> The day has come and gone and I didn't get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside.
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 :(
It's not typically how these things go, but Amber Heard was abusing Johnny Depp and holding him hostage. There are lengthy audio recordings where she admits to hitting him, threatening that the public will never believe his story.
She dragged his name through the mud in the court of public opinion, and it turned out she was actually an abuser. It ruined his reputation and cost him a lot of money.
Jonny Depp lost work throughout the publicized drama, while Heard continued to get bigger roles. Now that the audio is public, Heard has been let go from her contracts on Aquaman and other films.
There's an ongoing lawsuit, and it's probably best to withhold judgment as to Depp's guilt until it's concluded. The only evidence we have is of Amber's behavior. We have no evidence Depp did anything wrong.
Oh right - was going to say they kept the other games up so they obviously aren't doing it because they hate games or out of spite. Reasonable to believe their stated business reason.
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.
I got a bit nervous when someone found out that the computer we used to burn our master CDs on where infected with a virus. Luckily all disks were clean.
If you have the money for the premium, you can get just about any kind of coverage you want. There are coverage types that protect a company from an honest mistake ruining the company. While the payout may not be able to keep the company intact, it could at least keep from total collapse. Insurance to protect if you get sued for mistakes. These are not the types of things you worry about as an employee of bigCorp, but in a start up, you learn about these things quickly if you find good business advisors.
The thing I always screwed up when copying was getting the disks backward and having to start over. Did you do anything special to reduce human error, like special stickers or colored disks?
For instance nobody in the office is allowed to use red floppies except for master disks.
When I was growing up my brother and I used to spend a week each summer at our cousins' house. They had a copy of Monkey Island and each summer we would tell ourselves, "This is the year we're going to beat Monkey Island." Each year we never made it much further than the first Island. Eventually our cousins lent us the game and we beat it over the course of a few months.
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!
I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks trying to get a single disk to verify. This took hours and at the time blanks were something like 20$ each. I spent the whole night stressing I would get in trouble for spending so much and maybe I should have waited for someone who knew the process better. CTO told me the next day what being a single day late to get them to mfg would have cost and I felt better.
The senior guys should not have gone for drinks until someone had verified the copy. They could have dinked around the office for an hour until the first one failed. You got left holding the bag. A very expensive one from the sounds of it.
Yeah, that particular configuration of SR guys didn't really work out. Why they went drinking and left me to finish up is a longer story, life lesson. I quit within months and went to work with a couple of the more dedicated of the bunch.
Were you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?)
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.
>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
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.
I was bulk ripping CDs a few months ago and was running multiple SCSI drives to increase my throughput. The current Linux SCSI drivers will lock up the bus when you insert a disc and ruin any transfers already in progress on another drive. You'd think something like that would have been resolved at this point.
An actual SCSI device? And you're complaining about "by now". How old of hardware are you using? "By now" fixes are included in modern hardware on USB.
I have a number of Plextor CD-ROM drives that are more desirable than DVD-ROM for CD audio extraction. I have one USB Plextor but they command a high resale price. The point is that basic bus management should be sorted out and it clearly isn't.
A lot of CDs aren't in perfect condition, either because of scratches or things like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_bronzing. When faced with damaged data, the quality of the drive and its firmware will influence whether the data stream corresponds to the original content or not.
Given a perfect CD the drive is probably not going to have significant impact, but for an audio CD that's been exposed to real world conditions there's a bunch of ways the drive can make a difference to the recovered data.
When I was 9, in 1993, I hurt my eye and couldn't go to school for a week while it was healing. To make it bearable, my dad somehow got me a pirated copy of the secret of monkey island from a coworker (he worked at a PR company so I still find that mildly surprising today). The game had a copy protection feature where there was a spinning wheel and you had to input some text that was revealed when you combined the top of a pirate's head with the bottom of a different pirate's head (IIRC). This was defeated by the office photocopier.
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 also sent a physical letter to Lucasarts when I got stuck as a kid. They kindly sent me back a full walkthrough! I wonder how many other kids must've done this...
