Returning to Monkey Island - Noclip Documentary

(keyboard keys clacking) (mellow music) - The thing about stories is that they change. We tweak the narratives, forget parts and embellish others. And this problem, when it gets worse, once time gets involved, because it's not just the stories that change, it's us too, how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we remember the past. It's impossible to talk about a series like "Monkey Island" without indulging in some nostalgia. So let me tell you a quick story. One of my earliest gaming memories was playing "The Secret of Monkey Island" on my family's Amiga 600. I was four years old when the game came out, so probably around five or six by the time myself and my brother tried to complete it. To me, "The Secret of Monkey Island" was a window into an entirely new world, an impossible game that took all summer to complete. I remember it in its diluted 256 Commodore Graphics, not the original vivid EGA palette. To me, its soundtrack didn't play on a cd like players of the 1992 PC version. Instead, it was the fantastic crunchy, funky Amiga version, which absolutely no questions asked, has the best version of LeChuck's Theme hands down. I have no nostalgia towards the code wheel that came as a form of DRM with the boxed version as my copy of the game was an illegal copy. I loved completing "The Secret of Monkey Island". I enjoyed "LeChuck's Revenge" too, but I never actually completed it. I skipped three entirely, having no access to a PC back then, but loved "Escape", and then dabbled in the Telltale games when they came out. Each of us has our own version of "Monkey Island" in our heads based on when we played the games, in what order, how old we were, and whether we figured out the Monkey Wrench puzzle. So when I learned that not only were Lucas making a sequel three decades after the first game's release, but that they had somehow convinced the original co-creator Ron Gilbert to helm them, a man who famously said he'd never work on a game he didn't own the rights to ever again. Well, I knew there was a story here. There's a lot to cover from how Devolver convinced everyone to make this happen to the vivid new art style, which characters returned and which didn't make the cut, the power of Fandom, the difficulty with Cannon, and the reaction to the ending, which finally revealed the secret of Monkey Island exactly how it was imagined over 30 years ago. But before we talk about where we are now, let's first remember the many adventures and ports of call that led us to this moment. (upbeat playful music) (mid tempo lively music) - Well, "The Secret of Monkey Island" was my very first game in the industry. I started in 1989 and jumped right onto that. I worked with Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer on it, and we were all in our 20's. It was a kind of a happy little like, oh, it's our first or second job and we're out on this idyllic ranch in the middle of nowhere with a restaurant quality chef making us food, and then trees around and animals. And we all loved our work, and it was like, we were just kind of playing. It was like being at summer camp or something. We wasted a lot of time playing arcade games with each other, and somehow, we managed to make a couple of games in there. Yeah, it was great. It was a bad introduction to the world of professional game making for me, because I compare everything to that, and most things can fall kind of short. - I had it on my Commodore Amiga 500. I still have it, still have all the boxes and the discs, and the the copy protection wheels and all of that stuff. It really was just like a box of treasure, all of those things in there, they were just so special to me. All of the disc swapping probably was the most of the exercise I got the year that "Monkey Island" came out. But yeah, I just love those games so much. - They were more popular in Europe, it's true. Here, there was definitely like a Sierra Lucas Arts thing in the United States, and it was Lucas Art Sierra thing in Europe. (dramatic music) It made back its investment, I think, but it wasn't an immediate smash success. The industry wasn't even that big at that time. It just sort of hung around for a long time and developed a big nostalgic following since then. - Well, the first one totally changed what I thought about games. Suddenly, games had just like loads of atmosphere. I mean, the games are funny and everyone talks about the humor, but the world was just so rich. And having come from maybe playing some kind of side scrolling platform games and shoot 'em ups, suddenly there was a world that I really cared about. I wasn't just running past it, like it was scenery in like like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon - Well, in terms of design, it was definitely a group effort. And we would have daily sessions where all of us would get together. It was mostly Ron, and Tim and myself. Oftentimes, Steve Purcell would be there, Noah Falstein might wander in, he was just sort of everywhere. And we would sort of crack on the story and the puzzles. And then when it came to implementing things, then we took a little more individual responsibility. And Tim and I would have like, this is my room, this is your room. The characters in the room belong to you. I tended to write a lot of the ones who were in groups like the low moral fiber pirates on the corner, and the circus guys and kinds of things, Herman Toothrot. There was a point, we started working on Melee Island and there's a lot of characters on Melee Island, so there was a lot to do. And then we got midway through that and Ron said, "Okay, it's time to start a 'Monkey Island' debut. "Dave, you take that and we'll leave Tim on Melee Island." I'm like, "All right." And I quickly realized, there's no people here. There's nothing to grab onto, nothing to give it flavor. And so that's why there are notes all over the island, for example, so that even when you're sort of out in the wilderness away from people, there's still a little bit of a like, "Oh yeah, somebody's here." They're talking to each other. Something's going on. - In some ways, I think we take good writing for granted now in video games these days. Games that really had strong writing and strong characters were a lot, a lot harder to come by, and especially ones that had great writing and characters and were actually funny, which was a tremendous rarity. It was the character and the wit of "Monkey Island" that really drew me in. I will always remember that the thing that sticks with me, that scene when Guybrush and Elaine first come together on the docks of Melee Island, and the music swells, plunder buddy. That didn't exist at the time. So that really got me. I mean, Guybrush, he is everyone's hero in the sense that he's a hero that anyone could be, which I think is part of what makes him so relatable. He has his wits and he has his charms, but he is not possessed of any tremendous skill that most of us don't have in one form or another. He perseveres through a sheer force of will. - Well, the way things got green-lit at Lucas Arts in those days was essentially by the group of the project leaders at the studio. One of them would make a pitch and sort of plan it out, make a budget, this kind of thing, and bring it before the group, and sort of detail it all out. And they would usually say, "That's good, cut five characters in three locations "and you're good to go." And I don't remember there ever being any discussion over whether "Monkey Island" would have a sequel, just we sort of got to the end and that was the next thing Ron was gonna do. He just started working on it right away. - The second game, I was so emotional when I finished it. I just didn't know what to do with myself once I'd finished taking Guybrush on that adventure, so yeah, they were a big deal to me. - [Danny] Even more disc swapping on that second Amiga game as well. - That's right, yeah, yeah, I think at some point I actually managed to afford a hard drive, so it was just incredible. I played the whole game again immediately just to find out what it was like without any disc swapping. - Some people at the studio were probably thinking about whether the games were successful or not, but I wasn't one of them. A, it was above my pay grade until "Day of the Tentacle". And B, the atmosphere was just, let's make something fun. And if we think it's fun, then it probably is fun. And we did test it out on people. We would bring in friends and family sort of midway through the production when the game was playable and sit them down and give them pizza and sodas and just watch them. And if they were laughing, then that was good. We knew we were doing a good job, and if they were sort of confused and lost and we would ask them why and we would fix that before we ship the game. But yeah, especially since there was a huge film company behind us financially, there wasn't a lot of pressure at first to be a financial success, that came later. - I think something that really intrigued me from quite an early age was just how seeing the progression from the art in "Monkey Island 1" and then "Monkey Island 2", and I don't really remember that happening in a game before. I mean, I guess you would sometimes talk about, "Oh, the sequel, it's got better graphics, "it gets like eight out of 10 "for graphics rather than seven out of 10 "in the magazine review." But I don't really remember seeing sort of a style slightly changing. And I was at an age then where I got deluxe paint on my Amiga and I was trying to do my own stuff, and I was really interested in the process that had happened and what had changed. And on the surface, it could kind of look very similar, but I started to learn how the backgrounds in the second game had been painted and scanned in and that was something that really stood out to me. It was a game that made me want to investigate what it was like to make a game, probably more than any other one. I think there was more subtlety in the different islands that you went to. It didn't feel like, say the first game or a lot of other early point and click games where you were going in from one room to another room to another room and there, but in "Monkey Island 2", it was much more kind of complex and the environments kind of interleaved with each other more. - And then as some will know, there was a kind of a big hiatus, "Curse of Monkey Island" came out a few years later that was made by some other friends of ours, and none of us worked on that. - [Danny] What did you make of the third game? Because obviously that was such a departure art style wise, and people have a lot of things to say about it. What was your take at the time? - Yeah, I think it's really beautiful. I think it was a big shock back then in the same way that other "Monkey Islands" coming along with different art stars can shock people. Yeah, I think the design of the characters is just exquisite, being able to see all of that extra detail. I think it came at the time