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

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

#71

Post by anthk »

nsxwolf wrote: post #34
marban wrote: post #11

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 rec…

>Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete

Well, they were right.

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

#72

Post by johnwalkr »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #22
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam [0] and GOG [1], at least, have Monkey Island 1 & 2 special editions. Looks like GOG has them 65% off right now too. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lec...

it's also on the app store and it's a very good fit for tablets, slightly less so for mobiles

I played through them on iphone and it was great.

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

#73

Post by wgjordan »

marban wrote: post #11

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by WorldMaker »

Trasmatta wrote: post #25
dleslie wrote: post #8

I'm still not willing to accept that it's all the imagination of a child running wild at a theme park.

MONKEY ISLAND 2 SPOILERS Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? I never interpreted it as being what was actually going on.

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. ;)

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

#75

Post by spatulon »

deeblering4 wrote: post #35
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam [0] and GOG [1], at least, have Monkey Island 1 & 2 special editions. Looks like GOG has them 65% off right now too. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special... [1] https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lec...

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. edit: this might be the link https://archive.org/details/MONKEYISLAND_201903

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.

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

#77

Post by joezydeco »

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…

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.

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

#79

Post by egypturnash »

joshstrange wrote: post #40
deeblering4 wrote: post #29

> 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 bein…

> 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…

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.

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

#80

Post by LifeIsBio »

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!

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