When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game.
> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-
the-art tech and art.
This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped playing modern videogames and as much as I love the style of Thimbleweed Park, going forward for an artist like Ron is what _defines_ an artist. If you like MI1 and Mi2, just play MI1 and MI2 again as I do from time to time. Just like you would watch again a movie from the '70s or listen to the Beatles. But you cannot ask an artist to stay always the same because you loved their first works.
What was special about the first two Monkey Island games (at least for me) was the atmosphere. I mean, just look at this screenshot: https://www.adventurecorner.de//uploads/images/games/monkey1... Parts 1 and 2 had this effect on me, with part 3 the magic was mostly gone unfortunately. If Return to Monkey Island manages to recapture some of that, I don't care if it's pixel art or whatever else...
> I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate
I looked into responses to the announcement (on YouTube, Reddit, various forums), and didn't find any example of a "fan mob that it's starting the hate." Just about all of the top responses were extremely positive. I only found a small minority of comments saying they don't like the art style, and they're all pretty tame. For example, sorting by controversial on Reddit brings up this:
> I want to be excited but I'm not thrilled about that art and I haven't liked a Monkey Island thing since Curse of Monkey Island.
There can be a tendency to exaggerate any criticism in an effort to dismiss it. Ron is certainly free to make whatever game he likes. But at the same time, people are free to dislike whatever game he makes. It doesn't make them hateful or a mob, simply people with different opinions.
I didn’t know there was this rage against not being pixel art (but I should have suspected). I am glad it isn’t. I backed and loved Thimbleweed Park (even the ending), but that project was all around nostalgia. The gameplay, the X-Files-y story, it made sense for that game to be pixel art. Now Monkey Island is exactly what Ron said, state of the art. I liked even the 3D one.
I am even more excited for this new one after reading the post.
The interesting bit about this kind of games is that you don't need state-of-the-art tech, and art at this point is mostly about choices, not necessarily about what's technically feasible. The best example is the usage of orchestral music, according to the post.
I mean, for an 2D adventure game, you are basically animating characters. The objective is to create something like an animation movie, in whatever art style you want. It doesn't need to push the tech in the same style that the first games where.
Which is great! I want them to be spending their efforts in the game, artwork, narrative, puzzles, jokes, etc, not on how to create a background that looks OK if you have an EGA screen and a recognisable melody in a PC speaker.
Whether is pixel art or not is irrelevant to me, as long as it's well drawn and animated. I just hope that they end with a fantastic result. I'll sure buy it and play it when it's out.
> I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game.
That is the same blow-back that George Lucas caught when he made the Star Wars prequels. When George Lucas made the original Star Wars he set out to make a state-of-art sci-fi movie, and in fact he pushed the state-of-art ahead by a huge leap in that movie. A decade or two later, with the evolution of cinema effects, the original trilogy stopped being seen as state-of-art, but kept its cultural influence now under a new lens, it started being seen as a type of retro-futurism. So when George Lucas set out to make the prequels, he again intended to make state-of-art sci-fi movies*, as is his right, and as he should, but many of the fans instead wanted the new trilogy to match the retro-futurism feel they now assigned to the original ones, hence the many complaints at the time.
Interestingly enough, later when Disney made the sequels they went the other way completely, and bet heavily on the retro-futurism feel (down even to the story arcs), so they got blow-back from the fans that instead wanted a state-of-art sci-fi.
* If he achieved that state-of-art goal is debatable, my personal opinion he did, but just barely, failing to leap forward like the original did on its time, so they do feel a bit like "generic late 90s/early 00s sci-fi".*
Live by the mob die by the mob. When a mob is attacking your idea it might have some merits or not but it has reached a popularity breakthrough. A mob attacks when they feel threatened. A mob can be used as a tool. Followers are a pre-mob description of a group.
Putting out a retro version could be seen as a greedy activity that tarnishes the original that could get a different mob after you.