where I'd switched to a PC, so I was almost a bit kind of overwhelmed with the amount of pixels that were on screen. I mean, if you play it now, it still looks super low res, but to me, it was just like, this is the equivalent of like 16K or something. It was just like so high res. - About one or two months before the audition, I had literally told a friend that of all the video games, all the interactive things out there, my dream job would be to voice Guybrush Threepwood in "Monkey Island 3". But I told him, "Yeah, but that's never gonna happen. "Ron's left Lucas Arts, the series is long dead, "so that's too bad." But that would be my favorite, that would be my dream job. And then two months later, there it was. - I could just talk about good soup history all day. - How about that first fateful journey made to the Caribbean? - Oh, you mean the one that... - Then there was, oh, I skipped one (chuckling). Stanley will be mad at me. I skipped "Escape", that was in there somewhere. I didn't have anything to do with that one either. And then there was another hiatus, and then a company called Telltale picked it up where I happened to be working. Much to my surprise, actually, at the time, I didn't know we were even looking at it as a thing to do. And that was "Tales of Monkey Island" was this sort of short run limited series of games rather than a kind of a long form movie-like game. I got called into the boss's office at Telltale, and he said, "We're gonna do 'Monkey Island'." And I was like, "Really? "Oh, okay, that's a little weird. "And I'm not sure I actually wanna do that right now, "but let's call Ron." And he was like, "Oh, no, no, can't do that. "It's a secret. "We can't tell anybody." And it was a while before I was actually, I guess the ink had to dry on the contracts and that sort of thing before I was actually allowed to call Ron at all. And he was a little thrown by that, but he was like, "Can you come and do this with us?" He said, "There's no way I'm doing "another project right now. "I'm in the middle of it." But he did take a week and came down and we just sort of threw everything that was sort of on the table so far, and hear some plans we're making. And asked him what he thought, and he was like, "Yeah, you're treating Elaine kind of wrong. "She should be a little more sisterly "she should always be one step ahead of everybody." And we're like, "Yeah, yeah, that's good notes, good notes." And then we sort of went about our merry way. But yeah, mostly, he didn't get to put his thumbprints on that one. The built up expectations over just years of nostalgia and the impossibility of ever meeting that sort of thing with a sequel, like, oh, do make it the same, but better is that's paradoxical and you can't do it. And that was what made me terrified to even approach the project. But ultimately, we just started, we had to do it and there was a lot of experience in the room with "Monkey Island", both just people who had grown up on it and people who had worked on it. And the artists and the designers were all pretty steeped in. I had Stanley with me. Mark Darren was a big fan. Those guys did most of the story and design work on it, so kudos to them. I pressured them a little bit to hue to some themes, which was, that was kind of a new thing for me. When we made the first two, we just sort of blindly struck out and just sort of wrote whatever was in our minds at the time, but we were all a little older now by the time we were doing tales. We're like, these were people in their forties working on this game. So we wound up with this sort of big treat is on trust and who you should trust, who shouldn't you trust and what happens when you do and don't do that. And I think it came out actually pretty well. (mid tempo lively music continues) - "Monkey Island", like so many games of that era was unable to survive the capsizing of the adventure game genre. While the Telltale games gave it a second wind, there was something about the series that felt like it was from a bygone era. I, like many fans had resigned myself to it never coming back. I played the special editions of the games when they came out in 2009, in 2010, but the idea of a new game never crossed my mind, especially as Ron Gilbert had left the series behind and was working on new adventure games like "Thimbleweed Park". For years, Ron ran a blog called "Grumpy Gamer" where he'd wax lyrical about his work and how he felt about the game's industry. Ron doesn't strike me as a grumpy guy, but like anyone who rode the wave of a popular genre right up until it crashed into the rocky shoreline, he's got scars. It was gonna take some special people and special circumstances to lure him back to "Monkey Island." (upbeat playful music) (mid tempo playful music) - It came together because Nigel contacted me at Pax, I guess 2019. He knew somebody in Disney, high up in Disney that was a friend of his. And he thought, "Well, I think we could probably do another "Monkey Island" if you're interested in it. It's not something I was pitching around to people, doing another "Monkey Island". There was a lot about, I wasn't sure whether I really wanted to do another "Monkey Island". And that's when I contacted Dave Grossman. - So Ron and I were on a slack, "Hey, are you there? "Can you talk?" I was like, "Sure, sure." "Can you keep a secret?" I was like, "Yes I can." And he said, "Well, I've been talking to these guys "that I know. "There's this guy, Nigel from Devolver "and he knows this guy John Drake at Disney, "and they're talking about the possibility "of doing another "Monkey Island" game "and I'm thinking about it and would you do it with me? "Come partner with me on this." And I was in right away. And I was like, "This is the situation "under which I wanna make "Monkey Island". "Ron's here, he's running the show, I'm in." - There's always been this really dedicated audience that loved these products. We could do remasters and they would come buy them, we would do re-release on Steam or good old games or whatever, and we would get reactions. And the great thing that that Terrible Toybox has been doing in the interim since we sort of stopped doing those games was they've been continuing to keep that audience alive for that style of game and that kind of game in a very cool and unique way that is very much driven by Ron and the folks around him. And so it was an obvious yes. I mean, the only real question for us is do we have the capacity to do it? When would we do it? How do we make it work inside a world in which we are dealing with a whole bunch of other things at any given moment? So it was always a yes, how do we make that happen? How do we tell the next "Monkey Island" story? We know that "Monkey Island" is kind of the crown jewel of all of those games in terms of having still a sustained base of rabid fans that were still talking about it and playing it. And so we knew there was an audience there. It wasn't a question of will there be an audience for this? Will people come back for it? And then it just comes down to like, what does Ron wanna do? How does he wanna do it? How do we wanna roll this thing out? What's sort of the plan to reengage in something that's been sitting kind of dormant for over a decade now? - He definitely had some trepidation about how many layers there were gonna be on the project. There's developer doing approvals and Disney doing approvals, and there was gonna be a lot of stuff around that. And he wasn't sure, do we have a good idea? What do we wanna do with it? - He flew up here for a day, I guess a weekend and we just kind of hashed everything out and it's like, okay, do we want to make this game? What would it be? Because the important thing to me was I didn't want to make just another "Monkey Island", I didn't wanna just say, "Oh, here's the IP, "let's slap Guybrush in and do stuff." I wanted to make a game that meant something. And it was really kind of hashing all that out with Dave and really deciding whether we had something that was actually meaningful and not just another "Monkey Island". - So I flew to Ron's house and we spent basically about a day and a half just sort of getting our ducks together and talking about what we wanted to do. And we were kind of in the same place on this because the "Monkey Island" games have always been an avenue for us to sort of write about ourselves and what's going on in our lives. First one was about somebody embarking on a new career, and being really excited about it and finding that other things might be more important than that. And the second one was kind of about making a sequel and how that's hard. And so this one we thought, "Let's do something about being an old experienced hand "in an industry that's changing "and where the way things are done "are not what you remember." So we kind of started from that. Ron felt it was very important to address this whole "Secret of Monkey Island" thing that we had sort of left hanging. We thought it should sort of be about how these things, the secret or the game, "The Secret of Monkey Island", sort of take on an importance over time via nostalgia and get built up the things that you then become obsessed with and where that can take you. So Guybrush has some definite obsessive qualities in this game that come straight out of that as a theme. - Oh yeah, it was all story. Yeah, it really wasn't about looking at pros and cons and all that stuff. It was like, okay, do we have a good story? So it was spending the weekend just thinking about what would the story be? Where will we take Guybrush, where will we take the world? It was through that process that we had come up with the idea of Boybrush and Guybrush has a son, and he's telling his son the story. The other thing I also knew is I wanted the game to start right at the end of "Monkey Island 2", which is a really difficult thing to do, right? This kind of, I think gave us creatively, a really interesting place to kind of start and be true to that. It does happen right at the end of "Monkey Island 2", just not in the way people thought it would. - And then we roughed out a plot, we think it would be great to meet LeChuck's crew and have a section where you're on LeChuck's ship, that idea came straight outta that weekend and never changed. It was our best and favorite idea, I think the whole time, and it's possibly my favorite chapter of the games, is the one you're on his ship. But we came out of it with kind of four-fifths of the plot of the game. - It was really kind of hashing all that out with Dave and really deciding whether we had something that was actually meaningful and not just another "Monkey Island". And so after he left, then I contacted Nigel and said, "Okay, let's do this thing." I was very clear that I really want my creative freedom, I wanna be able to make the game I wanna make, which Disney couldn't agree to. It's like they're a huge company and they're just going, "Oh, we can't agree to that." - It took seven months to line up all the contracts before the