Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
grumpygamer.com
grumpygamer.com
Disney got the Monkey Island IP when they bought Lucas Arts. The first thing they did with it was to pull an excellent MI remake off the iOS Apple Store.
The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit.
So I really doubt that Ron will ever have his wish granted :(
If you're convinced it's bullshit, what do you think the real reason is instead?
He's not claiming they don't actually believe the reason they give. He's saying the reason is bullshit.
I also remember making gold master floppies for our products going back to 1987. It's actually a scary process because if you made any mistakes, you got back thousands-millions (depending on who you were) worthless disks back. Even sending out updates cost money and often we had to charge people in order to pay for duplication, packaging, shipping and sometimes a manual update. Often updates were the entire package of N disks; if lucky you can manage a patch disk.
Thinking back now I think there were still dinosaurs on the earth at the time too.
For instance nobody in the office is allowed to use red floppies except for master disks.
Errors and Omissions insurance?
Floppy-based releases were amazing. You knew exactly what was going to boot.
Interestingly, I think about Monkey Island a lot because I often tell people (only half jokingly) that the way that I think about learning conversational skills is by using the same mechanics as the sword fighting challenge in The Three Trials. As you gain experience sword fighting, you pick up new phrases and you eventually learn the situations in which you yourself can apply those phrases appropriately to defeat the other swords[wo]men. Similarly, I've found it quite effective to watch how other people use techniques to illicit specific reactions from people. After a while of seeing the same technique applied by different people for slightly different reasons, you can start using it yourself. Eventually you have a big bucket of techniques you can use whenever!
Just FYI, the word you're looking for is "elicit", not "illicit".
I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value you're getting from those $20 blanks!)
There was a class action lawsuit, and I eventually got a replacement drive (no relief for those wasted expensive, blanks). But the vindication that it was defective hardware, and nothing I did wrong helps. The manufacturer of the drive was Philips/Magnavox, but there were some other brands that were all linked back to this same defect that the class action lawsuit covered.
there was a slew of software hacks in most cd burning suites that'd attempt to deal with that problem across the industry.
believe it or not : time dependent FIFO buffers are capital H Hard. Or at least they were back then.. I suspect the damage done by poorly constructed FIFO buffers now is just more hidden, not exactly lessened.
If you're pulling a digital bit-stream off a disk then why does the reader matter?
Eventually I got stuck on a puzzle that I just couldn't figure out. Rather than giving up, I sent a physical letter through the USPS to Lucasarts explaining where I was stuck and asking for help. A few weeks later, I received a response with Lucasarts letterhead with the solution to the puzzle. I actually ended up sending two or three letters to finally complete the game. Talk about a different time and place.
Of course a few years later I racked up $30 in hint line charges while making my way through Sam and Max Hit the Road. It took a lot of chores to pay my mom back for that.
I learnt a lot of English from playing text adventure games. It was a fun way to learn a language. Whenever I encountered English words I did not know I had an English dictionary by the side of the computer and looked up the word I did not understand. Of course I am also thankful to my official English school teachers but playing text adventure games was a very fun way to learn a new language! You had to comprehend the text in the game to be able to play. It was somehow a bit hard but you got the reward of playing from learning.
I do the same thing nowadays with games like Animal Crossing and Ace Attorney. It's easier now than ever to find translations for other languages than English.
He says they didn't have time in the schedule to mail it, so they would go to the airport, find a flight to London, walk up to the gate and find a passenger and ask them to carry a pack of disks with them, and tell them someone at the other end would meet them at the gate to pick it up!
Man how times have changed in 30 years.
Seems to work really well, from the POV of the driver, the sender, and the recipient. Cheaper than DHL, more trustworthy than the post office, faster than both!
It's routine enough I can't imagine the bus service doesn't know about it, my bet is they tolerate it because it lets the drivers make a living wage (and thus gets you better drivers) and because most packages aren't big enough to be disruptive.
