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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

#91
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.

> Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck?

Yes. As they walk out into the theme park, LeChuck looks at the camera and his eyes glow.

I think this is just another entry in the genre of "there was no plan, so the writers added several different plot hooks on spec".

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

#92

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...

Played MI1 and 2 recently with my 6 year old from steam. We had a great time. Worked flawlessly with proton.

> Worked flawlessly with proton.

The game runs in DOS. DOSbox should be fine...

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

#93
post #15

Just curious: How would I go about playing Monkey Island today? I know DOSBox comes to mind? But, is there an official port, like the "remastered" versions of Final Fantasy that are in the Play store?

I highly recommend scummVM.

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

#94
post #45

I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks tr…

Were you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?)

I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. 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. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value you're getting from those $20 blanks!)

There was a class action lawsuit, and I eventually got a replacement drive (no relief for those wasted expensive, blanks). But the vindication that it was defective hardware, and nothing I did wrong helps. The manufacturer of the drive was Philips/Magnavox, but there were some other brands that were all linked back to this same defect that the class action lawsuit covered.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? Yes. As they walk out into the theme park, LeChuck looks at the camera and his eyes glow. I think this is just another entry in the genre of "there was no plan, so the writers added several different plot hooks on spec".

Also, during the credits, doesn't the game switch back to Elaine who says something like "I sure hope LeChuck didn't cast a spell on Guybrush"?

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

#97

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

I second this most strongly. Both Monkey Island 1 and 2 are available in unofficial "talkie" versions, which work in ScummVM.

It's technically piracy, so buy the originals at GOG so you don't feel too guilty.

Great games, and this is the best way to play them.

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

#98
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 flying.

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

#99
post #14

I was just the right age when ‘Monkey Island’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ appeared in my life. That kind of in-world puzzle solving seems absent from a lot of what I see my early-teenage nieces/nephews (choose to) play now.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is the true 4th Indiana Jones movie in my book. And yes, I'll die on that hill.

Can I give half an upvote? I haven't played the game but, gosh that movie was crap.

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

#100
post #45

I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks tr…

Were you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?) I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. 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. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value…

>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 constructed FIFO buffers now is just more hidden, not exactly lessened.

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