game. So it was July before we actually started paying ourselves. And we're like, "Okay, everything's serious. "We're actually gonna do this now, and we're sure about it." - I felt good enough in talking to them that I had their assurance that we will do that even though we can't contractually say we will do that. And they were true to their word. - People have to put things in contracts to protect themselves and they were all very scary to read. But then eventually they're like, "Okay, I think we've come to an agreement." And it turned out all that was, it was just a non-issue. Disney was really cool. They did let us make the game that we wanted to make. They gave us some suggestions, they were actually really nice and hands off about it. - There's very little in that game that we had to change. The things that we had to change that they wanted to change were really for legal reasons and we were very legitimate. We're gonna get sued if you do that type stuff, but creatively we really did have complete control. - [Danny] It's like the Q-tip in "Secret". - Yes, yes, I remember that well (chuckling). That was my introduction to the legal system. (cheerful music) - [Danny] Any good adventure needs a talented crew. And for this one, Ron and Dave were gonna go for some old and some new. Like any good nostalgia trip, this journey was going to need the return of some familiar faces, but to rely too much on callbacks could result in a game that felt out of step with the times. So they'd need some new ideas too, some new blood, and perhaps a new lick of paint. Ron's career has spanned many interesting projects, but in recent years, he's enjoyed the return to the classic point in click game. His 2017 original "Thimbleweed Park" made double its goal via Kickstarter and saw Ron joining forces with ex Lucas programmer David Fox. Jen Sandcock was a producer on that title too, making up the backbone of Ron's new crew. (playful music) - So first game was called "Rescue on Fractalus", which was a first person flight game, shooting game. Then "Labyrinth" based on the film, I was the designer and project leader on that. And then Ron asked me if I could help with "Maniac Mansion". So I became the first Scum Scripter in the world. Then I did my own game, "Zach McCracken and the Alien Mind Benders" also using Scum expanded version of it. And then both Noah Falstein, Ron Gilbert and I worked on "Indiana Jones and Last Crusade", and we had three of us working together 'cause we had a very tight deadline. We tried to get it out near the launch of the film. - David's the guy who hired me at Lucas Arts in 1989. Ron was in charge of my project, but David was the hiring manager for that, and he was around there. I knew him there a couple of years before he left to do, he did a lot of onsite entertainment stuff. He was really into these sort of pods that you would get in that would move around and stuff. - [David] So I think we set kind of the mechanisms in place for "Monkey Island" with a smaller team for "Thimbleweed Park". It was fun, it was a great project. The fun that we had in making it shows in how the game came out. - To be able to be part of it, I had to keep pinching myself. And I think there was a number of other people on the team who were the same. I started with the project maybe from day five or something, really not like the beginning. So Ron and David already had their brainstorming, but then we started work. So they had a good idea of all the worlds and areas we were gonna work in. So when Rex came in, he was starting with the mood boards for specific areas, starting with Melee and some of the places we'd visit. - Back in what, 2008, he had sent me just out of the blue, I did not know who he was at all, he sent me this picture that he had done of Guybrush, essentially fan loved. And it was really interesting to me. I just loved it because it was this very kind of stylized, angular take on the whole thing. And it was so different from what everyone else was doing. - I guess it was around the time that the remakes of the original "Monkey Island" and "Monkey Island 2" were announced. And it was interesting to see how they'd updated the designs of the characters. The great thing about art is there's never a right answer. It's like everyone's got their own takes on it. So I was kind of stimulated by that to think, "Well, how would I do Guybrush if I was gonna do him?" Instead of taking the approach of maybe just working up the detail and just going from a small amount of pixels to a large amount of pixels and figuring out, oh well, where are we go put all the laughter lines and the tiny little details and things like that. I thought, well, it would be interesting to kind of stick to pixel art, but kind of make it hand painted and make it more like a sort of kind of boxy. I think the early character designs in games are so strong because they were so limited and they had to be so readable and understandable at that tiny scale, and it was just done for fun. I think I did it, it was probably when I was leading "Tearaway, at Media Molecule" and I just did it in my lunch break as like a joke or something and put it on Twitter. And then Rob picked up on it and he posted it and said it was his favorite version of Guybrush ever, which was a bit of a surprise. - And so I made it my desktop on my computer, and it was that way for years. It was just my desktop. And then when "Monkey Island" started, one of the decisions that I had early on in the project was, do I do this as pixel art or do I do it as not pixel art? And I really decided I didn't wanna do it as pixel art. and then it became, "Well, what should it look like?" I mean, I think for most people when they think of non-pixel "Monkey Island" they think of "Monkey Island 3", that kind of cartoony Disney-esque, hand-painted type style. And I was never a huge fan of that. And I wanted to come up with something different and that's when I remembered Rex's art. And so I looked him up (chuckling), I found him, and I just sent him an anonymous email. - At no point did I tweet that it was gonna be a new "Monkey Island" game. I mean, I'm an idiot 'cause I should have worked that out really. And I actually kind of signed up without knowing that it was gonna be "Monkey Island". But yeah, when he told me, I really did, wow, it was a real like mic drop moment. So it was such a shock. - I'm thinking, "Well, I know Ron's always working "on some game. "I'm gonna go get coffee with him." And in my mind, the best case scenario is he's working on some new game and maybe there's like some little role in this game and he just thought to himself, "Hey, John would be cool for that." And I was thinking, "That would be so cool if I got "to work with Ron on some other game. "I never got to work with him and blah, blah blah." So we sit down, we're having coffee, and we're just sitting outside on the sidewalk in Seattle and just chatting whatever for 10 or 15 minutes. And then he says, "Well, do you wanna know what the project is?" I said, "Yeah, I'd love to hear about the project. "What is it?" And he says to me, "I'm making another 'Monkey Island' game." And I was like, "What?" And I lost my mind and I jumped up and I swear, I swear to you in that moment before he told me, as he's getting ready to tell me, I never, I did not think he was gonna say it. It wasn't even a possibility in my head. I don't know why. I mean, I know everyone's thinking like, "Well, Dom, of course he's doing another 'Monkey Island', "why would you not at least suspect that?" But I just didn't. And I think partially, it's a defense mechanism. I love doing it so much that every time we wrap, it's like I just have to tell myself, "It's gone forever. "We had a great run. "It was fun." 'Cause otherwise I'll drive myself nuts. I did that the first time. I drove myself nuts, hoping it was gonna come back. So as a coping mechanism, I think I just like, that's my reality. It's done, we're never coming back to it. So yeah, I had a good time with that (chuckles). - [Danny] Before production on, "Return to Monkey Island" ever began, Ron and David Fox worked on a spinoff for "Thimbleweed Park" called "Dolores". This re-engineered the original games engine and would act as a foundation for "Return to Monkey Island". - Being able to know our gameplay mechanics before we even started the game is just like a massive leg up to tons and tons of games out there. And so that meant we didn't need to explore that. We could explore art and story, and that in the puzzles. - [Danny] That's interesting, does that make for a shorter pre-production? - Yes, I would say so, yeah. - This was a little bit different for me because A, the game series existed before. Everything I've ever done before now has always been like, you are actually creating an original IP and it doesn't exist till you work on it. It's like you're not following on from four different versions of "Little Big Planet". You are just making something that turns into "Little Big Planet". And this is also different in that Ron had that image of Guybrush that he really loved and kind of initially actually think about, well, how would I do that image now? And also try and draw out of, well, what was it about that image that Ron particularly liked? 'Cause it's quite a simple image. There's not a lot there. I mean, it's not like I did an enormous concept painting of the whole of the Tri Island area or anything, it was one guy's head. Essentially, what I wanted to bring to it, the thing that I felt I could latch onto was the storyline that was in "Return to Monkey Island", and the way that Guybrush is telling this whole tale to his son. And it felt that maybe bringing some kind of slightly storybook, painted storybook element to the art style could be a way of both having that art that Ron liked, but also a world that had enough texture and enough believability to really feel like it's alive and that you're there, but you are not kind of expecting it to look photorealistic. - We kind of did multiple passes over the whole game. We started, but with mood boards for each of the different areas. And then once we had those mood boards, we then broke it down into, we're just gonna focus on the rooms for a particular island or scene first. We started with Act two on the ship because that was a very self-contained area that was not interconnected. And from there, we did what we called thumbnail art for everything, so it was very blocky art. It still had color for the most part. And then our programmers could take that, hook it up, get the character walking around. And so we had all of that working. You could play the game, start to play it, start to finish by the end of our pre-production. - We basically made a very simple version of the entire game that was just in very, very block colors so that you could almost like squint and you'd be able to still recognize where they were. The color palettes were just so important. And I had a discussion with Ron 'cause he was like, "Well, this is only 