The soonest flight was a passenger flight, not a cargo flight, so they bought the box a ticket and sent it on its way. At the receiving airport, a logistics company picked it up and drove it straight to the office in need.
Thing is, the logistics company sent a semi. Because they hadn't been told the size of the shipment, just its declared value, and they reasoned that anything worth mid six figures must be big. So this intrepid truck driver couldn't (in a timely fashion) get close to the building, and ended up jogging across the parking lot with the card under his arm, as the tech headed down the elevator to meet him at the door.
"Sign here. What the heck is this thing, anyway?"
"Twenty thousand people's ability to call 911. Thanks, gotta go!"
But I always tempered the anxiety by reminding myself that no matter what happens, no one's life was on the line from any downtime I might be responsible for.
I bought my Indiana Jones bluray set a few years back and promptly dropped the fourth movie in the trash with the wrapping.
As to what makes the game great, I think it's the perfect combination of humor, pirates, and difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s. It also has an amazing soundtrack.
Look! A three headed monkey!
You must've been a clever kid and/or I'm a bit dense :) When I played most of the Monkey Island games as a teenager / young adult there were definitely several times when I had to resort to GameFAQs.
I don’t recall it to be as frustrating as say King’s Quest but then again it might be nostalgia.
I can attribute my debugging skills to playing these games as a child. As you had to be meticulous.
The only reason we beat these as kids was having a near infinite amount of time to waste.
And it was so, so easy to kill a cat. You use the automatic repeat-move key and auto-hit when you collide with a monster, and if you ever find a cat anywhere that way, its dead. People would rage-quit and start all over, it was that frustrating.
The game is actually running the full original code alongside the new Special Edition stuff. We didn’t want to disturb the original codebase, so we ran it basically unchanged on another thread and the new game loop would surgically peek and poke some state every frame (animations, etc) to get synchronized. That’s how we essentially layered all the new art and sound on top of the original game. There was a lot of reverse engineering of data and asset formats that we had to do because all the original authors had since left, perhaps with the exception of EJ.
The F10 hotkey to transition between the old and the new art was actually a debugging feature that our lead rendering engineer wrote during development, but everyone agreed that it was too good not to ship it as an actual feature of the Special Edition.
https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special...
We few years ago we were lucky enough to meet Ron at PAX when he was there promoting Thimbleweed Park. Since then, I saw him fairly often at a neighborhood coffee shop here in Seattle.
Earlier this year, at the start of the pandemic, my brother and his partner ended up making an adventure game in the style of Monkey Island. It's almost an homage and has a few shout outs to those in the know. Check it out here:
https://www.landlubbersgame.com.
Thanks Ron and team for the good times!
Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? I never interpreted it as being what was actually going on.
Ron certainly seems to hint that it wasn't a trick by LeChuck and he had plans for what to do with that in the MI3 he never got to build, and likely never will get to build.
Given how much the games were based on the Disney ride and a lot of metatextual jokes throughout both of the first two games (prominent Cola machines throughout, as one easy for instance). It is possible that a literal interpretation of the ending of MI2 is warranted and whatever Ron had planned would have continued from there.
(Personally, I've grown to an impression that Ron was just as much pantsing the whole series as anything and even if Disney got it in their heads to give the entire IP back to Ron with carte blanche to design his own MI3 however he saw fit, I feel like Ron would have a harder time designing his way out of the box of that ending taen he likes to let on by teasing that there was a big secret he had planned. ;)
Yes. As they walk out into the theme park, LeChuck looks at the camera and his eyes glow.
I think this is just another entry in the genre of "there was no plan, so the writers added several different plot hooks on spec".
Much worse when it was ROM media - Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete because of a bug that made it into the release.
Still, this stuff was really rare. Very different QA mindset when recalling the product is impossible or expensive.
Well, they were right.
The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.
Thanks Ron.
But, is there an official port, like the "remastered" versions of Final Fantasy that are in the Play store?
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col...
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special...
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lec...
The game runs in DOS. DOSbox should be fine...