I agree with the import of this, but there is an economy to games, and if it turns out that the gamers really do just want another installment in the old style, you're missing out on that significant segment of the market until you do just that. Art is only art if it gets made, and at least frequently, someone has to pay the artist for the art to get made.
I love this post. I know a decent amount of indie devs, I also have done some hobby game development myself. I see this alarming trend of devs and small studios that are, what I would call, hyper engaging with their players. I get it, the players are important, you want to sell the game, you want people to play it. But, the entitlement and feedback I have seen from some players is just ridiculous. Most players don't have the fist clue as to what makes a good game, or just how hard it actually is to make games. I feel like this post was very elegant way of basically saying "Shut the hell up, it's my game, I don't care what you want, I am making this game primarily for me. This is my art, and my way of expressing myself and sharing it with the world, this is not a collaboration. If you like it great, if you don't, oh well.", but in a much more palatable and acceptable manner.
Seems to be the case with many resurrected franchises, Star Trek coming to mind.
As a kid in the 80s/early 90s, games and series like these caught my imagination. They were fun. Probably fun, interesting and inspiring in different ways to different people.
Agree if we listened to everyone's refined version, we'd end up with a different game for everyone. In the end it's only meant to be entertainment.
> Most players don't have the fist clue as to what makes a good game
that seems unfair. I think players (especially the kind who follow developers and make spend time posting online about games) do know what makes a good game. They know because they play title after title and see what works for them and what doesn't. The issue is that asking "What makes a good game" is much like asking what makes a good movie, or book, or romantic partner, or vacation. People are going to have very different ideas of what a good game is, but gamers are pretty damn savvy about what they love and about games in general.
That said, I agree with you that creators often go too far with player feedback. I think it's best for creators to make the games they would love, and if that doesn't lead to mainstream success that's fine, if real passion and love are put into a project there'll pretty much always be an audience out there who will appreciate it.
It's a bit ironic that he says he was not really a fan of Day of the Tentacle's "Chuck Jones" art style, when the screenshots for his upcoming Return to Monkey Island are all very specifically that 90's-infused Chuck Jones style - multiple skewed perspective lines in a scene, extreme avoidance of curves (rendered instead as polygonal outlines, so to speak).
The art style for his new game is rather ironically nostalgia-laden in probably an unintentional way: it's deep nineties pop art, ala "Xtreme", etc.
I replayed Secret of Monkey Island this weekend and was really struck by what a ramshackle, distorted place Melee Island is. It is an accurate cartoon caricature of slapdash architecture on sinking ground.
Here's the very first place Guybrush is controllable in:
Lots of straight lines, but no two buildings are in the same perspective. It's cartoon cubism, filtered through a 640x480 grid. Maurice Noble's work with Chuck Jones looms large over the backgrounds but so does the realities of what cheap shacks slapped together by pirates on constantly-sinking ground would look like.
I suspect the "Chuck Jones" art style of DOTT he's referring to is the character design. Which was so Jones-influenced that I recall hearing that when Lucasfilm had a chance to show it to Chuck, he did the most flattering thing possible: he tried to hire the animators to work at the new studio he was opening up.
Yeah, I just played DotT remastered (iPad) last night. I wasn't a fan of the art style /in general/. Something to note though, I played it entirely in the "old" pixel format not the new style (you can change between the two with a gesture at any point). I really did try to like the new art, but just couldn't, I genuinely preferred the pixel style.
For Monkey Islane I'm pretty sad that he's gone with the art style he has, looking at the photos they just seem claustrophobic, lacking in charm or character to me.
I have incredible memories of playing MI1, and to a lesser extent, MI2 (never finished - no Internet back then and these games were tricky). I think it is very cool he is getting to make the game he wants, and I do the same with my development work (it is always for me, if someone else likes it...bonus). I'll reserve judgement until release, but I personally don't like the art style...but who cares, I'm probably not his audience anyway (I stopped gaming years ago, but would probably pick up a copy if it was retro style - and then never play it anyway).
