If you missed out on the last few episodes of Conversations with Curtis (as we have), it’s time to catch up. And what better place to start than with this Kyle Balda interview? Balda is mostly famous for being the intern behind the DOTT credit screen (our CEO’s favorite game ) and also directed small indie features like Minions.
What else have you potentially missed? Hal Barwood; Mark Ferrari; Ronzo himself. Maybe even more! So go check it all out.
Boss Fight Books is now taking pre-orders for their upcoming release of the Oral History of Day of the Tentacle, available in both paperback and e-book formats.
Don't delay; order yours today!
Source: Boss Fight Books
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
Bill Tiller must be making headway on that A Vampyre Story 2 demo he mentioned at the beginning of the year. Over on his Instagram page, he shared some background art from the long-stalled game and the following caption.
Here is a little taste of A Vampyre Story 2 : A Bat's Tale. Its a view of the new town Mona explores, Gothford Falls. Also the trailer for A Vampyre Story is now up on the ZOOM Platform YouTube channel if you haven't seen it yet. You will notice on the little snippet of the map that Mona's boat is washed up on the beach on the northwest coast of France. Something must have happened on the voyage! But don't worry, the crew was all bad!
What publisher could afford not to pick this up? Bad Brain, thy redemption arc is nigh.
Source: Bill Tiller's Instagram
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.
It’s no secret that, despite Mojo’s bandwagon-spurning affection for the movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ended up being a massive box office face-plant for Disney. Since the studio long ago stopped granting me gross point participation in their feature films, I am happy to report no personal financial impact, but it does raise the question of the fate of whatever MachineGames is working on.
Hypothetically, one should have nothing to do with the other, but having already noticed a certain deafening silence around the Indy game despite its two-and-a-half-years-ago origins, one feels justified in growing a bit jaded.
Today, you can breathe a sigh of relief. In a new interview with Bethesda big shot Todd Howard, the game is given an official status of, erm, “midway.”
Howard is showing no sign of slowing down. As well as executive producing the Fallout show, he’s midway through executive producing an Indiana Jones game – a “bucket-list thing” for a man whose favourite movie is 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s developed by MachineGames, the team behind Wolfenstein. “They’ve got the whole Nazi killing thing down,” he says, “and they’re doing a really great job.”
Of course, they say such things about Beyond Good and Evil 2 about every fifteen years, but hey, let’s be optimistic.
Source: British GQ
2023 continues to belt out its remastered games, with this week's flavour being 1995's Star Wars: Dark Forces. Check the reveal trailer here:
The remaster is being handled by Nightdive Studios, who recently released a "benchmark" quality remaster with Quake II. It's releasing on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam, promised to be in 4K and 120 FPS (FPS in this context means "the new 'omg gr@phics!!!'").
Dark Forces is an FPS that has you blasting through Star Destroyers, Coruscant, and a yacht as a guy with the overtly sci-fi fantasy name "Kyle". Kyle's job? To "battle every man and machine the Imperial Forces can muster" in order to stop the rise of "a doomsday army - one that, if finished, will become the final cog in the Empire's arsenal of terror and domination."
I think the original trilogy answered this tantalising "will they/won't they" (as in "will they/won't they singlehandedly destroy every man and machine the Imperial Army can muster, or will it show up in the movies?"), but I doubt you're signing-up for this for story, anyway.
More info as it becomes available.
Ron’s next game—presumably the one that goes by A Little Something on Wikipedia—has been revealed just a little bit more...
Sounds like it could be a fun little something to me!
As we reported earlier in the summer, Bill Tiller teamed up with the publisher Zoom-Platform to get A Vampyre Story in fighting shape for newer machines during a self-imposed hiatus from digital storefronts. The title has relaunched on Steam at a discounted price and armed with various updates, which you can find laid out here.
The occasion was seen as grounds to relaunch the long-kaput Autumn Moon web site, complete with a refreshed logo:
Could this signal a new lease on life for the label? Who knows, but in the meantime you gonna want that TruCoat them emotes, whatever those might be.
Source: Autumn Moon
If you frequent our forums—and why wouldn’t you?!—you will have seen this thread from bot-meister JP LeBreton. Entitled “a comprehensive collection of all LucasArts background art (1987-2000),” his current project is... Well, let the man describe it himself:
A few weeks ago I started working on a spare time project: a complete collection of all the background art from every LucasArts adventure game (Maniac thru EMI), in palettized PNG format and in its original resolution and aspect ratio.
Read the whole thread for more, or, if you’re more of the passive type, go check out the bot that posts the backgrounds to Mastodon: LucasArts Places. While we can’t confirm elTee broke down in tears after seeing this EGA scene, odds seem good that it happened.
Looking for more passive entertainment? We post a daily screenshot both to Mastodon and M. And even ol' SCUMM Bar has gotten in on the fun: Follow @scummbar for a daily Monkey Island scene. (“More to come,” we have been told.)
Remember in 2003, when all the Domino bricks started falling, and we learned that, yes, a Monkey Island movie was in production at some point? In 2013, we published a short article about it on The SCUMM Bar, and it has now resurfaced here on Mojo.
In 2021, Polygon published its own story with a lot more official-ish information, of course, but it never really caught the zeitgeist angle quite as vividly. So, go read and relive the movie that thank god never was.
Over to Marius:
Want to relive the Monkey Island 2 commentary tracks without the hassle of playing the game or dealing with YouTube? Mojo got you covered with our new Commentary Browser. Thirty-one tracks, all at your fingertips, right here!
Usual caveats apply: Minimal beta testing, may not work on your device, etc.
Rumor has it the CEO is already working on expanding this with his favorite game, Day of the Tentacle, so stay tuned.
As some of you already know, we made a startling discovery last week: By all accounts, Stan and Elaine had a serious thing going in The Secret of Monkey Island before—or until?—Guybrush showed up.
To further dive into this fundamental plot twist, we sent our software architect department into the depths of the two first games and their discovery... Well, let’s just say that Return now is fully and wholly explained.
Make your own conclusions from rock-solid proof that never was run and edited through multiple pieces of software.
We keep digging through the archive, this time stumbling across our #monkey-island IRC chats with Ron and Dom.
All I can do is apologize.
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
Some of you may remember Jake and Marius’ stream of the two original Monkey Islands—we documented the first one right here Now, they’re doing it again, albeit with SeMI.
That’s tomorrow (Saturday), 11am PT/8pm CEST. Be there—the cool kids are sure to be.
Our trip down the old and dusty interview caverns continues. This time we’ve pulled seven of 'em out of the vault and combined them into one “Curse of Monkey Island Retro Interview Bonanza.” Some pre-launch, some post. They’re the type of texts that probably will be taught in universities for decades to come.
Sincere apologies for the lack of any pictures. In the early aughts, we were more concerned about the page loading on a modem than anything. Now read.
