Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
grumpygamer.com> The day has come and gone and I didn't get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside.
Disney got the Monkey Island IP when they bought Lucas Arts. The first thing they did with it was to pull an excellent MI remake off the iOS Apple Store.
The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit.
So I really doubt that Ron will ever have his wish granted :(
the more we talk about it, the more disney will think it has value and will hold on to it.
Never say never. Pirates of the Caribbean “brand” is on the wane - it’s pretty much driven by Johnny Depp whose stock is plummeting.
Pardon the huge sidestep, but can you elaborate? Why is Depp's stock plummeting?
> The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit.
If you're convinced it's bullshit, what do you think the real reason is instead?
I think you misunderstand what he's calling bullshit.
He's not claiming they don't actually believe the reason they give. He's saying the reason is bullshit.
Oh right - was going to say they kept the other games up so they obviously aren't doing it because they hate games or out of spite. Reasonable to believe their stated business reason.
I just noticed recently that in American English "bullshit" often means "unfair" or "trivial" where in British English it usually means "untrue".
It usually means "untrue" here as well, but it's often used as a synonym for "extremely ridiculous".
FWIW in my version of English it means "nonsense" (I'm the OP).
I have never realized this. Wow, this would explain some weird conversations.
Presumably that they merely thought it was diluting their brand without it actually doing so.
It was a great game.
I also remember making gold master floppies for our products going back to 1987. It's actually a scary process because if you made any mistakes, you got back thousands-millions (depending on who you were) worthless disks back. Even sending out updates cost money and often we had to charge people in order to pay for duplication, packaging, shipping and sometimes a manual update. Often updates were the entire package of N disks; if lucky you can manage a patch disk.
Thinking back now I think there were still dinosaurs on the earth at the time too.
I got a bit nervous when someone found out that the computer we used to burn our master CDs on where infected with a virus. Luckily all disks were clean.
It could have been worse. I know of one studio that sent a debug version to the duplication factory by accident. It killed the company.
Did the company not have insurance?
Now I’m curious: what kinds of insurance would such a company have?
I think I've heard of this in relation to housing contracts on TV (back when I watched stuff like Holmes on Homes).
Errors and Omissions insurance?
If you have the money for the premium, you can get just about any kind of coverage you want. There are coverage types that protect a company from an honest mistake ruining the company. While the payout may not be able to keep the company intact, it could at least keep from total collapse. Insurance to protect if you get sued for mistakes. These are not the types of things you worry about as an employee of bigCorp, but in a start up, you learn about these things quickly if you find good business advisors.
The thing I always screwed up when copying was getting the disks backward and having to start over. Did you do anything special to reduce human error, like special stickers or colored disks?
For instance nobody in the office is allowed to use red floppies except for master disks.
Master disks didn't have write protection on?
I think that would be less about overwriting a master, and more about confusing some other disk for the master and sending it to the copier instead.
I really miss the days when all I had to do, to finish a release, was wait for 'dd' to complete, and then I was done.
Floppy-based releases were amazing. You knew exactly what was going to boot.
When I was growing up my brother and I used to spend a week each summer at our cousins' house. They had a copy of Monkey Island and each summer we would tell ourselves, "This is the year we're going to beat Monkey Island." Each year we never made it much further than the first Island. Eventually our cousins lent us the game and we beat it over the course of a few months.
Interestingly, I think about Monkey Island a lot because I often tell people (only half jokingly) that the way that I think about learning conversational skills is by using the same mechanics as the sword fighting challenge in The Three Trials. As you gain experience sword fighting, you pick up new phrases and you eventually learn the situations in which you yourself can apply those phrases appropriately to defeat the other swords[wo]men. Similarly, I've found it quite effective to watch how other people use techniques to illicit specific reactions from people. After a while of seeing the same technique applied by different people for slightly different reasons, you can start using it yourself. Eventually you have a big bucket of techniques you can use whenever!