Cool indeed. I think MI caught the spirit of gameplay for me, alongside iconic titles like Elite and Civ.
Pirates of the Caribbean had a similar spirit.
I'll likely be handing over cash for this version. If the new game has the same banter and half decent puzzles, it'll be a winner, for me. Something to get my daughter to play with me if she has the patience of walking about the place!
This reminded me of the amusing way the leas character (Guybrush) was named. Obligatory wiki linkage [1] but basically due to a Deluxe Paint filename convention.
I love his Day of the Tentacle critique, it's basically what my grandma would say if she reviewed games.... "I'm sure what you've created might be good, but it's not my cup of tea at all... In fact..."
Your grandma is a wise person - but of course it's the only way to critique a game made by people that you respect and that you worked with for a long time...
About the art, I think another perfect example is Grim Fandango. It was the first Lucasarts 3D adventure, at a time when the 3D (late '90) was a graphically inferior solution to 2D. However, they exploited the low polygon number, to give a special character to the models, like paper dolls. So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.
To me, Grim Fandango looked fantastic. What made it difficult to play were the cursed keyboard controls. I still did beat it, but never wanted to come back to it because of those controls. A couple of years ago, I replayed the modern remaster, and boy does the good old mouse pointer improve the game immensely.
> So the heresy of moving from 2D was instead a conscious artistic choice, strictly linked to the then-modern technologies.
This is how it should have been all along. The only reason modern GPUs are in such demand is because we forgot to apply art before shiny tech. I don't know why things like polygon count and texture resolution turned into a metric for fun.
To this day I can have way more fun in older games like Minecraft than super polished AAA titles like RDR2 or Cyberpunk 2077. The graphics used to get me interested back when we thought photorealism was going to make shit way more fun, but the reality of artistic expression turned out to be much more complex than this...
Another great example of choosing an art style that worked with the limitations of early 3D is Interstate '76, from 1997: https://i.imgur.com/ro5k82Z.png
...and then Escape from Monkey Island utilized the same tech as Grim Fandango, but without those stylistic choices that made Grim Fandango's graphics work so well :)
Wait there is a new Monkey Island game (<googles furiously>)...
Growing up in Soviet Union and getting 100% games pirated through floppies, I played Monkey Island (funny), DoTT (funny ^2), Gobli[i|ii]ns, Space Quest (!star trek?), Gabriel Knight (scary!) and many other adventure games with fervor only lightly diluted by doing other things like programming.
My command of English wasn't so good. And being behind a (slowly falling apart) iron curtain, the cultural references were often completely over my head. I didn't understand half of the jokes in Monkey Island, I didn't get all the Star Trek references in Space Quest although I do now, and I was completely unsure what was the deal with the Cherry tree and Franklin (oh wait was it Washington) joke in the Day of the Tentacle, but I rolled with it. Doing it all made my english so much better, and so profit!
But those games were still amazingly awesome and I'll be getting the return of Monkey Island sight unseen!
Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.
Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece. The 2D hand drawn style and animation are a huge part of it.
I'll take any Monkey Island sequel, but if you take a closer look at say the Tales of Monkey Island sequels, you'll see what people are worried about.
Monkey Island 4 was TERRIBLE. Fully 3D and tank controls. Tales of Monkey Island was great but completely ruined by terrible tank controls.
A proper Monkey Island games needs to be
1. Point and Click
2. Have excellent puzzle design and structure
3. Ideally 2D hand drawn art and animation
4. Least important, Pixelated style like MI2 or Loom
People who are critizing the trailer are worried we're getting another Tales of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 4.
As long as you nail #1 (proper point and click controls) I think you will still make a better Monkey Island sequel since Curse of Monkey Island
> Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.
I don't read anything Ron said as "bashing". He explains why he is not interested in making pixel art games. He is also promising you this is the best possible Monkey Island game he can make, one he is proud of.
