Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)
OMG OMG, some kind soul is posting good-quality, full-page scans of all of the old LucasFilm Games / LucasArts Adventurer magazines! Created at the company’s artistic height, these gems were half retail catalog, half inside scoop trivia treasure trove, decked out with never-to-be-seen-again Steve Purcell art (including single-page Sam & Max comics parodying the major Lucas game release featured that issue). They now sell for an arm and a leg on eBay.
I used to have every one of these, but they all vanished to whatever corner of the landfill my triangular Day of the Tentacle box and Dial-A-Pirate wheels ended up in…
(Via MixNMojo)
These are great! My favorite is the Leisure Suit Nighthawks.
Here’s a reverse challenge for you: famous paintings found in classic adventure games. Go!
(Update: someone already made these nice screengrabs of the Lucasfilm pixel-Suerat paintings, which were the ones I was thinking of! Now I don’t have to fire up ScummVM! PS: I’ve long loved the idea of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the original pixel art piece, being further referenced via pixelation in these games, an homage to the pointillism that had come almost exactly a century before)
Famous paintings mashed up with 80s adventure gamesAled Lewis (@fatheed) mashes up historic paintings with ’80s point-and-click adventure games for @iam8bitshowYes! (Visit Aled’s Tumblr)
If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!
(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)
The Mansion - Technical Aspects
If you love the old Lucasfilm games and want a peek into how their venerable game engine worked from a very technical perspective, you should read this article that walks through a disassembled Maniac Mansion. Extra bonus: Ron Gilbert, the creator of the SCUMM scripting language, drops a lengthy note in the comments section with insider info:
One of the goals I had for the SCUMM system was that non-programers could use it. I wanted SCUMM scripts to look more like movies scripts, so the language got a little too wordy. This goal was never really reached, you always needed to be a programmer. :-(
Some examples:
actor sandy walk-to 67,8
This is the command that walked an actor to a spot.
actor sandy face-right
actor sandy do-animation reach
walk-actor razor to-object microwave-oven
start-script watch-edna
stop-script
stop-script watch-edna
say-line dave “Don’t be a tuna head.”
say-line selected-kid “I don’t want to use that right now.”
I think it’s amazing that they managed to build a script interpreter with preemptive multitasking (game events could happen simultaneously, allowing for multiple ‘actors’ to occupy the same room, the clock in the hallway to function correctly, etc.), clever sprite and scrolling screen management, and fairly non-linear set of puzzles into software originally written for the 8-bit C64 and Apple II era of computers.
The Secret of Monkey Island (DOS). Lucasfilm Games, 1990.
Guybrush confronts The Beast. The horror, the horror.
Steve Purcell’s ink drawings for that crucial copy protection code wheel that came in the box of The Secret of Monkey Island - this thing. I still have ours!
What’s better than a piracy prevention device that actually depicts PIRATES? Arrr! I still have this Dial-a-Pirate™, too, along with two of the Mix’n’Mojo wheels from LeChuck’s Revenge. I’ve always appreciated that none of these pirates are in the game (well, not exactly: the dude on the bottom left looks an awful lot like Guybrush, and maybe that’s a proto-Elaine in the top row?), adding a bit of extra unseen character to the game’s world.
See also this great circa 1990 photo that cropped up a few months ago showing the Monkey Island developers personally assembling the Dial-A-Pirate wheels, getting ready to stick them in the retail boxes!
Know who assembled the retail boxes and whatnots for the original Secret of Monkey Island launch (including putting together the Dial-A-Pirate™ codewheels, as seen above)? The actual developers! I believe that’s Hal Barwood in the red glasses, and maybe that’s Dave Grossman on the left? If you have positive ID’s on anyone in the photo, let me know! The GameCola blog scored these photos of launch assembly from Tim Schafer’s Facebook page, including this good bit of trivia:
In one of these boxes, the developers slipped a five-dollar bill, signed by the whole team. It hasn’t been seen since.
The game industry’s definitely a bit different these days.
(Source: mixnmojo.com)
"A private school principal once told me that in the history of literature, the greatest translation of all time was the English translation of Waiting for Godot, because Samuel Beckett had personally translated it from French, in which he’d originally written it, into English, his mother tongue. Well, Steve Purcell just might be the Samuel Beckett of comic book video games."
— From an article on Huffington Post declaring that Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max Hit the Road is among the greatest comic book games ever (hard to deny). Nothing revealing in the article, I just enjoy that one of my all-time favorite cartoonists is becoming well-known enough now after 20+ years to start making appearances on sites like HuffPo.
A Meditation on Sierra AGI vs. Lucasfilm Games
From a short essay by elTee on Mixnmojo considering “The Secret of Monkey Island” as a satire of and rebuke to Sierra’s adventure games, a major shift in the genre that would signal the end of the (strangely death-obsessed) Quest series:
Did any of you ever play Police Quest? It was an interesting game because it actually expected you to act like a real police officer. I didn’t realise that cops had to perform a 360-degree vehicle check every morning (duh) and so when I drove away, I got a flat tyre outside of the station. If that were LucasFilm Games’ The Secret of The Death Angel, I’d probably be able to get out of the car and change the tyre, but not so in Police Quest with its grimly predictable ‘game over’. But in a weird way, it was more annoying when I finally managed to get that first day at work under my belt and it was time to get changed and head home. There’s a locker room, and I realise I have no idea which one of the lockers is mine – and then I further realise that the game isn’t going to help me out because of the logic that… the character knows which locker it is.
The Secret of Monkey Island throws that kind of crap out from the opening line. Guybrush doesn’t know shit, and that puts him and us on a level playing field. It’s subtle and incredibly liberating.
Very true. You could learn a lot about storytelling and game writing, good and bad, by studying the early adventure games.
Monkey Island 2 Special-Uber Edition - Voodoo mama. I wish the real Monkey Island SE looked half as great as this. I’d sell my fine leather jacket if Monkey Island 2 SE came out this faithful to the original art. Double bonus points for getting a thumbs up from Steve Purcell himself!