I enjoyed your anecdote, as someone who has never played Monkey Island.
Just FYI, the word you're looking for is "elicit", not "illicit".
Ah, for sure. Thanks! Too bad the editing window is past.
I never shipped gold floppies but I did ship golden master CDs on a 1x (maybe 2x?) writer for a very early ebook publisher (sometime in late 1990s). I was young and inexperienced in the business side of things. The machine doing it was underpowered and frequently overran it' buffer. I remember that one late night when more sr folks had gone for drinks and i was left to do burn, I went through a stack of 16+ blanks trying to get a single disk to verify. This took hours and at the time blanks were something like 20$ each. I spent the whole night stressing I would get in trouble for spending so much and maybe I should have waited for someone who knew the process better. CTO told me the next day what being a single day late to get them to mfg would have cost and I felt better.
The senior guys should not have gone for drinks until someone had verified the copy. They could have dinked around the office for an hour until the first one failed. You got left holding the bag. A very expensive one from the sounds of it.
Yeah, that particular configuration of SR guys didn't really work out. Why they went drinking and left me to finish up is a longer story, life lesson. I quit within months and went to work with a couple of the more dedicated of the bunch.
Were you burning CDs with enough contents to get close to the capacity of the disk? (~650mb-700mb?)
I had a similar issue, also in the late 1990s, so I understand the stress around wasting those $20 blanks. Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity. (something that you'd often WANT to do, to maximize the value you're getting from those $20 blanks!)
There was a class action lawsuit, and I eventually got a replacement drive (no relief for those wasted expensive, blanks). But the vindication that it was defective hardware, and nothing I did wrong helps. The manufacturer of the drive was Philips/Magnavox, but there were some other brands that were all linked back to this same defect that the class action lawsuit covered.
>Found out a few years later that the drives were defective, and would often (but not always!) have buffer errors when burning discs close to capacity
there was a slew of software hacks in most cd burning suites that'd attempt to deal with that problem across the industry.
believe it or not : time dependent FIFO buffers are capital H Hard. Or at least they were back then.. I suspect the damage done by poorly constructed FIFO buffers now is just more hidden, not exactly lessened.
I was bulk ripping CDs a few months ago and was running multiple SCSI drives to increase my throughput. The current Linux SCSI drivers will lock up the bus when you insert a disc and ruin any transfers already in progress on another drive. You'd think something like that would have been resolved at this point.
An actual SCSI device? And you're complaining about "by now". How old of hardware are you using? "By now" fixes are included in modern hardware on USB.
I have a number of Plextor CD-ROM drives that are more desirable than DVD-ROM for CD audio extraction. I have one USB Plextor but they command a high resale price. The point is that basic bus management should be sorted out and it clearly isn't.
> I have a number of Plextor CD-ROM drives that are more desirable than DVD-ROM for CD audio extraction
If you're pulling a digital bit-stream off a disk then why does the reader matter?
A lot of CDs aren't in perfect condition, either because of scratches or things like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_bronzing. When faced with damaged data, the quality of the drive and its firmware will influence whether the data stream corresponds to the original content or not.
Thanks for the explanation - I misinterpreted the OC to be about audio quality rather than just trying to recover data from damaged media.
Given a perfect CD the drive is probably not going to have significant impact, but for an audio CD that's been exposed to real world conditions there's a bunch of ways the drive can make a difference to the recovered data.
A little interested! What exactly are FIFO buffers?
When I was 9, in 1993, I hurt my eye and couldn't go to school for a week while it was healing. To make it bearable, my dad somehow got me a pirated copy of the secret of monkey island from a coworker (he worked at a PR company so I still find that mildly surprising today). The game had a copy protection feature where there was a spinning wheel and you had to input some text that was revealed when you combined the top of a pirate's head with the bottom of a different pirate's head (IIRC). This was defeated by the office photocopier.
