I missed out on the Amiga era of games, sadly. There is a charm and beauty to those, but I seem to have missed the era for it, and got spoiled by better technologies.
Curse was also my first, and my only fear with this project is that Gilbert will think we need to go back to the nine-option interaction system for the first two games.
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.
I played 1 and 2 so found it hard to get into 3. Funny how exposures in childhood anchors one's tastes. The special editions were an absolute joy to play!
As I was confused by the quote "Ron Gilbert told me he'd never make another Monkey Island unless...", it seems to come from this:
> 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."
Seems so, but the situation is generally unclear. This is what the Ars Techica article says about 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.
He also has experience with Thimbleweed now, and perhaps he's more willing to have a frank discussion with the rights holders for Monkey Island and get what he really wants in exchange for what they want. Maybe complete control of the IP is more than he needs, just assurances that he can direct the game as he sees fit.
I don't know the details more than anybody else, but I would point out Ron Gilbert's name appears explicitly on the third box, along with a company name.
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 am very excited for this. For those unaware, Ron Gilbert was the creative force behind The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, but then left Lucasarts and the subsequent Monkey Island games were made by others. He's said for a long time that those games, while perfectly fine, didn't represent his vision for how the series would have continued (and Monkey Island 2 finished on an intriguing cliffhanger), so it's cool that we'll finally get his version of things, as the new game will continue from where MI2 left off (although apparently the other games will remain as canon somehow).
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.
The game announcement states that it "picks up where Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge left off". These two facts do not have to be mutually exclusive.
I thought the implication from this trailer was that Ron Gilbert agreed to do this game if he could ignore the story and characters from the other games (which is why Murray is getting pushed off the deck)
It's amazing how many interpretations of this joke people appear to have :)
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".
From 2013: "If I end up being able to make this game at some point, we all might find that it fits nicely in between Monkey Island 2 and Curse of Monkey Island." https://grumpygamer.com/just_to_clarify_point_12
I still haven't played through all of Thimbleweed Park, but I managed to get my GF into adventure games after I bought it for her on Switch and she played through the entire game.
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.
Coco was announced about the same time Disney bought LucasFilm and that was my running joke that the real reason Disney bought LucasFilm wasn't as much to secure Star Wars, but to build a Grim Fandango Cinematic Universe.
I remember there was lots of buzz about a resurgence of the genre when Double Fine's Broken Age did the crowdfunding thing and raised $millions. A lot of excited people. And then that seemed to go away again when the critical reception to Part 2 of it was pretty contentious? I wonder what it would have sparked if it had been as much a critical and publicity success as the first part...
Yeah, cut my teeth on the Sierra adventure games. Didn't hate the FPS takeover Half-Life ushered in, but.. It's almost cliched to say "Modern RPGs don't feel as alive as Ultima VII" and yet.. There is truth to that.
Kinda got stuck in Thimbleweed but honestly hadn't felt so immersed in a game's setting since the old days.
I have mixed feelings about Thimbleweed; it was very good until it wasn't; the ending felt like what you'd get when a company ran out of funding and just rushed everything together.
It may just be me, I enjoy breaking the fourth wall but not really tearing it completely down and burning the remains.
I couldn't agree more. I loved the first two thirds, but was so disappointed by the ending that I haven't recommended it to anyone since. I was very invested in a number of character development threads that never lead anywhere.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I consider MI3 (The Curse of Monkey Island) to be the absolute best in the series. The puzzles feel just right, the comedy and writing are on point from beginning to end, and the graphical style holds up to this day.
Use Monkey With Wrench and that library sequence ruined my replays of MI2 and took away some of the charm. The sewer scenes made me forget it tho, and still gave me fond memories.
Same here. The art was beautiful and the puzzles just doable. MI2 I found super hard though I have to admit the show loading times and disk swapping on amiga didn't help.
I think MI2 took me 6 month to complete (also with only like 2 years of english I didnt know what a monkey wrench is...) . Mi3 was one weekend, a bit too easy.
This is the third time this has made front page in the last ~8 days. I'm as excited about it as everyone else here, apparently, but at this point isn't it just displacing other good stories?
I spend way too much on HN in general, but this is the first time I see it and it's also not visible on https://news.ycombinator.com/best, so I'm happy people are upvoting it (again).
Very cool! Fond memories of MI1 and 2 as a kid. I don't game anymore (I don't even have the time to write all the code I want to), but I could potentially buy this (I bought Thimbleweed Park too, but barely started it lol).
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'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.
Monkey Island 1 was THE game of my childhood. I'd watch an older neighbor kid play it for hours. Every once in a while I'd throw out a bad idea (try Pushing that bush). I'm excited to play the new one with my 7-year-old.
Did anyone actually beat games of this class 100% without cheating? The whole era of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, etc had so many random little "make this thing interact with that thing" I know as a kid I had to occasionally look up the answer. I did beat Myst without cheating, which felt like it was a different type of product because there was always a logical answer once the puzzle clicked, whereas the old Lucas Film games had so much randomness.
I hope/wonder if they will tweak the mechanics on this new release.
Games back then without access to walkthroughs on the net were genuine puzzles that one spent weeks over. Ideas popped into ones head after a night of trying out various things and it was genuinely satisfying. I hated making genuine progress and then being blocked because of lack of some copyright protection codes from a manual (mostly Sierra games).
As a non-native English speaking teenager, I can attest that I spent at least a month on "figuring out" (i.e. basically trying everything on everything) the monkey wrench puzzle. It wasn't until years later that I learned that it actually made any sense!
With adventure games, some people are just very persistent and can guess what the designer was thinking. While the apparent search space can seem huge, trial and error(use all verbs including the look-at; use all item combos), reordering actions, and pixel hunts eventually defeat everything except the puzzles where search space has been deliberately inflated(secret code puzzles, infinite mazes etc).
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).
One of my favorite gaming moments was from the first Monkey Island. I won’t spoil the gag, but those of you who recall Guybrush calmly saying “Rubber tree” probably went through the same emotional roller coaster that I did.
I had forgotten about this, but a friend of mine has been streaming his first playthrough of Secret of Monkey Island recently and he got to this gag yesterday. I completely lost my shit laughing at his expression.
This is fantastic news. If Ron Gilbert hadn't been on board - but yeah, he is. (I guess Orson Scott Card won't be providing any of the duelling banter this time round, considering his...somewhat-altered credibility these days.)
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?
Slightly offtopic, but anyone who is grieving the loss of adventure games and hasn't played games by Daedelic Entertainment (Deponia series, Whispered World), is seriously missing out. Too bad Daedelic does not do those games anymore either. I've also massively enjoyed Unforeseen Incidents, which has more of serious tone akin to the Police Quest series.
Speaking of Daedelic both 'Edna & Harvey' games are pretty great. Germany seems to have had a flood of adventure games 10 years ago. My absolutely favorite is 'The Book of Unwritten Tales' series.
84 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadThe 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
[1] https://thimbleweedpark.com/
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.
I'm already counting up the time I've mentally put aside to play this.
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'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.
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).
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?
Your choice mattered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUMKy2Jk3Oo