Monkey Island brings back very good game memories and who the whole Lucas Art series had good stories!
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.
Games are such a great way to get people to naturally learn language.
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.
In the middle it links to the post he made on the 25th anniversary, which talks about how they would ship the gold masters to Europe.
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!
A friend of mine had this happen with a processor card for a telephone switch. A bad software update had hosed up the primary card in such a way that it also made the standby unable to function, and they were capital-D Down for hours. The manufacturer was in Texas, the switch was in Michigan.
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!"
For most of my career, I've worked in ops for companies where every moment of downtime would mean the loss of a lot of money.
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 love these kinds of stories. My current favorite is one I first read about here a few weeks ago where NASA needed some to replace a broken something holding up a launch. They arranged for an F-14 (or something along those lines) as a courier since normal shipping wouldn't get there in time.
My dad used to do the same thing all the time but with trains and coaches - if you had to send something to the other side of the country pronto, you'd go to the train/coach station, speak to the driver, hand them some money, and they'd happily take whatever you were sending with them. It was literally the fastest way to get something somewhere. It doesn't surprise me at all that people used to do the same thing with flying.
In some parts of the world this is still the norm. I know someone who sends things to her parents (about a 10-hour drive away, in a village) exclusively by bus. You pay off the driver, tell him/her who's going to pick up the package and at what stop, and off they go.
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.
I first played Monkey Island well after its time, but it held up and I enjoyed it immensely. I recall specifically being impressed by the twist in the insult-sword-fighting mechanic that occurs when you fight the Sword Master. I maintain that the game holds up even today, though obviously nostalgia bias probably applies.
We're in the middle of playing this game for the first time with our kids, after literally decades of having people trying to tell me that I really need to play it. As a first-time player I can say that yes, almost everything about Monkey Island stands the test of time, no nostalgia required.
How old are your kids? I'm wondering if mine are ready for this (I've also managed to avoid playing it for decades, despite many attempts to get me to play it).
I think a case could be made that those insults are some of the first digital memes. Even to this day, they're still widely-recognised catchphrases among nerds and nerd-adjacents of a certain age. Before Monkey Island you only really got that effect from TV/movies/radio.
I was just the right age when ‘Monkey Island’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ appeared in my life. That kind of in-world puzzle solving seems absent from a lot of what I see my early-teenage nieces/nephews (choose to) play now.
I did the same only because it was cheaper to buy the set of 4 movies instead of the first 3 movies separately. I even bought an empty 3-Bluray case to just keep the 1st 3 movies.
Wow this really brings back memories! If Ron Gilbert is reading this, thanks for all your hard work on this game. This game was definitely one of the highlights of my childhood.
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.
> difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s.
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.
ADOM had similar issues. You kill a cat any time, you miss out on a later quest. Instead you just had to fight the cat lord. Missed out on a very powerful ring.
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.
I remember that there were quite a few games that I never was able to finish as a kid, but to finish them is not really the point. The point is to play. And to play them was fun.
Working on Monkey Island Special Edition in 2009 while at LucasArts is one of the highlights of my career. I have really fond memories of my time there on the team (Team 3!). I wish I had worked on the original but that was way before my time.
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.
For those who didn't experience it the first time or perhaps would like to do so again, I feel obligated to mention your version is on sale for $3.49 at Good Old Games aka gog.com. No affiliation myself other than a customer and someone a bit in awe of what you guys wrought.
Monkey Island and its sequel are some of the defining games of my childhood. My brother and I played all the Sierra Games, and Lucas Arts games, and while we have many loves (Heroes Quest/Quest for Glory, Indian Jones), Monkey Island was by far our favorite.
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:
While MI2s ending gives this impression, MI was planned as a triology, where in MI3 the secret of monkey island should be revealed. (Un)fortunately Ron Gilbert left after MI2 and took the secret with him, never to be revealed.
That's certainly the takeaway that the Monkey Island 3 that we got (Curse of Monkey Island) used.
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. ;)
The thing I always wonder is how testing/QA worked back in the days for cartridge/disk games. I mean, there've been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can't even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.