My understanding is that someone backported the speech from the remastered version into the original game. So you can play the original MI1 in SCUMMVM, with speech. It's great.
edit: this might be the link https://archive.org/details/MONKEYISLAND_201903
It's a bit hard to describe why, but there's a lot of both dry and surreal lines in the game, and hearing Guybrush deliver them all in the same bemused voice can get a little monotonous, and makes the character come across differently from just reading them.
It's technically piracy, so buy the originals at GOG so you don't feel too guilty.
Great games, and this is the best way to play them.
If you have an original copy you can run it with ScummVM: https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/
Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick made a new game in 2014 too, it's excellent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed_Park
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
There is even some code in there.
Fans would only love a chance to return to that world as envisioned by its original creators, and even if all the character etc. names have to be change it would be better than waiting forever for Disney to do anything with the IP given how it conflicts with Pirates of the Caribbean.
It chronicles Tim Schafer (ass't designer on Monkey Island and designer of numerous other LucasArts classics) and Ron (early on, he eventually leaves) building out their kickstarter adventure game.
It's funny that having played Monkey Island 1 & 2 well into my adulthood, I still get somehow very nostalgic and tender vibes from it.
I want to deeply thanks everyone who worked on those games. Thank you.
Tsk. Please. We've all seen CD disks before, you know.
Consensus at the time was a disk with a K was writable, a disc with a C was read-only.
Also, it's "pedant", not "pendant" :P
http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island
(And FWIW, my brother played marimba and some assorted percussion on Escape from Monkey Island. One of his weirdest gigs ever...)
Here’s an instruction on DosBox MT32 emulation if you’re curious: https://blog.zyrain.org/2016/11/roland-mt-32-and-emulating-i...
Here’s a clip of the MT32 opening soundtrack if you just want to have a listen https://youtu.be/i3dB0qEcG20
You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or "needle" as we used to call it - a joke riffing on those archaic record player things that mum and dad danced to. We would of course be listening to our modern cassettes in our dodgy knock off Walkmans and rubbish headphones.
You will notice that there are two small square cut outs on each disc. That means that grumpygamer had access to the latest double sided discs. When you got to the end of side A, you turned it over and engaged side B to continue loading.
That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1/4" effort was actually ... floppy. I don't miss them at all but I still have a few around the place.
I had a real ball playing this game.
>Yeah... talk to the Mouse. I don't own any of it.
Makes me remember this open day we organized a year or two back at work. We had some floppy disks laying around and this one kid pulled his dad's jacket and told him that we had 3D printed save icons here.
For some reason, I love the universal impulse to throw ironic shade at millennials/Gen Z whenever a floppy disk comes up. Like, we’ve all independently decided to embrace our deepest boomer tendencies when it comes to a single innocent topic.
It’s nice.
I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.
Computers have a long and complicated history. And the technical parts are being abstracted away more and more.
I think it's important to help people understand how we got to where we are today, and why it is (or isn't) an improvement from the way things used to be.
>> I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.
Expect it's not even funny, it's just super cringey and reeks of gatekeeping and condescension.
(I personally enjoyed the jokes)
I feel a better way to be jokey about the old tech, is to just be amazed at it. Folks know how to google something when they don't know what it is
Those four disks cost less than $1 each, and each individual one holds over one million bytes? Amazing.
They sound so useful that I bet people built whole collections of them, including devices just for organizing and protecting.
I can even imagine a hobby industry of unneeded tools for dealing with them.
It's humor not a joke. There's deep wonderment at how much the world has changed behind it. A 16GB thumb drive holds 10,000 times more information. A floppy disk doesn't even have the most rudimentary electronics built in. You can't even turn one on.
The problematic part is "for the younger readers out there." Leave that out and it's fine. Replace it with "Fuck, I'm old" and it's pretty good.
Technical articles are (well) technical and the author is not responsible for explaining what a floppy disk is in a world where google and wikipedia are eleven keystrokes away. The reader has to work too.