'cause of EGA colors. "It wasn't like we chose these ones." Well, somebody would've chosen them, but it was so limited with what you could do on some of those early versions. But I still think that those limitations are really what gives a lot of games with a lot of history a very strong visual identity and I was very keen to continue that. It gives players the feeling of they're in a certain section at the moment and then there's the reward of getting to a new section and really feeling that they've got somewhere new because essentially, point and click adventure games can't just give people like 5,000 XP or something. We don't have currency or anything, we just have to reward you with more pictures to walk around in. So, you want them to be exciting and feel very different from where they've been, whether that's the color palette or a whole bunch of other things. - And then once we did that, we basically repeated that whole process again twice. So we then did the art all over again, and then we started adding in some animations. The final pass on art was less of the rooms. It was like, what are the ones that we either think aren't standing up to the same quality as others, or what are the ones that we wanna be wow rooms? We had this idea of some of the rooms, we wanted to be ones where you could just sit and appreciate it, such as La Anchor where you're under the water and there's fish everywhere. There is a time limit on how much you can appreciate that one, but we had a couple of these are our wow rooms where you're just gonna sit and enjoy it. - I think the reason I didn't want to do pixel art for the game is I didn't want the game to be just a nostalgia play. And I feel that had I done it with pix art it just would've been a nostalgia game. "Thimbleweed Park" was all done with pix art. It was very much a nostalgia game, but that was really the point of the Kickstarter, right? The whole Kickstarter was about nostalgia, and so it made sense. But with this game, I really wanted to be able to not just go after that core audience. I really wanted new people to experience the game. And I think pixel art is an art form and it's a fascinating art form. And I love pixel art, but for a lot of people in the world, they see pixel art and they just discount discount it. And I didn't want to kind of have to deal with that. So the game, ironically the whole game is about nostalgia, that is the point of the game, but the game isn't a nostalgia play, if that makes sense. There are two kind of separate things. - We used more off the shelf tools on this project. So for animation, we used Spine, which we didn't use for "Thimbleweed Park". "Thimbleweed Park" was much more, I guess just cell frame animation essentially. Here, we could actually do more of (indistinct) stretches and all sorts of other great things with this tool, very powerful tool. For sound, we used FMOD. There was one tool that was very similar to both games called Wimpy. You have to ask Ron where he came up with the name for that. But that's the one we used for helping to block objects in the room, set different states of the objects, set up where the walk boxes were gonna be. When setting up the walk boxes, we also have like scale regions. So like in this area, when the Guybrush is, he's this size. When he's there, he's that size and it'll scale between those. We have parallax layers. We did that with "Thimbleweed Part Two", so you have multiple layers and there's a max, I think it was six. You could go in and say at what rate they pan in relation to the main background layer. - There's no way I'm getting through there. - Lighting only affects characters. So if there's lighting in the room, that's all baked in. But then a character might walk into where a light like a lamp is hanging down and that's where we would add lighting by saying here's this color light, it's like in this area. Here's this the region, here's the intense region, here's the blend out region to nothing. By changing the value of the light to dark, you could essentially use it for creating shadows. So when someone walked into a shadow area, we just put a light there that was darker than the ambient light. Some lights could randomly flicker between two different colors. So if it was a fire or flame, you could have like a flicker effect on him. - What exactly is a scorched Alaska? - Imagine a dessert shaped like a huge legless jellyfish with a texture like ice cream wrapped in packing foam and it sets your face on fire when you eat it. - Appetizing. - Not really. - Pretty soon, we were into production, we were actually making things, but we were still revising the design most of the way through the entire production 'cause nothing is ever quite right. Once it came time to build things, the script was my job. So I was the principal script writer and I probably did about 85% of it. Ron is a funny guy and wanted to keep his hands in, so he would take like particular characters in scenes that he cared more about and either do them or weigh in on them. And so there's like LeChuck on his ship. So it's mostly like cranky characters. He really likes to do them. So Cobb in the bar and the two quarantine pirates on the ship. - By the time we were done, we had a large maybe 20 page outline of the story that's gonna happen. But big beats, not the small beats. The small beats are the things that for an adventure game, when you're actually starting to design the puzzles, we're not even doing puzzle design at that point, but when you start to do the puzzles, you have to answer the small beats because the puzzles are the kind of the mechanics of everything. And so when we start doing the puzzles, then we kind of have to figure out, well, what are the small beats to the story? Why does somebody want the wrench? We know we want a wrench, but why do they want the wrench? You can't just make up a reason. You have to have a reason that fits in the story about why they want the wrench. (lighthearted music) (Guybrush burping) - [Danny] To make a "Monkey Island" game, you first have to make some islands, not just "Monkey Island", but presumably Melee and maybe a few new ones thrown in there too. So how did the team approach this challenge? What islands made a return? Which ones got cut? and how did they figure out which characters were gonna make it into Guybrush's most recent chapter? (gentle music) - [Rex] And in some ways, Melee was one of the easier places to do because you always had some artwork to compare to. Definitely, the Dock and the Low Street because they're just such iconic locations. Everyone can remember meeting the men of low moral fiber for the first time and all of that stuff. And they had quite distinct angles, particularly Low Street with that very deep perspective, which I remember when I played that originally, that was just so exciting to just be able to walk so deep into the screen and come out again. So we didn't wanna change stuff like that too much. But also places like the interior of the Scumm Bar feels quite different. The cameras kind of tilted around further. - [Ron] We didn't want to just rehash "Monkey Island 1", just make that game again. We wanted to make a new game, but we felt like Melee was important, that was the jumping off place for "Monkey Island 1". And it felt right that Guybrush goes back to "Monkey Island 1" to start this adventure. But we also wanted to make it different, so there are places that are different that you don't see in "Monkey Island 1" or places that don't exist. - I think we had planned to put Meat Hooks Museum there. And then when we were consolidating, we decided to move that into the forest and then just sort of minimize the travel of that character were there's the curator who's a new guy. who's pretty fun. - What's the story with the Wanted poster? - That is the earliest known Wanted poster for Captain Kate Capsize. You could tell how notorious she was by the huge number of crimes listed there, very impressive. I got it from a collector on Fat Island. - Those are my own crimes actually. I was pretty much public enemy number one on Fat Island at the time. I stuck Kate's picture on there, so she'd get thrown in jail. - (laughing) That would never work. Nobody's that clueless in real life. - He's thematically good because he sort of represents the disturbed fan base. He's just super, it was another idea that we had kind of early on that we thought was really funny was that there would be a character who was super into all this pirate stuff and he had all this memorabilia for Guybrush's previous adventures, but that Guybrush himself had just somehow been left on the cutting room floor and he was just out of the picture and you just couldn't convince him otherwise. - He gets everything wrong. There's this whole history going on and Guybrush is very aware of that as he is looking at all these exhibits, and he just has everything completely wrong. And I find that very kind of amusing. I kind of wonder, it's like sometimes I'll read things people have written, like a history of "Monkey Island" or whatever and I'm just reading that just like slapping my mind, going, "What are you thinking? "This is not what is really happening." And so in some ways, he was that character. Dave wrote him mostly, but I just remember reading all this stuff and talking to Dave about it. Yeah, he needs to be totally off the rails and totally wrong about everything that happened historically. - [Danny] But very confident? - Yes, very, oh absolutely, yes. - Ron had said how he wanted to make sure that we didn't end up with a kind of shoebox feel, almost like that kind of doll's house feel where you walk in a door on one side of the screen and you've just got floor, back wall, ceiling, another door on the other side of the room, basically what you do is the programmer art when you're just mapping the whole place out. And there was a version of every room that was done as programmer art like that. - When Dave and I were first redoing it, there was a lot of kind of this internal desire to just recreate everything. Well, we have to meat hooks, we have to have this, we have to have this. And we just cut all that stuff very early on. It's like, well we don't wanna do that. If we're gonna bring back a location, it has to be there for a reason. - It felt that what you wanna do with a location is that you want to almost create one of those 360 images that you can take with a camera, and everything is kind of like bent around like a sphere. And you kind of want to make the environments feel like they're way bigger than the screen through distortion. You're just seeing more than you would ever normally see. Because otherwise, just the 16:9 version of a room, all you're seeing is the back wall, and there's a lot of opportunity to just show more if you're creative with the perspective. (upbeat cheerful music) - Have you seen the pirate leaders around? This is their table. In fact, you'd probably better move. You don't wanna get caught sitting here. - It's our table, rummy. - We