My mileage certainly differs. I loved how it looked, but to me it is by far the weakest of the lucasarts games I played (and I played all but the first Maniac Mansion and Zac McKraken). It is far too difficult! Far too many locations and items, you just get overwhelmed in the middle part of the game.
The game looks stunning, and I'm happy about the direction they have chosen graphically.
What I am most excited about is what new game design and mechanics we might get to see. I'm hoping it will be more than raw point and click, and hopefully will involve more mechanics for puzzle solving.
“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art.
Fun games but did anyone read the footer on Ron's page? death by dismemberment!
"Unless otherwise noted, all content is Copyright 2004-2022 Ron Gilbert. Unauthorized use under penalty of death by dismemberment and/or fine not less than one million dollars. (v4.1)"
I just played thimbleweed park, and yikes what a horrible ending.
I'm very worried about Monkey Island now. Some authors NEED editors. I think Ron Gilbert needs the original team to help him on what works and what doesn't.
Even the original Chrono Trigger was going to be super depressing, if the original writer had his way on everything. I would have hated his version of it.
This is partly why I think Dave Grossman's deep involvement is so important to Return to Monkey Island. Ron seems best with a larger writers room and Dave by all accounts is one of the best influences he can have that is also a Known Quantity from the rest of the franchise.
Thimbleweed Park was imvho a "meh" game. I hope the new monkey island can improve on that.
OTOH I am now playing "The Captain" which is a modern take on point&click with beautiful pixel art and a few new things, and I feel it filled my need for a good monkey island already.
I have a lot of fondness for Monkey Island, but more often than not - giving a creative person complete creative controls is less likely to produce something good.
old 2d scumm is my favorite engine.
with all its weird stuff going on, the amount of imagination it has unleashed is next to magical. its like the amiga500 or c64. there is something about being limited as a creative person which sparks imagination. certain "things" do it better or worse. scumm should be seen as an instrument, not a tool.
Ron says "I never liked the art in DotT...never liked the wacky Chuck Jones style" but the first screens of RTMI looks exactly like that!
Not that I don't like that style, but I don't think it's a surprise for Lucas Art fans. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Fullthrottle weren't that far away (except with a lower resolution)
lucasarts had a string of hits that are timeless, dig, day of the tentacle, sam and max[had own tv show], and full throttle. great single player games that didn't require fast user clicks. you can go at your own pace.
Sam and Max was a 80s-90s comic by Steve Purcell[0], who was also a LucasArts employee at the time. You will recognize his art style in several Monkey Island scenes.
Anyway the point is that the tv show was not based on the videogame which you seem to be implying, but on the comic instead.
The comic series is artistically amazing. Purcell is a master of setting an atmosphere. It's also meant to be comedic but the humor is mainly cartoon violent slapstick mixed with pop culture references (of the time). It's dated by now.
When he talks about pushing the art forward, I wonder if he is also talking about the art of game design. Is he going to show us a futuristic vision of the classic point & click gameplay, or is this part still stuck in the past?
> It's ironic that the people who don't want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans. And that is what makes me sad about all the comments.
I don't know. I can probably still finish monkey 1 and 2 without a walkthrough because I've played them many times. That makes me a fan right?
You probably do know. If you've read the reactions online, you'll probably know some vocal fans are disappointed with the new art style. This is Ron's reply to them.
There will be exceptions. You are one. I am another. But it doesn't invalidate Ron's point, because it's easy to fact-check it by going online and looking for opinions, even in Ron's own blog.
They are very good! Obviously the style is out of fashion and some puzzles can be a bit frustrating (though not as much as old Sierra adventures), but they are amazing games...
The second game is really good. I think it's a lot funnier than the first and has more colourful areas and dialogue (although some puzzles are ridiculous).
I played the LeChuck's Revenge first and later tried the first one. It didn't have quite the impact.
