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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

#131

Post by andrewzah »

acd wrote: post #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 teache…

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.

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

#132

Post by herman_toothrot »

kvn_95 wrote: post #58
throwaway287391 wrote: post #19

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.

The King's Quest games were absolutely brutal. Actions performed early in the game could prevent you from winning at the end. I found this list: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Unwinnab...

The only reason we beat these as kids was having a near infinite amount of time to waste.

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

#133

Post by JoeAltmaier »

herman_toothrot wrote: post #132
kvn_95 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The King's Quest games were absolutely brutal. Actions performed early in the game could prevent you from winning at the end. I found this list: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Unwinnab... The only reason we beat these as kids was having a near infinite amount of time to waste.

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.

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

#134

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dylan604 wrote: post #122
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#135

Post by LifeIsBio »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #127
LifeIsBio wrote: post #80

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 l…

I enjoyed your anecdote, as someone who has never played Monkey Island. Just FYI, the word you're looking for is "elicit", not "illicit".

Ah, for sure. Thanks! Too bad the editing window is past.

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

#136

Post by davidwritesbugs »

jedberg wrote: 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…

"Uh hey? Fella? can you do me a solid and take this small bag through customs and onto London for me? It's, er, floppy disks"

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

#137

Post by e12e »

hinkley wrote: post #52
coldcode wrote: 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…

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.

Master disks didn't have write protection on?

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

#138

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

gre wrote: post #104
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #96

>> 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".

I'm fine with that. Like "SAM Missiles" (in the sky) or "CMS System" etc.

Also, it's "pedant", not "pendant" :P

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

#139

Post by blaz0 »

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.

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

#140

Post by gerdesj »

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.

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