are the pirate leaders. - Get lost. - Yeah, it's like we wanted to have the pirate leaders, but we didn't want to have the same pirate leaders. We wanted pirate leaders that had a new kind of idea about the world 'cause the world changes. The pirate leaders in "Monkey Island", they're very, very much a part of that wonderful pirate culture and they're the good guys and they're helping you out. And we wanted to kind of flip that. - So there are new pirate leaders, and this was just our way of covering this idea that the industry is changing, Melee is changing, and Guybrush thinks he's gonna do things the same way that he always has. He's gonna go in, have a knock back a grog with the pirate leaders and they're gonna give him some money. He is gonna go buy a ship and hire a crew, sail off to "Monkey Island" and bring back glory for everyone. And he gets there. Pirate leaders, it's new guys and they're young and they're more like real blood thirsty pirates, and they wanna sack and pillage and destroy things and they're just not interested in his thing at all. They won't support him. The old pirate leaders meanwhile are out on the street corner and they're milling around. You're meant to mistake them at first for the guys who used to hang out on that street corner, there were also three of them. And you have a conversation with them sort of about what's happened to them, and they say things about like, "Oh, once you're painted as old school, "that's all anybody sees." And that whole conversation just comes directly out of my experience at Telltale basically where we went there. And it touches on some interesting bits of history like the fact that Guybrush never technically finished his quests in "The Secret of Monkey Island". So technically speaking, he should be calling himself a pirate and ah, we're not gonna worry about all that. But it's all optional. There's no reason to talk to those guys at all. And there was stuff in the code already for if you haven't done it in the later chapter, now they're running a fish shop and they will talk to you about it in this early scene like, "Oh, we're taking our money "and we sold our ship and we're opening a fish shop. "It's gonna be great." And so you talk to them again later and there's all this code and they're like, if you haven't spoken to them earlier, then this happens. And if you have, then this other thing happens. So when we were trimming the game and we were looking at it, one of the problems we had was that Melee Island is really big. There's a lot of characters on there, and we brought back a lot of people just for let's reintroduce the environment and have some opportunities for nostalgia, but also opportunities to acquaint new people with how this whole thing works. And it gets pretty long. And we were looking for ways to just make that experience shorter so we could get you to just solve especially the part that comes before you solve the puzzles to get onto the LeChuck ship and get out of there. So the first and obvious thing was along, "Oh, those guys on the street corner, they're superfluous. "They don't have to be there at all. "it's literally one bit in code. "We just turn 'em off "so that they're not even on the corner." And this is one of our regular design talks, and we both said, "Yeah, we could do that, "but that's a fun conversation. "We really hate to cut it." And that was the point that which I said, "We should have a writer's cut "where you can turn it on and off if you wanna have more, "just more lengthy conversations and useless stuff." You just wanna kind of see more and you're not worried about how fast am I getting through this game? You have volunteered for the lengthier experience if you've turned that on. - Guybrush Threepwood. - I would just have the screen up so close. I'd be zoomed in so far looking at the original pixel art and being like, "Is that their nose? "No, no, that must be their mouth. "No, but they haven't got a mouth." But again, it always comes back to the fact that Wally's distinctive 'cause he's got that mop of red hair and he's got the big monocles, so if you get those two things right, then everyone's gonna come along with you. Something that I really wanted to do with the characters is have them all kind of a little bit angular, whether they're boxy or just they've got sharp angles so that they really feel like characters that I always say that they should look like people that have really been kind of like smashed around the world a bit. They've been on a few too many boats and they've fallen off too many harbors and they've drunk too much grog, and everyone has just become a little bit distorted. Grouping certain characters together like how does the whole of Le Crew look as a team together? It's like team Le Crew over here and all of the people that you'll see on Melee over here, and it's similar to doing the rooms where you're looking for similarities in color palette, but also the tricky thing with characters particularly in a 2D game like this, it's making sure that they pop from the backgrounds they're in front of. It's not like a TV animation where you are doing each character and each background bespoke for that scene. You have no idea that that character is gonna walk into that room. So occasionally, something might change in the script or something and you'd suddenly see a character that was never designed to be there. There might suddenly have to be a few tweaks to their design or their colors to make sure that they were still readable. (seagulls squawking) - Another of the things that we talked about that weekend when we were physically together was, let's think about some other islands that we can have, because we're always trying to kind of build out that world and put new places in it, and those are the most fun to explore. And he was like, "I want there to be a cold one." - This is a long story, so feel free to cut all this out. Back in 2000, I had thought about doing a new "Monkey Island" and I wanted to do a really interesting story for that whole thing. And my story for that game was the game took place 3,000 years in the future, and it took place on this snowball earth where everything was frozen and Guybrush had been frozen in ice. And 3,000 years later, these pirates had kind of heard the myth of Guybrush and their quest was to go find him and thaw him out. And so a lot of the game just took place sailing in pirate ships through ice and ice cutters and all that stuff. I mean, it never went anywhere, but I just found it interesting. The pirates would be in this kinda icy arctic world. And so when we had to come up with a new island, I'm like, "I'm gonna build this island. "I'm gonna build this snow island." - And yeah, I like the idea of like, oh, the 19th parallel runs straight through the Caribbean and anything north of that just instantly becomes like super cold. So I think it was a day or two before I was like, "Oh, you know what it should be called is Brrrmuda" - Well, we wanted it to be a little bit of kind of the Viking North stuff, but we're also really interested in the more indigenous people that would've lived up there. And so that's really it became a melding of those two things. - Well, I mean the way we thought of it was, it was sort of like Greenland had been transported into the Caribbean. So we just imagined this kind of smallish island that had been colonized jointly by Inuit people and Norse people, and they had just sort of come and interbred. and that was the society. - And in the challenges chair, all the way from the southern Caribbean, still in possession of nearly all of its original teeth, the newcomer, Guybrush Threepwood. If you would each now select your first fish and place it on the plate in front of you. - [Pirates] Ooh, aah! - I'm not sure exactly how we started on this idea of the contests that you have to become queen. That probably just started with the ridiculous idea that you become a ruler of the island. And then we just sort of went from there to, okay, we need some ways to do that. We need some things that these people will care about. And given who they seem like they are, what would those things be? And okay, well, you gotta be kind of smart, but you gotta be kind of hearty and sturdy and very stoic. And it's just like, here are the characteristics that we think these people would have as a culture, and let's put some contests around them and build silly tests for you to do to prove you're one of them. - [Danny] Magic has always been an important facet of the series, going back to that original game. And one returning franchise favorite was Corina, proprietor of the House of Mojo Shop on Melee Island. Most often, she's referred to as the Voodoo Lady, a persona she utilizes to promote the tourist trap store that she operates. But Corina's seemingly true ability to harness magic has helped Guybrush on more than one occasion. - As you say, she's kind of lynch pin. She represents the whole sort of magical side of "Monkey Island", without which, it would seem lacking. Good intentionally, we always thought of her as a representative of this sort of inauthentic, sort of Louisiana huckster version of Voodoo. And so we tried to sort of magnify that with lots of comments about it. Is this really voodoo? Well, no it isn't, but the tourists like it. And so that's why we do that. "Oh, it says, I'm sure this is authentic voodoo, "it says so on the sign," and that sort of thing. And we brought in, Disney found us an expert just to consult. And we brought him in and was like, "Look, here's what we're doing. "Here's how we're portraying things. "What do you think?" And he explained the difference between like, "Well, there's authentic voodoo like this "and there's touristy voodoo like that. "And I think as long as you are sticking "within these boundaries, it should be okay." And she was also a good foil for the sort of decline of Melee as we saw it. It's like the new guys are in charge and they're kind of bleeding the place dry, and it's all the familiar things are going away. So you first meet her and she's having a going out of business sale and you're like, "Oh no, what's going on?" The old ways are being challenged. There's a new magic in town. It's a factor in the story. I think originally, it was gonna be a little bit bigger of a factor, sort of the new dark magic and the old voodoo magic and sort of those being the two opposing forces. - They're brewing the potion to go to "Monkey Island". - So? - So, I'm gonna help them finish it and then we follow them. All I need to do is get them a skull somehow. Make ready to sail. - That comes directly outta the fact that Ron had just watched "Black Sails" and he insisted that I watch it too. We both liked it a lot. And there's a heavy element of this is how they actually did things on these ships. People gotta vote. It was semi democratic and the captain could be deposed 'cause there's a lot of the crew and they can depose the captain whenever they want really. - That was very interesting because so much