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Happy Birthday Monkey Island

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Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#101
post #10
post #2

"I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me." I won…

There is no other way. MI is too close to the Pirates of the Caribbeans franchise to let anyone run wild with it. Disney will keep it as buried as possible, and strictly under control. Ron is publicly begging for it (and not even for the first time) because all other avenues have failed. It's easy to predict nothing will change as long as Johnny Depp is alive and working.

>> I wonder if anyone high up in Disney could be persuaded to give Ron Gilbert enough control to make MI3a.

> It's easy to predict nothing will change as long as Johnny Depp is alive and working.

Clearly, Ron Gilbert should try contacting Johnny Depp to get the rights from Disney ;)

Depp seems to be the kind of guy to appreciate the creativity in Monkey Island, and Disney would actually respond to him. Hell, Johnny Depp might even be interested in doing some Guybrush voice acting for the game.

Even if he couldn't get full rights, Disney would be much more likely to acquiesce to the notion of another Monkey Island without a complete stranglehold on creativity.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#102
post #89
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game. One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the…

King's quest was easier the alternatives. The worst for foreigners was Police quest. One command was seared into my brain: 'administer sobriety test' Good luck figuring that out with a small learner's dictionary.

Police Quest was pretty picky. I remember the scene where you have to get the suspect from the car laying down on the ground. Shouting "Lay Down" would only give you nitpicking about the sexual meaning of "laying", which I never got until later.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#103
Chipping in on the memories. Lucasarts Adventure Game Pack on 5 floppy disks IIRC was the first game I ever purchased with my own money for our Compaq Presario 386-SX 25Mhz back in the day.

They used to remind to take backups of your floppies before doing anything else, so I purchased a 5-pack of 1.44 MB floppies to copy the diskettes unto. I will never forget the pain when I realized that I accidentally formatted one of the original diskettes in the process, and I could not install Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ever.

My imagination ran wild when I looked at the photos of this game in the contained cleverly disguided walk through that was in the format of a story, and I longed to install that game and play it but nobody had it. Luckily I downloaded it later from a local BBS and finally got to play it.

But back on the subject, seeing Monkey Island logo on the screen, with glorious 256-color VGA, the PC Speaker playing the theme music, in the dark cellar where our PC was, was just pure magic. Nothing has ever come close to that moment and will never come, it is one of the few rare memories that I wish I could re-live, to feel the magic of entering that Island and being there again, for the first time.

Monkey Island 2 came close, but the magic of playing my first really graphical adventure had already passed. Oh, I wish to share that feeling with my child in the future :)

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#106

If anyone is unaware, they've got some pretty good versions of MI 1 and 2 on the Apple App store. I played it on my iPad a couple of years ago, and it was great. The adventure format works really well on a tablet. You can even play with updated graphics or in classic mode. Easily worth the 10 bucks or however much it costed.

They're actually not that great since they lack the creator commentary, which I did not know about when I bought them. I should have bought the xbox360 versions, but I thought they were the same, and decided portability was a good enough factor to go for the ipod touch versions.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#107
A great interview with the creator is here

http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1147

I remember getting a demo floppy with it on it and being absolutely blown away by it. I had played Sierra games before that, and the artwork and interface made those games look and feel absolutely stone aged in comparison.

The excellent writing was icing on the cake.

I must have played through that short demo a hundred times before getting the retail game for a present. It's kind of amazing how much fun fit into such little disk space.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#108
oh god that font choice. Really, Ron? The c64 font in the eyestrain-inducing default blue? Do you really want to wallow in nostalgia for that? And Safari's 'reader' view isn't working.

edits the css manually so she can actually read this

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#110

If anyone is unaware, they've got some pretty good versions of MI 1 and 2 on the Apple App store. I played it on my iPad a couple of years ago, and it was great. The adventure format works really well on a tablet. You can even play with updated graphics or in classic mode. Easily worth the 10 bucks or however much it costed.

The normal course of action used to be: You build a game for console & Windoze, then wait 10 years, then maybe port it to Mac. The current course is: You build a game for console & Windoze, then wait 4 years, then maybe port it to iDevice, and probably never to Mac. That's at least a relative improvement over before, even if it's still not really satisfying for folks that don't have a console or a PC.

Here you go!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/secret-monkey-island-special...

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