Return to Monkey Island, Coming 2022
returntomonkeyisland.com
returntomonkeyisland.com
Also, a few years ago Gilbert and many of the others working on this new game made a retro-styled point-and-click adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1]. It wasn't a smash hit in terms of sales, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and had some very sharp dialogue and design, and reassures me that the creative team haven't lost their touch and this won't be another Underworld Ascendant debacle.
It's going to be really interesting to see how they're going to pull that off given the twist ending.
To me it's very clearly about Gilbert's past remarks that he'll never do another Monkey Island unless he fully owns the IP. Tossing Murray into the water means "yes, I don't own the IP and yet I'm making another Monkey Island, you can stop pointing it out".
It's a fantastic game, It's basically what I always wanted out of an adventure game when I was a kid, and what's more the touch screen is a perfect interface for adventure games.
It was disheartening when 3D FPS games took over in the late 90s and MS fortified that with advertisements targeting the 'bro' segment for their new Xbox console and Halo franchise.
I was worried that Grim Fandango (still my favourite, omg that soundtrack) was the swan song of the genre but I'm so pleased to see that gaming as a whole has exploded and game development is so much more accessible than it used to be so that the genre has found it's niche. I genuinely think that an ipad mini form factor is utterly perfect for the genre so it pleases me that kids of a new generation can explore these neat little story worlds once again.
Also it's good to see that Disney isn't smothering the video game IP that they got when they bought LucasFilm. It seems like this is them testing the waters, and I hope that it is a resounding success that encourages them to do more with that goldmine that is LucasArts.
Imagine Disney making Coco or Encanto when they're sitting on the Grim Fandango IP. :D
Kinda got stuck in Thimbleweed but honestly hadn't felt so immersed in a game's setting since the old days.
It may just be me, I enjoy breaking the fourth wall but not really tearing it completely down and burning the remains.
> That quote is a reference to a manifesto Gilbert wrote in 2013 about his dreams of creating another Monkey Island game [https://grumpygamer.com/if_i_made_another_monkeyisland]. The post made clear that Monkey Island would never officially return unless Gilbert owned the series' IP. "I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own," Gilbert wrote. "Not only would I allow you to make Monkey Island fan games, but I would encourage it."
Found at https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/ron-gilbert-confirms-...
The skull is being irritating bringing it up so he hits it into the water.
Basically “yeah I know what I said, but fuck it”
> In the years since that post went live, the Disney-helmed Lucasfilm Games has been more generous about helping its most venerable alumni re-release original games with minimal interference, and the company also increased its efforts to put its biggest properties in the hands of new developers. [...] Gilbert hasn't said what deal he struck with LucasArts' rightsholders, but it's arguably good enough to make him eat some very famous "not making another Monkey Island" words.
At the risk of reading some tea leaves, the style kinda reads to me like his name was a last-minute addition to the trailer, too.
Anyhow, he may have more ownership than a mere employee of a company would. There's a lot of gradations of levels of "ownership". It perfectly possible to write a contract that gives Ron Gilbert the right to make any game he wants with the franchise with minimal oversight and forbids the original owner from making any use of the IP, while turning over a certain amount of money for the privilege, and that may satisfy him creatively, while also satisfying the money guys (since I imagine they're otherwise making a whopping hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year on the IP rights otherwise).
I hope/wonder if they will tweak the mechanics on this new release.
It was a more complex albeit a simpler time.
I think Loom was the hardest for me.
The Lucasarts games were not the hardest in the genre by any means. By the time they came along there was a huge legacy from both Infocom and Sierra and those also had parser issues(you wouldn't be able to trial-and-error verbs or nouns without sitting down with a dictionary) and softlocking events(don't eat that custard pie, King Graham, you might need it later).
It's interesting to compare with Japanese adventures, which gravitated towards a straightforward menu of choice actions by the late 80's but mostly stayed in first person instead of using an onscreen avatar, and from there, visual novels became a standard gameplay style. (It takes a lot less animation to show first person scenes, and many of the titles were targeting the higher-res display tech of PC-88/PC-98, which might have something to do with it) The Ace Attorney games are good examples of this style of game, and they have a particular strategy of focusing on one style of interaction at a time(separate scenes for investigation and trial).
Elaine: What’s that?
Guybrush: Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
Elaine: A what?
Guybrush: I don't know. I have no idea why I said that.
The artwork and soundtrack for COMI were absolutely gorgeous though.
"You look like a monkey in a negligee!"
The three-option interaction medallion was actually quite clever, and I really don't want to be stuck staring at a piece of the screen deciding if I should "use" it, "push" it, or "pull" it.
At least the right click uses a verb intelligently most of the time. I think I used pull once in a situation it wasn't needed in?
From perusing the forums, he's also much more aware of translation issues with all the verbs, so we may see something different this time around.
Considering the huge surge in popularity for retro-style gaming recently, the grainy Quake-type FPS shooters and pixel-art games, I've been surprised there hasn't been a similar upwelling of traditional adventure games - not just the Monkey Island type (there have been a few of those, but no megahits?) but also the old text adventure games. Is anyone trying to do an Infocom-like out there, or an evolution of it, in a somewhat mainstreamy way?
That said, I'm one of those weird people that like the retro look and I wish the art style was more along the lines of MI2 and low-rez like (using techniques like they did in Thimbleweed Park). Still, pretty cool they are doing this.
I'm already counting up the time I've mentally put aside to play this.
I've absolutely loved this series of games ever since I first played them as a kid in the 90s. I didn't think we'd ever see another MI Game with Ron Gilbert involved so for me this is wonderful news, I really can't wait for this to come out.
Your choice mattered.