Eventually I got stuck on a puzzle that I just couldn't figure out. Rather than giving up, I sent a physical letter through the USPS to Lucasarts explaining where I was stuck and asking for help. A few weeks later, I received a response with Lucasarts letterhead with the solution to the puzzle. I actually ended up sending two or three letters to finally complete the game. Talk about a different time and place.
Of course a few years later I racked up $30 in hint line charges while making my way through Sam and Max Hit the Road. It took a lot of chores to pay my mom back for that.
I also sent a physical letter to Lucasarts when I got stuck as a kid. They kindly sent me back a full walkthrough! I wonder how many other kids must've done this...
I mailed Nintendo for a dragon quest puzzle and they wrote back. Was great.
Monkey Island brings back very good game memories and who the whole Lucas Art series had good stories!
I learnt a lot of English from playing text adventure games. It was a fun way to learn a language. Whenever I encountered English words I did not know I had an English dictionary by the side of the computer and looked up the word I did not understand. Of course I am also thankful to my official English school teachers but playing text adventure games was a very fun way to learn a new language! You had to comprehend the text in the game to be able to play. It was somehow a bit hard but you got the reward of playing from learning.
Games are such a great way to get people to naturally learn language.
I do the same thing nowadays with games like Animal Crossing and Ace Attorney. It's easier now than ever to find translations for other languages than English.
In the middle it links to the post he made on the 25th anniversary, which talks about how they would ship the gold masters to Europe.
He says they didn't have time in the schedule to mail it, so they would go to the airport, find a flight to London, walk up to the gate and find a passenger and ask them to carry a pack of disks with them, and tell them someone at the other end would meet them at the gate to pick it up!
Man how times have changed in 30 years.
A friend of mine had this happen with a processor card for a telephone switch. A bad software update had hosed up the primary card in such a way that it also made the standby unable to function, and they were capital-D Down for hours. The manufacturer was in Texas, the switch was in Michigan.
The soonest flight was a passenger flight, not a cargo flight, so they bought the box a ticket and sent it on its way. At the receiving airport, a logistics company picked it up and drove it straight to the office in need.
Thing is, the logistics company sent a semi. Because they hadn't been told the size of the shipment, just its declared value, and they reasoned that anything worth mid six figures must be big. So this intrepid truck driver couldn't (in a timely fashion) get close to the building, and ended up jogging across the parking lot with the card under his arm, as the tech headed down the elevator to meet him at the door.
"Sign here. What the heck is this thing, anyway?"
"Twenty thousand people's ability to call 911. Thanks, gotta go!"
For most of my career, I've worked in ops for companies where every moment of downtime would mean the loss of a lot of money.
But I always tempered the anxiety by reminding myself that no matter what happens, no one's life was on the line from any downtime I might be responsible for.
I love these kinds of stories. My current favorite is one I first read about here a few weeks ago where NASA needed some to replace a broken something holding up a launch. They arranged for an F-14 (or something along those lines) as a courier since normal shipping wouldn't get there in time.
My dad used to do the same thing all the time but with trains and coaches - if you had to send something to the other side of the country pronto, you'd go to the train/coach station, speak to the driver, hand them some money, and they'd happily take whatever you were sending with them. It was literally the fastest way to get something somewhere. It doesn't surprise me at all that people used to do the same thing with flying.
In some parts of the world this is still the norm. I know someone who sends things to her parents (about a 10-hour drive away, in a village) exclusively by bus. You pay off the driver, tell him/her who's going to pick up the package and at what stop, and off they go.
Seems to work really well, from the POV of the driver, the sender, and the recipient. Cheaper than DHL, more trustworthy than the post office, faster than both!
It's routine enough I can't imagine the bus service doesn't know about it, my bet is they tolerate it because it lets the drivers make a living wage (and thus gets you better drivers) and because most packages aren't big enough to be disruptive.