Also, I replayed the games like 10 years ago and found them very short and the humor being quite outdated. A bit like watching all the Star Wars movies in one go. The pacing in the first triology is pretty crappy.
You should really play them both; I have the remastered versions on steam and enjoy playing the hell out of them. I often switch backward and forward from new to original graphics and music for nostalgia reasons though.
I find it interesting that sequels in gaming are way easier than in movie business: game designers don't have to deal that much with stars ageing or dying, and voice actors are far easier to replace than on-screen ones. Though with deepfake technology this might be changing.
I feel like monkey island one and two was basically a very advanced "book" with basic animated illustrations. But you could still fill in a lot with your own imagination with the graphics of that time. Skip forward to any of todays games and they are way way closer to a movie then a book. Just like when any book is made into a movie there is a lot of hardcore fans that have a different mental model of their book and don't want it overshadowed by a movie. It is easy to avoid and not watch the "movie". I will be very happy to see a new game by Ron based on what he feels is his vision and not what the public wants.
Something amazing can happen (such as a new Monkey Island game) and there will always be an angry mob with pitchforks that will be very vocal about it on social media.
This probably was always the case, but the internet now serves as an amplifier of some sort of hype-based social feedback mechanism for ideas and opinions. This mechanism probably made sense 200,000+ years ago when groups were very small and it helped survival by promoting social cohesion. But today the internet connects billions of humans and it's a pretty toxic behavior.
I'd love the new design and i love the old games. I dont really see the point of doing a new game with the old tech. Its better to make a new game with new tech that brings it into 2022.
darkwater|3 years ago
> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art.
This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped playing modern videogames and as much as I love the style of Thimbleweed Park, going forward for an artist like Ron is what _defines_ an artist. If you like MI1 and Mi2, just play MI1 and MI2 again as I do from time to time. Just like you would watch again a movie from the '70s or listen to the Beatles. But you cannot ask an artist to stay always the same because you loved their first works.
rob74|3 years ago
bnralt|3 years ago
I looked into responses to the announcement (on YouTube, Reddit, various forums), and didn't find any example of a "fan mob that it's starting the hate." Just about all of the top responses were extremely positive. I only found a small minority of comments saying they don't like the art style, and they're all pretty tame. For example, sorting by controversial on Reddit brings up this:
> I want to be excited but I'm not thrilled about that art and I haven't liked a Monkey Island thing since Curse of Monkey Island.
There can be a tendency to exaggerate any criticism in an effort to dismiss it. Ron is certainly free to make whatever game he likes. But at the same time, people are free to dislike whatever game he makes. It doesn't make them hateful or a mob, simply people with different opinions.
soneca|3 years ago
I didn’t know there was this rage against not being pixel art (but I should have suspected). I am glad it isn’t. I backed and loved Thimbleweed Park (even the ending), but that project was all around nostalgia. The gameplay, the X-Files-y story, it made sense for that game to be pixel art. Now Monkey Island is exactly what Ron said, state of the art. I liked even the 3D one.
I am even more excited for this new one after reading the post.
jaimebuelta|3 years ago
I mean, for an 2D adventure game, you are basically animating characters. The objective is to create something like an animation movie, in whatever art style you want. It doesn't need to push the tech in the same style that the first games where.
Which is great! I want them to be spending their efforts in the game, artwork, narrative, puzzles, jokes, etc, not on how to create a background that looks OK if you have an EGA screen and a recognisable melody in a PC speaker.
Whether is pixel art or not is irrelevant to me, as long as it's well drawn and animated. I just hope that they end with a fantastic result. I'll sure buy it and play it when it's out.
