie:
Discuss the new unveilings below or in our Indy 5 forum thread. Maybe some of you could pool your talents and throw together an official web page as an act of almsgiving; times are so tough for the studio, IndianaJones.com still redirects to a Facebook page.
The world has been awaiting a worthy follow-up to telarium’s twenty-two year old interview with Gary Winnick, the first artist hired by Lucasfilm Games as well as Ron’s creative accomplice on Maniac Mansion and Thimbleweed Park, and pundits are finally ready to say that a contender has emerged.
A highlight comes at 43:30 when Gary holds up his original character designs for Maniac Mansion. I’m sure if they had been left for Lucasfilm to vault they’d be landfill by now. Protect that binder, Gary.
At the close of the interview, Daniel Albu teases that his next interview will be with Bill Tiller. May the roster of LucasArts veterans at his disposal never tap out.
Source: Conversations with Curtis
Twenty-four hours remain for you to decide whether you want to have electricity this month or own any/all of these from your rapacious friends at Limited Run Games:
Meanwhile, folks on the forums are reminiscing that it was a year ago today that Ron announced a new Monkey Island game as a vicious April Fools joke. Still can’t believe some of you fell for that. There’s a sucker born every minute, I suppose.
Source: Limited Run Games
Substantiating earlier rumors, Disney plans to premiere Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the Cannes Film Festival in May. While Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was also unveiled to the world at Cannes (not to mention last year’s Top Gun: Maverick -- a release that Disney would surely love to replicate in more ways than one), the June 30th release date for Dial of Destiny means an entire month will separate this debut and the general release.
It’s hard not to view this as a vote of confidence on the studio’s part given how much soaking that allows the word of mouth out of that screening to do. Imagine the render quality they must have achieved with the prairie dogs this time.
Source: Variety
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the best Aprils non-fools schtick in recent memory, we’re seeing some more “lessons learned”-type information making its way to the public. Take producer Jenn Sandercock’s recent GDC talk, The Production Secrets of 'Return to Monkey Island', from which you can download the presentation deck. I haven’t read it myself, but couldn’t help but notice this tidbit while skimming through it.
According to one David Fox, Return’s musicians also held a talk called Thirty Years Later: Scoring 'Return to Monkey Island'. We haven’t gotten our grubby hands or eyes on that one yet—if you can help us track it down, we’ll pay in hugs and love. Not a bad little soundtrack, that.
Statements by Bob Iger and Kevin Feige last month sent the signal that Disney has sailed past the honeymoon phase of torching kajillions of dollars at a time on streaming content, and they will consequently be rolling back their production of Star Wars programming for Disney Plus to a mere surfeit.
It hardly needs to be said aloud that a belt-tightening policy of somewhat-less Star Wars at Lucasfilm means an absolute banishment of anything else. Historically, Lucasfilm has never required having Disney as a parent company to satisfy that expectation all by its lonesome, but it’s been an unusual last few years in this regard between the ill-fated revival of Willow on Disney Plus and an incoming finale for Indiana Jones that was said to be spawning a live action television project on the same service. Well, about that:
I’d be telling quite the whopper if I acted like I lament whatever that Indy show was gonna be, but Mojo’s memory is long enough to recognize that this strategy of Daring To Consider A Slate Consisting Of Half A Percent Of Not-Star Wars Before Abruptly Coming To Our Senses is…well, a classic.
Source: DiscussingFilm
Whether you know him from his animation career at LucasArts, his stint as Creative Director of Telltale Games in its earliest days, his comic strip Grickle (whose universe the Puzzle Agent series occupies), or his movie credits (Coraline, The Boxtrolls), Graham Annable is definitely One Of The Principals, so there was no escape for him as the latest subject of Daniel Albu’s “A Conversation with…” series.
Don’t let your unseemly, targeted lust for the Sam & Max: Freelance Police juice (29:28) get in the way of watching the whole thing.
Source: YouTube
I often forget that I gave Fallen Order a shot, but I did and it wasn’t exactly “my thing.” That said, the 2019 Star Wars game was well-received by many, and I will admit—the sequel is looking pretty good.
Being that I’m the guy who repeatedly, and only somewhat sarcastically, used the front page to hype up the approach of the Willow television show, it might have been noticeable that I fell silent when the thing actually arrived. Well, Mom always said that if you don’t have anything nice to say…
But hey, just ‘cause the show’s aggressively tropey Young Adult vision wasn’t for me, doesn’t mean it wasn’t for somebody. Plus, you gotta cherish when Lucasfilm puts anything non-Star Wars on its docket. It’s sorta Mojo’s raison d’etre, if I might invoke a little…Portuguese?
So I stand with the bereaved in reporting that Disney/Lucasfilm has given the show the axe rather than allow Jon Kasdan to make good on his outstandingly presumptuous post-credit implications, presumably on the grounds that it didn’t have lightsabers in it. On the plus side, you’re effectively left with an eight hour, live action Willow 2 quasi-starring Warwick Davis, which few people over the past thirty-five years would have called possible.
I’ll also take this time to point out that the show’s soundtrack, featuring compositions by James Newton Howard and Xander Rodzinski when it wasn’t going in for horrific rock covers, is available from all the Mickey-approved platforms in a three-volume digital release from Walt Disney Records. It’s another important precedent for those of us who have our fingers crossed for more official soundtrack releases for certain non-obvious Lucasfilm properties.
Now, dry those tears and let’s get that throwback graphic adventure continuation up and running. May I suggest David Fox?
Source: Deadline
At least for consoles, that is.
As pointed out by Jn, you can now pick up a boxed version of ReMI for $35.
Let’s be honest, you can never own too many copies of the game. Run to Amazon and buy, buy, buy!
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
