Speed running Monkey Island

Well the post you are commenting on is the original developer of both the game and SCUMM, so it is not really a decompilation. That said it would be cool to get a commented version of the original code if that exist.

Also the tasvideos forum is nice to lean about games on though they are not much for point and click games.

As a younger dev I often dreamed of devs releasing the source code to ancient games so that I could learn from it, but now that I know how corporate works I've made my peace that it will happen rarely or never.

I bet that devs in a company like LucasArts these days need to wait for weeks on corporate to give permission to use a alternate email client, just imagine coming up with a proposal to abandon copyright claim on something. It just can't happen, you would have a very hard time even finding one single person inside the company who might actually have the authority and pull to greenlight it.

Considering how easy it is to emulate Graphic Adventures thanks to ScummVM, I doubt releasing the source code would impact the sales in any shape or form. People that want to play for free already have the easiest life possible. I think it's one of those cases where emulating is as much convenient as grabbing a copy on Steam.

You rise a good point. After X years releasing the code of many things would benefit the public so much without hurting at all the owners, are there movements about this concept?

I actually think most proprietary code should be open sourced eventually. There needs to be really good reason not to, and I don't see those applying to most code.

That was very good!

There are no original compilers of SCUMM script available online as far as I know, although certainly Ron Gilbert and Aaron Giles and probably some other LucasArts programmers have the originals.

I don't think there were even any samples of the original scripts online when ScummC was developed so it can be forgiven for not matching the original format :)

What you call "scummL" isn't even publicly described in any other way than by the kind of snippets like in this article. You can find some more in GDC slides, but that's pretty much it.

Here's what looks like a manual for SCUMM, with examples and all:

https://tandell.com/misc/SCUMM-Tutorial-0.1.pdf

I played some text-based adventure game which also had graphics.

I wish I could remember what it was. It was cool for the early 90's, sort of fantasy-horror haunted house kind of game.

I recall finding a bug on a replay of the game, where I accidentally typed a command one room early in the house, and it immediately went to the end game screen. Apparently the bug was that at any time you could basically type something like, "Open the last door" and you would immediately finish the game.

That's got to be the fastest speedrun I've seen, just by virtue that the game intro was a lot shorter than Monkey Island.

Press Alt+W to instantly win the game.

Wow. that game is so difficult. I spent hours and hours on it in my youth and never got anywhere lol. I didn't know you could do it in 30 minutes though.

Of course speedrunners will know all the puzzles in advance. Which kinda defeats the purpose of such a game.

How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

Just to have at least one counterpoint in this thread, but I loved the ending. Much, much better, IMO, than a non-meta epic fight with LeChuck, for example.

I took it as a very interesting and profound discussion about the role of games and fantasy in our lives as adults after playing it from a different perspective as kids. The dialogs during the ending are very well thought and thought-provoking. The role of Elaine in it is special.

I loved the whole game, but the ending brought it to a complete new level for me. It’s probably something that I’ll want to play again a few years from now.

After playing Thimbleweed park, it became clear to me that Ron's a huge fan of David Lynch, whose films often explore Buddhist or Hindu themes of reality as a dream we create inside our heads. I think that this theme appears in most of his games, and the endings of MI2 and Return are no different. When I finished MI2 as a teenager, I felt cheated too, but now as an adult that has spent a lot of time meditating and exploring eastern philosophy, I think there's a lot more to it than I could appreciate at that age.

That ending was such infuriating sophomoric "meta" bullshit it only cemented my perception of Curse as being the best MI game.

I don't think the point is to speedrun a modded game, but instead to understand how the random events work to exploit them in your advantage

The rules vary between games, but generally it's up to the community to decide what's allowed.

I'm not sure if I remember the details correctly, but I think a few months back there was a moist critical speedrun challenge where the game had to be patched using a third party tool in order to prevent crashes.

As long as the rules are clear and everyone is on a level playing field then it's fair.

Speed running games is an awesome hobby. I've been watching the community for over a decade and it's really amazing the creativity and skill speed runners demonstrate. When you get down to it high level speed running is really no different from sophisticated software testing--the best speed runners figure out bugs and how to exploit them for maximum speed. It's really a cool software development-adjacent sport IMHO.

While I have no interest in speed running any game, it is kind of entertaining to see what people come up with.

are you seriously calling Ron Gilbert a rookie

Such an odd complaint. Not only is this not really a forum about games, but also the recent Zelda release was at the very top for like a whole day.