SkeuomorphicBee|3 years ago
That is the same blow-back that George Lucas caught when he made the Star Wars prequels. When George Lucas made the original Star Wars he set out to make a state-of-art sci-fi movie, and in fact he pushed the state-of-art ahead by a huge leap in that movie. A decade or two later, with the evolution of cinema effects, the original trilogy stopped being seen as state-of-art, but kept its cultural influence now under a new lens, it started being seen as a type of retro-futurism. So when George Lucas set out to make the prequels, he again intended to make state-of-art sci-fi movies*, as is his right, and as he should, but many of the fans instead wanted the new trilogy to match the retro-futurism feel they now assigned to the original ones, hence the many complaints at the time.
Interestingly enough, later when Disney made the sequels they went the other way completely, and bet heavily on the retro-futurism feel (down even to the story arcs), so they got blow-back from the fans that instead wanted a state-of-art sci-fi.
* If he achieved that state-of-art goal is debatable, my personal opinion he did, but just barely, failing to leap forward like the original did on its time, so they do feel a bit like "generic late 90s/early 00s sci-fi".*
ipaddr|3 years ago
Putting out a retro version could be seen as a greedy activity that tarnishes the original that could get a different mob after you.
sam0x17|3 years ago
jeffwask|3 years ago
RajT88|3 years ago
hitpointdrew|3 years ago
stuckinhell|3 years ago
ricardo81|3 years ago
As a kid in the 80s/early 90s, games and series like these caught my imagination. They were fun. Probably fun, interesting and inspiring in different ways to different people.
Agree if we listened to everyone's refined version, we'd end up with a different game for everyone. In the end it's only meant to be entertainment.
autoexec|3 years ago
that seems unfair. I think players (especially the kind who follow developers and make spend time posting online about games) do know what makes a good game. They know because they play title after title and see what works for them and what doesn't. The issue is that asking "What makes a good game" is much like asking what makes a good movie, or book, or romantic partner, or vacation. People are going to have very different ideas of what a good game is, but gamers are pretty damn savvy about what they love and about games in general.
That said, I agree with you that creators often go too far with player feedback. I think it's best for creators to make the games they would love, and if that doesn't lead to mainstream success that's fine, if real passion and love are put into a project there'll pretty much always be an audience out there who will appreciate it.
PeterHolzwarth|3 years ago
The art style for his new game is rather ironically nostalgia-laden in probably an unintentional way: it's deep nineties pop art, ala "Xtreme", etc.
<edit> This interview article has a number of screenshots that demo this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23021974/return-to-monkey...
egypturnash|3 years ago
Here's the very first place Guybrush is controllable in:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/secret-of-monkey-island...
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/secret-of-monkey-island...
Look at those walls. Not a vertical one in sight. They're all leaning.
Deeper in town:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/secret-of-monkey-island...
https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/secret-of-monkey-island...
Lots of straight lines, but no two buildings are in the same perspective. It's cartoon cubism, filtered through a 640x480 grid. Maurice Noble's work with Chuck Jones looms large over the backgrounds but so does the realities of what cheap shacks slapped together by pirates on constantly-sinking ground would look like.
I suspect the "Chuck Jones" art style of DOTT he's referring to is the character design. Which was so Jones-influenced that I recall hearing that when Lucasfilm had a chance to show it to Chuck, he did the most flattering thing possible: he tried to hire the animators to work at the new studio he was opening up.
emmanueloga_|3 years ago
I always thought this is used mostly out of convenience since it is cheaper/faster to animate with tools like Spine or Dragon Bones.
1: https://www.drinkboxstudios.com/games/guacamelee-super-turbo...
wlll|3 years ago
For Monkey Islane I'm pretty sad that he's gone with the art style he has, looking at the photos they just seem claustrophobic, lacking in charm or character to me.
halfnormalform|3 years ago
hadjian|3 years ago
Copenjin|3 years ago
I've played Thimbleweed Park and loved it, brought back a lot of memories.
GaylordTuring|3 years ago
nu11ptr|3 years ago
ricardo81|3 years ago
Pirates of the Caribbean had a similar spirit.