"Uh hey? Fella? can you do me a solid and take this small bag through customs and onto London for me? It's, er, floppy disks"
Yeah. I'm all for rose coloured glasses looking at our logistics short-cuts, but I don't see this happening for real in the last decade or two.
I first played Monkey Island well after its time, but it held up and I enjoyed it immensely. I recall specifically being impressed by the twist in the insult-sword-fighting mechanic that occurs when you fight the Sword Master. I maintain that the game holds up even today, though obviously nostalgia bias probably applies.
We're in the middle of playing this game for the first time with our kids, after literally decades of having people trying to tell me that I really need to play it. As a first-time player I can say that yes, almost everything about Monkey Island stands the test of time, no nostalgia required.
How old are your kids? I'm wondering if mine are ready for this (I've also managed to avoid playing it for decades, despite many attempts to get me to play it).
We have a spectrum of ages. I think the seven year old is the youngest one who "gets it" enough to be involved with solving the puzzles.
I think a case could be made that those insults are some of the first digital memes. Even to this day, they're still widely-recognised catchphrases among nerds and nerd-adjacents of a certain age. Before Monkey Island you only really got that effect from TV/movies/radio.
I was just the right age when ‘Monkey Island’ and ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’ appeared in my life. That kind of in-world puzzle solving seems absent from a lot of what I see my early-teenage nieces/nephews (choose to) play now.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is the true 4th Indiana Jones movie in my book. And yes, I'll die on that hill.
Better to die on that hill rather than in a refrigerator like Indy should have given how hard that thing landed.
People give it a lot of crap, but honestly: It's better than Temple of Doom.
Horses for courses, I guess - I thought the story wasn't great and the movie marred by miserable CGI effects.
This.
I bought my Indiana Jones bluray set a few years back and promptly dropped the fourth movie in the trash with the wrapping.
I did the same only because it was cheaper to buy the set of 4 movies instead of the first 3 movies separately. I even bought an empty 3-Bluray case to just keep the 1st 3 movies.
Use 100 orichalcum beads so that Indy becomes a god.
I thought you had to trick a bad guy into using the machine instead?
Same here, FoA beats the Kingdom of Crystal Skull any day. A true sequel that filly captures the spirit of the movies
Can I give half an upvote? I haven't played the game but, gosh that movie was crap.
I so wish they had made a movie out of this game.
Wow this really brings back memories! If Ron Gilbert is reading this, thanks for all your hard work on this game. This game was definitely one of the highlights of my childhood.
As to what makes the game great, I think it's the perfect combination of humor, pirates, and difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s. It also has an amazing soundtrack.
Look! A three headed monkey!
> difficulty level that feels just right for a kid in the early 90s.
You must've been a clever kid and/or I'm a bit dense :) When I played most of the Monkey Island games as a teenager / young adult there were definitely several times when I had to resort to GameFAQs.
Oh there’s like 5 of us playing it on the same pc so there’s always ideas thrown around. If nothing works then start clicking on everything :)
I don’t recall it to be as frustrating as say King’s Quest but then again it might be nostalgia.
The King's Quest games were absolutely brutal. Actions performed early in the game could prevent you from winning at the end. I found this list: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Unwinnab...
The only reason we beat these as kids was having a near infinite amount of time to waste.
ADOM had similar issues. You kill a cat any time, you miss out on a later quest. Instead you just had to fight the cat lord. Missed out on a very powerful ring.
And it was so, so easy to kill a cat. You use the automatic repeat-move key and auto-hit when you collide with a monster, and if you ever find a cat anywhere that way, its dead. People would rage-quit and start all over, it was that frustrating.
King's Quest..... That one was a challenge. As it was easy to miss an item from area and not be able to return to pick it up.
I can attribute my debugging skills to playing these games as a child. As you had to be meticulous.
I remember that there were quite a few games that I never was able to finish as a kid, but to finish them is not really the point. The point is to play. And to play them was fun.