of the show was about the pirate crew voting and stuff. The captain wasn't an authoritarian leader, but the crew had to vote. And that really intrigued me. And it was a little puzzle about, getting their votes. And I thought that was interesting. - We needed some obstacles for you on the ship. And we decided the biggest one would be that no single member of the crew wants to go to "Monkey Island" at all. They're all dead set against this idea. And so your primary job is just to convince them all and get them all on your side by doing shipboard politics, which is what we were watching in "Black Sails". One of the first things that I did, I think before we even officially signed the contracts and started the project was a little writeup on what it would be like on that ship, sort of who's there and what are the things they do in their spare time and this sort of business. And a lot of that's just not in the game, but it's good to do these things just to sort of get your wheels turning. And one of the things that is in that document, I think is Iron Rose, the Quartermaster. And for a long time, she was my favorite character, - The matter before the crew is the question of whether we should go to "Monkey Island"? I vote nay. - Nay. - Nay. - Nay. - Aye. - The vote to go has to be unanimous. It isn't, meeting adjourned. - But then, you start writing and you develop other favorites as you go. It tends to be just sort of whoever you're working on at the moment. You mentioned Flambe. He's pretty fun, the guy who won't just won't do anything. And they have to keep him around 'cause he's useful for one or two things. And my ultimate favorite was Putra, the Chef. And I think the reason she's my favorite is just that she has the most to say, because you get on the ship and you're disguised as a zombie and she's the other zombie. And so there's a kind of a natural, you're like me, but there's also an element of how do I pretend to be a zombie and am I gonna get into trouble? And so I felt like I had to cover all this in the dialogue. So there are these like long chains you could go down where you're getting into conversation with her and she's talking about herself. Then she's asking you questions as though you're a zombie and you have to come up with answers. You're supposed to worry about whether you're getting 'em right or not. - Sometimes, I forget I'm a zombie. - I don't, every time I try to get a decent cooking job at a restaurant or some swanky manor house, they say I'm too green and they play it off like they're talking about experience level, but I know what they mean. "Zombies need not apply. "We don't want 'em rotting near the food." You must have experiences like that. - Ron himself enjoys cooking quite a bit too, which is one of the other things we got to geek out on when we get together. So yeah, I mean, certainly particularly, you're talking about he's working on this game during Covid lockdown and he is working on, he's doing a lot of cooking at home, so naturally, the galley and the ship is gonna have a little extra flavor. Guybrush isn't really so much about good and evil. He's not out on a crusade to get rid of the evils in the world. He just wants to get his thing. They say he's the embodiment of chaotic, neutral. If Putra or any of the other ghost chefs are like, hey, there's not really anything necessarily they got personal against him as long as they're not out to get him. Why not be buddies? If I can sneak in there and befriend somebody, hey, whatever gets the job done. - Yeah, I was gonna be a chef and then I turned into a zombie, and now there's discrimination against zombies and we could just talk about marginalized people and how that worked, but all in the context of being a zombie, it was just super duper fun. So she was my favorite, I think, to write and also to talk to. - They think all we wanna do is eat brains. - Which to be honest, I do want, but not constantly. That's a terrible stereotype. - I really like Putra, the zombie Chef who's sort of almost in danger of eating herself. She's kind of just full, she's just got meat hanging off her. To be honest, the character description was such a joy. I've got like 20 other versions of Putra that I would've been just as happy if she'd turned up in the game. - Gullet is another favorite. He's your overbearing boss who gets thrown off the ship and pretty early on then you can kind of go down and make fun of him. It's just kind of sometimes fun to write the really mean guys and make 'em as mean as possible. And there's a scene where he's describing what your life is gonna be like down in the hold, and I had a ball writing that. - What if I need to, you know? - Use the portal. Don't get anything on the ledge outside though. I hate an unsightly ledge. - So if you think about it, we're trying to make a game that's sort of similar in scope to "The Secret of Monkey Island". "The Secret of Monkey Island" has part on Melee Island and part on Monkey Island and some parts on ships. And you go back to Melee Island very briefly. "Return to "Monkey Island" has part on Melee Island and some parts on ships and a part on Monkey Island. And we were gonna put four other islands in here in the middle. It's like, oh, we we're actually planning a game that is twice the size of the original one, and that is probably a mistake. And we just sort of, as we were building the thing and realizing just exactly how much work it was gonna be, that's when we started to trim the fat as they say, cut some things out. And Cogg Island, we had designed out some puzzles and it was sort of an homage to the fact that we both like Myst. And so these were sort of a little bit more mechanical puzzles with machinery and stuff. And the idea was the mother of the locksmith had been the designer of this island and had built all these things there. And this was just sort of part of your chapter for questing was you had to go there and get one of the keys. So yeah, there was lots of sort of pulling levers and shooting things outta cannons. It was all appropriately themed to the time period, but definitely felt a little more mislikes than the rest of it. And so, when the time came and we were like, "We need to make some serious cuts here." Cogg Island is the thing that sort of tonally fits the least well with the rest of the game and it lifts out pretty easily. So despite the fact that we like it, I think that's what has to go. There was previously another island called Mayer Island, which was basically a trash dump. It has some puzzles in there. And I think we took our favorite bits of that and moved them onto Terror Island and threw the rest of it away. It's little earlier consolidation going on there. I guess it was just basically came out of the idea of wanting to do a place with that tone where you would walk around and it would just feel really scary everywhere you went. And a lot of that just has to do with how the art is drawn. Also, the principle feature of that island is the Cave of Screams, which is of course behind the maze of twisty passages, which of course comes directly from adventure in the colossal caves. I know Ron and I had both played that when we were much younger. The game has several mazes in it and neither of us likes mazes at all, but we keep putting 'em in our games 'cause people do seem to like them. And then we always have some sort of clever way to get around them. And then sticking Herman at the bottom just made perfect sense because he's always stranded somewhere. So if somebody's gonna be down at the bottom of this cave, it's definitely gonna be him. - Herman Toothrot? - I think so. It's been a while. - We took it as an opportunity to sort of expand on this idea of Guybrush's obsession with finding the secret causing harm to other people. You'll see it's happening throughout the game. And this is one of the instances is he gets down there, he finds Herman and then he manages to get out of the cave himself, but can't take Herman with him and you can't really get back in there anymore 'cause your lamp is broken then and you just can't go get him, and you just sort of forget about it, which is a little bit of a strange thing to do. - Well, that wasn't so hard. - What happened to Mr. Toothrot? - When? - Did you get him out of the cave? How'd you do it? - That's not part of this story. - Oh, okay. - Yeah, I mean, Guybrush does, but it's not malicious. I mean, Guybrush is not a malicious person. His wake of destruction is because of his innocence. That is a very interesting as a designer and a writer because you can have somebody that leaves chaos in their wake, but because it's not malicious, you don't have to deal with him suddenly becoming the villain of the story. - Nice to see you again too, Wally, whatever your last name is. - I spent years in therapy getting over being burned, blinded, blown up, abandoned and maroon because of you. - Yeah, good times, huh? - It just comes from almost over excitement. He's so excited about this. And I think about just a lot of that with my dog. My dog is so excited about everything and just constantly running around and doing stuff and creating chaos in her wake. - Yeah, the sort of obsession and fanaticism of Guybrush with this is it comes in on several levels. It's a send up of how adventure game characters behave in general, but it's also a little bit about the nostalgia that the fan community has built up and the fervor, with which people have been approaching Ron over the years about the secret and wanting to know what it was. Just the importance of it becomes so huge that we just wanted to show something about that. We had a system where when we were doing a cut scene or something like that, we would do a little previous work. We would have a meeting with the artists and one of us would do a writeup, and one of us would talk to the artists through the scene. We had a storyboard artist, Sarah Thomas who was working on it. And so we did that for that scene with the chopping down the tree. I was the one who got to describe that one and basically shepherd it through the process. And at every step of the way, my comment was always like, "That's awesome, more, make it more horrible." And they were all a little like, "Really, you want more?" And, Cody Hann, I think did all of the little weeping animals and it was like just people started to get really into it until finally it was like, yeah, it just goes on and on and there's terror and horror and fire and just that. And I was like, "Yes, perfect, that's exactly, that's the vibe "that we need from this scene to make it work." - Another resource has given its all in support of my personal goals. It's what nature is for. I must have startled them while I was whittling. Some animals are quite skittish. - Part of how I see adventure games and what's fun about them to begin with is this idea that you do ridiculous things and cause a lot of harm in favor of your own really trivial goals. And so lamps shading that a lot with this game was a real treat. And then bringing it