I'll likely be handing over cash for this version. If the new game has the same banter and half decent puzzles, it'll be a winner, for me. Something to get my daughter to play with me if she has the patience of walking about the place!
babyshake|3 years ago
SamPatt|3 years ago
unwind|3 years ago
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guybrush_Threepwood
DocTomoe|3 years ago
Simon_O_Rourke|3 years ago
benniomars|3 years ago
rob74|3 years ago
YakBizzarro|3 years ago
Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago
bob1029|3 years ago
This is how it should have been all along. The only reason modern GPUs are in such demand is because we forgot to apply art before shiny tech. I don't know why things like polygon count and texture resolution turned into a metric for fun.
To this day I can have way more fun in older games like Minecraft than super polished AAA titles like RDR2 or Cyberpunk 2077. The graphics used to get me interested back when we thought photorealism was going to make shit way more fun, but the reality of artistic expression turned out to be much more complex than this...
Nition|3 years ago
seba_dos1|3 years ago
danielodievich|3 years ago
Growing up in Soviet Union and getting 100% games pirated through floppies, I played Monkey Island (funny), DoTT (funny ^2), Gobli[i|ii]ns, Space Quest (!star trek?), Gabriel Knight (scary!) and many other adventure games with fervor only lightly diluted by doing other things like programming.
My command of English wasn't so good. And being behind a (slowly falling apart) iron curtain, the cultural references were often completely over my head. I didn't understand half of the jokes in Monkey Island, I didn't get all the Star Trek references in Space Quest although I do now, and I was completely unsure what was the deal with the Cherry tree and Franklin (oh wait was it Washington) joke in the Day of the Tentacle, but I rolled with it. Doing it all made my english so much better, and so profit!
But those games were still amazingly awesome and I'll be getting the return of Monkey Island sight unseen!
technovader|3 years ago
Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece. The 2D hand drawn style and animation are a huge part of it.
I'll take any Monkey Island sequel, but if you take a closer look at say the Tales of Monkey Island sequels, you'll see what people are worried about.
Monkey Island 4 was TERRIBLE. Fully 3D and tank controls. Tales of Monkey Island was great but completely ruined by terrible tank controls.
A proper Monkey Island games needs to be 1. Point and Click 2. Have excellent puzzle design and structure 3. Ideally 2D hand drawn art and animation 4. Least important, Pixelated style like MI2 or Loom
People who are critizing the trailer are worried we're getting another Tales of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 4.
As long as you nail #1 (proper point and click controls) I think you will still make a better Monkey Island sequel since Curse of Monkey Island
the_af|3 years ago
I don't read anything Ron said as "bashing". He explains why he is not interested in making pixel art games. He is also promising you this is the best possible Monkey Island game he can make, one he is proud of.
Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago
My mileage certainly differs. I loved how it looked, but to me it is by far the weakest of the lucasarts games I played (and I played all but the first Maniac Mansion and Zac McKraken). It is far too difficult! Far too many locations and items, you just get overwhelmed in the middle part of the game.
MI1 was a much better game in this regard.
seba_dos1|3 years ago
Also, while Escape was absolutely atrocious, Tales wasn't so bad. It wasn't point'n'click, but unlike Escape it actually had reasonable controls.
agency|3 years ago
lawgimenez|3 years ago
I still remember the part of the game where Guybrush was stuck in a quicksand, I remember it took me days to figure the solution out.
fouadf|3 years ago
chapliboy|3 years ago
What I am most excited about is what new game design and mechanics we might get to see. I'm hoping it will be more than raw point and click, and hopefully will involve more mechanics for puzzle solving.
Sharlin|3 years ago
technovader|3 years ago
There's a proper way to take criticism from a passionate fanbase of 20+ years.
IMO the criticism is absolutely justified, just from looking at the screenshots and trailer.
adamrezich|3 years ago
> "The muse visits during the act of creation, not before."
I'd never heard this before but this is an amazing quote.