I remember Quest For Glory IV shipped with a game-breaking bug that required downloading a patch from a BBS and possibly starting with a new save. I never finished the game because of that one.
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.
Though there were more overall platforms back then, the hardware for any given platform was a lot more uniform than any modern PC. OSs barely did anything where they existed at all, which also helped. Finally, codebases were a lot smaller and everything was single-threaded so there was generally just less to go wrong.
According to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.
The original Doom code basically broadcast packets to every machine on the network, which on any large network would bring everything to a crawl. It's why network Doom was explicitly banned on many university networks.
The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.
When making the Thimbleweed park game, they kept a blog.
Its decent and has some interesting tidbits on how they designed the game. I read after I played through to avoid spoilers, but it was a fun game.
I don't have a link handy, but there is a "monkey island 1 ultimate talkie" version of the original Monkey Island that I highly recommend.
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.
Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I prefer playing the game without the voice acting.
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.
Considering how successful Thimbleweed Park, the spiritual sequel to Maniac Mansion, has been, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaffer and Dave Grossman could just reboot Monkey Island with a different name, say Ape Archipelago or something.
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.
For anybody that needs to scratch the nostalgia itch after reading this post I highly, highly recommend the free web series "Double Fine Adventure"
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.
I played Monkey Island ten years ago, when they launched the Remaster. It was such a great game. And I've got to say the follow up ranks as one of the best games I've ever played.
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 remember my brother playing (and me dicking around a bit with) Zack McKracken first and then Monkey Island. It's always the sword fighting part I remember the most. It's a pity I don't have time for anything anymore, I would love to revisit them some time.
I loved Maniac Mansion,Day of the Tentacle and Zack McKracken. A modern game that may be comparable is "Trover saves the Universe" by Justin Roiland, probably best played on the Oculus Quest. I haven't had that much fun playing a video game for a few years.
I really loved the Lucas Art point & clicks. I remember being stuck for hours in those games. Eventually, I finished most of them (or I remember I did, but maybe I didn't, honestly I don't remember).
I want to deeply thanks everyone who worked on those games. Thank you.
Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam n Max made me want to study CS away from my home country. I loved those games as a young teenager. 30 years later I still do...
Monkey Island was great. To this day I occasionally use insults learned during the swordfighting part of the game. Also, the MI theme was once my ringtone on a good old Siemens S65i
I played it using a basic Soundblaster card in the 90s and it’s already amazing. Lately I used DosBox with the MT32 emulation and was blown away by how good it sounds.
Music is very memorable! I kept the original game disc at my parents’ house so I wouldn’t lose the music. Silly me! There’s an entire internet of folks who won’t let this stuff die.
Guybrush Threepwood, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle so many good memories. I remember the anti-piracy message in Guybrush where the main character was sent to jail, the inner game (Maniac mansion) in Day of the tentacle....
I think Monkey Island was the game I spent the most time with, it was full of humour.
Ahh that takes me back. For the kids, here's how you use those things:
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.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
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.
Thirty years ago today and I was in Saudi Arabia getting ready to go to Iraq. It would be another 4 years before I started using my first computer and a year after that my first Linux OS.
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.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
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.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
>> 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.
This attitude is why I never finished Thimbleweed Park, it’s full of “hey remember when it was the late eighties/early nineties, wasn’t it better then” jokes and it just wore the whole thing thin for me.
Whats funny to me about this too is that retro gamers come in all ages and would probably think this guys an idiot for writing something like that. "Youngsters" who would even be interested in this article probably already know about Monkey Island, at least theres a good chance. I wouldnt underestimate younger gamers, I know some that know more than me about games I know like the back of my hand.
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.
I think it's more a moment of realisation that a lot of time has passed, that things have changed to such an extent, and that it's hard to imagine something so large having so little function, relative to today's tech. I don't think it's written in the spirit of the stereotype you suggest.
Kind of a patronising comment in itself, as if the poor little snowflakes are so weak that they'll run away from tech after an extremely minor bit of ribbing at their expense.
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 :(