all back, there's a scene with Elaine towards the end of the game where you're walking through the woods and she's just like, "By the way, "I've been hearing some things about what's been going on "and let's talk about them." It's just sort of a callback to like, in case you hadn't noticed, here are all the terrible things you have done during the course of this game. - She's a grounding influence. Yeah, I've always thought about her all the way back to the original "Monkey Island" is she's the smartest person in the room. She kind of understands everything that's going on. Guybrush is a little kid. And so she's kind of always having to kind of rein him in a little bit. He can just spin off into these weird ideas, and angles, and schemes, and plans, but she never does. She kind of knows this is the right thing to be doing, we should be doing this particular thing. So she's always been in all of the stories and I think she occupies that role in this story as well. - Elaine was quite hard because initially, the design that we'd gone for was a little more rugged almost. Similarly to what I was saying about the other characters that she looked like she'd been around the world a few times and bashed around a bit. And it wasn't until quite last minute that she kind of got softened a little. - How we wanted the relationship between Guybrush and Elaine to feel, these were things that we had to kind of find in the dark as we were making the game 'cause our initial stab at them was like, "Nah, that's too mean. "Neither Elaine nor Guybrush comes off well this way "and we kind of don't want that "and our play testers don't like it. - You always amaze me, I had no idea you knew ship repair. - I don't know any more than you do, but I brought a manual. Why don't we fix it together? - Like any good pirate story, "Return to Monkey Island" was made entirely in secret with members of the development team unable to tell their friends or family. Ron didn't want fan expectation influencing either him or the new team. In a way, the pandemic made some of the logistics around this wee bit easier. When the game was finally announced, Ron decided to do so on April Fools, not just because of his long running hatred of the day, something he's blogged about on his "Grumpy Gamer" blog a decade earlier, but because he had previously said he would never work on a game with an intellectual property he didn't own. The idea of Ron working on a new "Monkey Island" game seemed like a fantasy, perhaps even a great April Fools joke. But as April first landed on a Friday and the tease went live, the reveal trailer the team had been working on was gonna have to wait an entire weekend before it launched, and the truth was revealed. - So there was this weird in-between zone where it had been announced, but we couldn't actually tell anyone it had been announced. And pretty much the whole art team had come to London to visit. And we all met up for the first time ever that weekend, but none of us could talk about the game because we didn't want anyone to overhear us talking about the game that had been announced, but hadn't officially been announced. So we were all out drinking Grog and having a great time, but all being very careful not to let on why we were meeting. - When we first announced the game in April and we showed some of the art, there was a human cry from small portion of the fan base that said, "Oh, we don't like that. "We're never gonna get used to that." - Once we got past just the excitement of the tease and the fact that it exists, then everyone can sort of start poking into the details a bit more. And there was some backlash. I got quite a few emails that weren't very nice, but I kind of get it because I did that original picture of Guybrush 'cause I was responding to some other art that had been done of Guybrush and I wanted to do my take, but I prefer to do it a bit more constructively of painting my version of some art rather than sending death threats, but anyway. - People were especially mean to Ron on his blog and I felt bad for Rex 'cause they were attacking him directly. And I was like, "That's not cool. "Come on people, be nice." I was less worried about that than some of the other folks because I'd seen it a lot at Telltale. Our own forums were just full of people constantly telling us we'd done the casting wrong and we'd done this wrong and that wrong and everything, and this is all before the games come out. And then the game comes out and they're like, "Oh, this is really good. "When's the next one?" So I had to take it all with a grain of salt. This is probably just gonna blow over. - Yeah, I mean, there's never a right answer. You just have to have confidence in what you're doing and go for it. And I think if we'd been a totally new team, if it had been me and the artists, and some people weren't even born when "Monkey Island" came out, but if it was just us making the game, it would've been terrifying because it's like, "Oh no, we've taken on this franchise "and we've kind of screwed it up." The fact that we are there with the series creators of the game, that really gave us the confidence that it's like, well, if this is what that they're looking for and they're super happy with it, and we're super happy with it, then we can't have made something too bad. (dramatic music) - There was a lot resting on the grand finale of "Return to Monkey Island". This was after all a spiritual successor to "Monkey Island 2", a game with a notoriously divisive ending, but it was also so much more than that, a game that was attempting to sum up the weight of expectation that games like this carry. But before we talk about the ending, what it means, and how it made people feel, let's first talk about an answer 30 years in the making. What exactly was the secret? - Well, I knew what the ending was gonna be initially, although not exactly. A lot of times, you have an ending, and I wanted to go in this direction for a story, but you don't have all the peculiars. So I didn't have all the details about how it was gonna end, but I knew how was it gonna end. And a lot of that is because people ask me constantly, over the last 30 years, what is the secret of Monkey Island? It's right there in the title, "The Secret of "Monkey Island". And so people wanna know, what is the secret of Monkey Island? And I've never told anybody. I've just always kept that to myself, or make funny jokes about it. But I felt with this game, I need to tell people what the secret is. - "The Secret of Monkey Island", it's sort of a silly idea. And it felt like getting a tattoo in your 20's and thinking it's cool and fun at that time. And then 30 years later, you have to explain it to people over the dinner table and maybe it feels a little ridiculous and embarrassing by that point. And so we went back and forth a lot about what we would reveal about the secret. Were we gonna reveal it? Originally, we weren't. And there were thoughts about, well, things change. This is a game about how things change, possibly the secret changes too, possibly it is not immutable. And again, there was not really any version of that, that felt good. What we were after early on was wrapping the ending around the conflict between Guybrush's interest in the secret and his relationship with Elaine. And so there were drafts of what we wanted to do with the ending that were all about that. And we actually got pretty far, we produced some material for some of them and sort of tested them out on everybody and the universally people were like, "Yeah." And even Ron and I were like, "It's not working. "It's not good." And so there was a point at which Ron basically said, "Let's just rip the bandaid off "and get weird with this "and reveal the real secret and do it in this way." And he said, "We'll go through the thing "and then we'll come out, "and you'll be basically in a version of the spoilers, "a version of the game, "where it's a basically an amusement park, "like a larping space kinda thing," which was his original idea for the secret 30 years ago. - [Danny] And did you know that 30 years ago? - I did, he mentioned that. He did not go into quite as much detail at the time, but he had said, basically, it's an amusement park. - And Guybrush being in an amusement park, that is the secret. That's what it was back in 1989 when I was putting all this together, he was in an amusement park. And that's why it has that title just because the secret was he was in an amusement park. And this was very early on, so LeChuck wasn't a character yet. The protagonist in the early stories was the owner of the amusement park. Nobody knew they were amusement parks, so all the other pirates in the world, they were all trapped in this kind of Westworld style amusement park. So I mean, it did change a lot, but that is the secret of "Monkey Island". And so I knew that I wanted to reveal that in this game. So I kind of knew how the game was gonna end. - [Danny] Was he knowingly in this amusement park? - No, no, he didn't know he was. It was something that he discovered was that he was basically trapped along with everyone else in this amusement park. I think what happened was as the game kind of developed even more, I just kind of drifted away from that, especially when I read it on "Stranger Tides", which was an incredibly influential book, that just solidified a whole lot of the story to me, especially with LeChuck and the protagonist and how that all worked. And, so the original stuff, I think just slowly slid, although you can still see it, but you can still see it in those first two games, the little anachronistic things. I mean, even the grog machine that sits and stands, I mean, that is a holdover from that original idea. - And that, it took me a while to get on board with that actually, because I was like, "Wow, that is gonna be really shocking and weird "for the audience." But I sort of felt like, oh, this feels like "Monkey 2" all over again. We're doing something really bizarre with the ending and it'll be controversial. - We ended with an ending of a similar nature to the ending of "Monkey Island 2", not just the ending where it's the sort of ending that you would get at the end of an "Indiana Jones" movie. I think it would've been a disservice to the game if it hadn't done something dramatic and surprising like that with the end. - Glad you finally made it kid. - What, Stan? - It's closing time and everyone wants to go home. - Last chance to hand over the key, locksmith. - What do you mean it's closing time? I just got here. - Oh, I don't have time for this. I'm late for an important meeting. Take my keys and shut off all the lights before you leave. I'm not liable for anything that happens after closing time. - There were versions of it where Stan was sort of a little more in your face interacting, and then there was a cool version where Stan was turning the lights off and you had to turn it back on again in order to get over to where the secret was. You basically had to win this light flipping