VladimirGolovin|3 years ago
BTW, easily one of the best books I've ever read.
deater|3 years ago
http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/monkey/
erwincoumans|3 years ago
"Unless otherwise noted, all content is Copyright 2004-2022 Ron Gilbert. Unauthorized use under penalty of death by dismemberment and/or fine not less than one million dollars. (v4.1)"
giords|3 years ago
stuckinhell|3 years ago
I'm very worried about Monkey Island now. Some authors NEED editors. I think Ron Gilbert needs the original team to help him on what works and what doesn't.
Even the original Chrono Trigger was going to be super depressing, if the original writer had his way on everything. I would have hated his version of it.
WorldMaker|3 years ago
riffraff|3 years ago
OTOH I am now playing "The Captain" which is a modern take on point&click with beautiful pixel art and a few new things, and I feel it filled my need for a good monkey island already.
legitster|3 years ago
I have a lot of fondness for Monkey Island, but more often than not - giving a creative person complete creative controls is less likely to produce something good.
pcthrowaway|3 years ago
nomoreusernames|3 years ago
JohnFen|3 years ago
madarco|3 years ago
Not that I don't like that style, but I don't think it's a surprise for Lucas Art fans. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Fullthrottle weren't that far away (except with a lower resolution)
Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago
kgbcia|3 years ago
it was like the studio Ghibli of the 90s
ByThyGrace|3 years ago
Sam and Max was a 80s-90s comic by Steve Purcell[0], who was also a LucasArts employee at the time. You will recognize his art style in several Monkey Island scenes.
Anyway the point is that the tv show was not based on the videogame which you seem to be implying, but on the comic instead.
The comic series is artistically amazing. Purcell is a master of setting an atmosphere. It's also meant to be comedic but the humor is mainly cartoon violent slapstick mixed with pop culture references (of the time). It's dated by now.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Purcell
cpfohl|3 years ago
Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago
It absolutely did! Curse that seagull in MI1 tavern, ugh.
fancyPantsZero|3 years ago
noduerme|3 years ago
kappuchino|3 years ago
nottorp|3 years ago
I don't know. I can probably still finish monkey 1 and 2 without a walkthrough because I've played them many times. That makes me a fan right?
And I find the fake modern pixel art... boring.
the_af|3 years ago
You probably do know. If you've read the reactions online, you'll probably know some vocal fans are disappointed with the new art style. This is Ron's reply to them.
There will be exceptions. You are one. I am another. But it doesn't invalidate Ron's point, because it's easy to fact-check it by going online and looking for opinions, even in Ron's own blog.
capableweb|3 years ago
Monkey 1&2 are not pixel art, it's "state of the art" graphics. The new one will also not be pixel art, it'll try to move the graphics forward.
So if you think pixel art is boring, you should be happy with what was outlined in this blog post?
darkerside|3 years ago
jaimebuelta|3 years ago
https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=monkey%20island&developer...
They are very good! Obviously the style is out of fashion and some puzzles can be a bit frustrating (though not as much as old Sierra adventures), but they are amazing games...
rjh29|3 years ago
hadjian|3 years ago
https://archive.org/details/mnkyega
k__|3 years ago
Also, I replayed the games like 10 years ago and found them very short and the humor being quite outdated. A bit like watching all the Star Wars movies in one go. The pacing in the first triology is pretty crappy.
tluyben2|3 years ago
Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago
pizzabearman|3 years ago
pier25|3 years ago
Something amazing can happen (such as a new Monkey Island game) and there will always be an angry mob with pitchforks that will be very vocal about it on social media.
This probably was always the case, but the internet now serves as an amplifier of some sort of hype-based social feedback mechanism for ideas and opinions. This mechanism probably made sense 200,000+ years ago when groups were very small and it helped survival by promoting social cohesion. But today the internet connects billions of humans and it's a pretty toxic behavior.
technovader|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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fouadf|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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rightnow|3 years ago