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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

grumpygamer.com

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Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#111
post #84

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…

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…

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.

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#112

> 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 Ro…

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Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#113
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 construc…

A little interested! What exactly are FIFO buffers?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFO_(computing_and_electron...

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#114
post #104

>> 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. Tsk. Please. We've all seen CD disks before, you know.

Fun fact, the D stood for disks, so you're literally saying "Compact Disks Disks".

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Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#115
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.

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#116
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh there’s like 5 of us playing it on the same pc so there’s always ideas thrown around. If nothing works then start clicking on everything :) I don’t recall it to be as frustrating as say King’s Quest but then again it might be nostalgia.

King's Quest..... That one was a challenge. As it was easy to miss an item from area and not be able to return to pick it up.

I can attribute my debugging skills to playing these games as a child. As you had to be meticulous.

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#118

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

You fight like a dairy farmer

How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#119
post #6

It was a great game. 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…

It could have been worse. I know of one studio that sent a debug version to the duplication factory by accident. It killed the company.

Did the company not have insurance?

Re: Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island

#120
post #104

>> 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. Tsk. Please. We've all seen CD disks before, you know.

Fun fact, the D stood for disks, so you're literally saying "Compact Disks Disks".

The D stood for Disc.

Consensus at the time was a disk with a K was writable, a disc with a C was read-only.

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