battle with him. It's true, it's the truth. That was the secret we had in mind 30 years ago. And so that's where we're going with it, and we were able to take that and really say some things about storytelling and the gaming experience and the experience of sort of playing these particular games over the years and what they sort of meant to people. - We spent a lot of time in that ending. There's a lot of kind of iterations of trying to figure out how we really wanted to present that. And Dave and I just had a lot of brainstorm meetings where we were just hashing this whole thing out. We knew we wanted to do it. To me, the multiple endings aren't so much about having multiple endings, but it's really about how players can think about things. Tell me what "Mulholland Drive" means. You can't, right? But everybody has their own ideas for that stuff. And so to me, the ending of "Monkey Island", I was really playing into that whole thing about how everybody can derive their own meaning for something. I mean, readers and players and viewers, they make their own meaning a lot of times to endings of stuff, so it was really about emphasizing that. - One of the things that was concerning for us the entire time was this idea of canon and what's canon and what's not canon? And we were dealing with a series that already was somewhat paradoxical in terms of how the different incarnations of it had dealt with each other. And so when we announced the game, I was saying from day one, canon is something that we are going to pay attention to as much as makes sense for this story that we're trying to tell. But if it gets into a conflict between our story and the canon, we're gonna go with our story because we're trying to make up something that feels good on its own. And I was aware that there are people who are canon wonks who want everything to sort of fit neatly. I used to be heavily into comic books too, so I get how this works and it's fun to sort of try and put all the pieces together, but at some point, we had to just take a stand and say, yeah, some things are not gonna match up. And I feel like this, the ending where you get to kinda put your own stamp on it feels like the perfect expression of that. There is no canon here. It belongs to you. How do you like that? I think some people, they just wanna be told what's going on and they're uncomfortable with that responsibility. But that's our story and that's the end of it, is open-ended by design. - Dad, that was a silly ending and it didn't even make any sense. You're terrible at endings. - I thought you liked silly endings. You and Chucky play the ending of "Monkey Island 2" really silly. - That's different, we're kids and we're just goofing around. You're the one who said you can't just change things. You said that's not how storytelling works. - I did? - I wanna know the secret. You have to tell me what it was. - Everything leading up to that, the discussion with Boybrush about the story and the ending of the story is a chance for the player to express for themselves what this means to them. We don't nail it down. We provide options, and we do that for specific reasons. It's gonna mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and that's part of what makes this story good. - There isn't any one answer to what the secret is. It's not like a rock or a banana, it's like a story. It changes with time and the person telling it. Everyone you ask will have a different idea. - Mom, dad won't tell me what the secret is. - Are you filling our son's head with your outlandish stories again? - I was telling him the one about how we found "The Secret of Monkey Island". - Oh, that one. Every time you tell that story, the ending gets stranger and stranger. - I mean, I think Dave may have a different opinion, which I think is great that we can kind of look at this and morph it into kind of whatever we want. But for me, it was just about how stories can change. It's like you're telling something and you can change the story as you're going on. I mean, very rarely, our story's a completely historical account of what happened, right? And some of that just becomes from players, their ideas of the original two "Monkey Island" games. There's a lot of rose tinted glasses that come with that, that they may remember stuff that isn't actually true or they've completely made up stuff. They've taken one little thread of an idea that we never kind of decided to make into something real, and they've made it into something real. And in their minds it's canon, right? Because they've kind of forgotten that they just made this up with a couple of their friends one night. So of course, it's a canon. This is true. And that's always interesting to me. And that's a little bit about what happens with Guybrush telling the story to his son is he has an imperfect memory. His son has a whole different idea about what's gonna happen. And in some ways, Boybrush is the player. He is the the old "Monkey Island" player who's just kind of taking things off in a weird direction. He and Chucky have played the ending of "Monkey Island 2" really weird, which Guybrush acknowledges. And so, it's just fun to play with that a little bit. - The ending of "Return to Monkey Island" may not have worked for me if it was my first game in the series, if I had played it in my 20's, or if the original game hadn't been literally the first game I ever completed. But sitting in my new home on the other side of the world from where I grew up, a 36-year-old with a wife, a child, and a heart bursting with nostalgia for these old adventures, it reached in and squeezed on my heart. When we play games, we bring our own lives and experiences into them. We always do, be them games we enjoy or hate. Nostalgia has as much to do with the time and place in which we played those games as it does with the games themselves. It's about us, who we were then, and who we are now. (mid tempo lively music) - I found the lost map to the treasure of Mayer Island. It's going to be a fun adventure. - I'll meet you down there. - What exactly Guybrush is thinking as he stares off into space is really dependent on what the player is bringing to the game as they play it. They've had an experience that we control part of it, but they control the rest of it. There's a co-authorship going on there. - I think that Guybrush staring into the camera, that was me. That was me staring into the camera and thinking about, well, what does all this mean? It's complicated and I don't have control of it anymore, both creatively and legally. So what does all this mean to me? And so having him staring at the camera was me just kind of staring into this thing, going, "What does kind of all this mean?" Dave and I were working on the ending and some things just weren't gelling right. We didn't feel like it was really kind of getting that right emotional message that we wanted to do. And we were just chatting on Zoom one day and Dave said, "Oh, well, when we started this project, "I just kind of wrote this little note to myself. "We should read that and just see if it sparks anything." - I wrote the letter in July of 2020, just like when I heard that the contracts had been signed. We were gonna start the project the next week. And I was like, I just need to get some thoughts down on paper about what we're about to try to do and how I expect it to go. So I wrote this letter basically to Ron and myself, and I stuck it in a file and I put it in a folder and I didn't look at it for a long time. And then at first, we actually put the letter literally in the chest where the secret goes, and then we put it on a wall. And both of those felt like, "It's too many levels of disruption "of the fantasy within the fantasy." So we decided to put it where it is, which is sort of stashed at the scrapbook for you to find accidentally afterwards. And I just feel like it was a good accidental period to put on the sentence. - I dunno if it's because I'm in the same place as Ron and Dave now, or the fact that they did it the way they did it has made it easier for me, but this has been the most comfortable of endings for me. Like I say, every time I get the phone call or I get the email and there's that crazy elation because it's like, "Ah, we get to do it again." And then we go in and it's just nuts and you do the work, which is so much fun. And then there's all that quiet anticipation when you gotta keep it quiet. And then there's the announcement, and seeing all the reactions, and then it eventually kind of fades away. I've always had difficulty dealing with the hope that it's gonna come back. And to be clear, I still do. I mean, that's never going away. I will do Guybrush as long as they'll let me and as long as I still have the voice for it. But I kind of feel like this was the first time where it's like, "Okay, if this is it "for the first time, I'm okay with it. "I'm okay with it. "It would not be my choice, but I'm okay with it." - Yeah, I'm very happy with the reception it got. There were things that I or Dave and I were trying to kind of do with the story that did really resonate. They landed exactly how we want them to land. And some people hated it as always, but a lot of people liked it. And for me, watching YouTube videos of people who were literally in tears, they were crying, not that I enjoy making people cry, but it really said, okay, well I think we did succeed in that. We touched that thing that we wanted to touch with the game. - Working on it and writing it, I think we felt like there were some things that we needed to wrap up, but as is typical for us, we didn't wrap things up quite with a neat little bow on it. I wouldn't say distinctly that would definitely be my last one. I certainly had to approach it as though it were, 'cause the circumstances that had to kind of line up for this project to happen were pretty, it's like waiting for the celestial spheres all to align. - Yeah, I don't think it was our way to say goodbye, right? I was not doing this as this is my last game, "Monkey Island" game ever. I mean, it may be, but that was not our goal. It's a world that I love. I like the "Monkey Island" world. I like the characters in that world and it was fun to kind of revisit them. But, as I said earlier, it's like I want to revisit them kind of in a fresh way. I will not be the person that is churning out "Monkey Island 17" at some point. It's not interesting to me. It's like if I'm gonna do a sequel for a game, I wanna make sure that I have something new and interesting to say in it. I think with this "Monkey Island", with the "Return of Monkey Island", it kind of was about that. It's like, okay, well we have something new and interesting to say, and so it made it worth doing. (calm music) (Amiga Version of Le Chuck's Theme Plays) (keyboard keys clacking)

Channel: Noclip - Video Game Documentaries

Views: 206,716

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Id: SdWzlDwxBmQ

Length: 95min 33sec (5733 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024