If you want to be sure he gets your lovely message you should leave a comment on his blog...I just did :)
Working on Monkey Island Special Edition in 2009 while at LucasArts is one of the highlights of my career. I have really fond memories of my time there on the team (Team 3!). I wish I had worked on the original but that was way before my time.
The game is actually running the full original code alongside the new Special Edition stuff. We didn’t want to disturb the original codebase, so we ran it basically unchanged on another thread and the new game loop would surgically peek and poke some state every frame (animations, etc) to get synchronized. That’s how we essentially layered all the new art and sound on top of the original game. There was a lot of reverse engineering of data and asset formats that we had to do because all the original authors had since left, perhaps with the exception of EJ.
The F10 hotkey to transition between the old and the new art was actually a debugging feature that our lead rendering engineer wrote during development, but everyone agreed that it was too good not to ship it as an actual feature of the Special Edition.
For those who didn't experience it the first time or perhaps would like to do so again, I feel obligated to mention your version is on sale for $3.49 at Good Old Games aka gog.com. No affiliation myself other than a customer and someone a bit in awe of what you guys wrought.
https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special...
Monkey Island and its sequel are some of the defining games of my childhood. My brother and I played all the Sierra Games, and Lucas Arts games, and while we have many loves (Heroes Quest/Quest for Glory, Indian Jones), Monkey Island was by far our favorite.
We few years ago we were lucky enough to meet Ron at PAX when he was there promoting Thimbleweed Park. Since then, I saw him fairly often at a neighborhood coffee shop here in Seattle.
Earlier this year, at the start of the pandemic, my brother and his partner ended up making an adventure game in the style of Monkey Island. It's almost an homage and has a few shout outs to those in the know. Check it out here:
https://www.landlubbersgame.com.
Thanks Ron and team for the good times!
I'm still not willing to accept that it's all the imagination of a child running wild at a theme park.
While MI2s ending gives this impression, MI was planned as a triology, where in MI3 the secret of monkey island should be revealed. (Un)fortunately Ron Gilbert left after MI2 and took the secret with him, never to be revealed.
MONKEY ISLAND 2 SPOILERS
Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck? I never interpreted it as being what was actually going on.
That's certainly the takeaway that the Monkey Island 3 that we got (Curse of Monkey Island) used.
Ron certainly seems to hint that it wasn't a trick by LeChuck and he had plans for what to do with that in the MI3 he never got to build, and likely never will get to build.
Given how much the games were based on the Disney ride and a lot of metatextual jokes throughout both of the first two games (prominent Cola machines throughout, as one easy for instance). It is possible that a literal interpretation of the ending of MI2 is warranted and whatever Ron had planned would have continued from there.
(Personally, I've grown to an impression that Ron was just as much pantsing the whole series as anything and even if Disney got it in their heads to give the entire IP back to Ron with carte blanche to design his own MI3 however he saw fit, I feel like Ron would have a harder time designing his way out of the box of that ending taen he likes to let on by teasing that there was a big secret he had planned. ;)
> Didn't the ending heavily imply that the theme park was just a trick of LeChuck?
Yes. As they walk out into the theme park, LeChuck looks at the camera and his eyes glow.
I think this is just another entry in the genre of "there was no plan, so the writers added several different plot hooks on spec".
Also, during the credits, doesn't the game switch back to Elaine who says something like "I sure hope LeChuck didn't cast a spell on Guybrush"?
We're part way through playing the first game, and my daughter's pet hypothesis is that it takes place in a far future post-apocalyptic society.
The thing I always wonder is how testing/QA worked back in the days for cartridge/disk games. I mean, there've been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can't even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.
I remember Quest For Glory IV shipped with a game-breaking bug that required downloading a patch from a BBS and possibly starting with a new save. I never finished the game because of that one.
Much worse when it was ROM media - Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete because of a bug that made it into the release.
Still, this stuff was really rare. Very different QA mindset when recalling the product is impossible or expensive.
>Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 is literally impossible to complete
Well, they were right.
Though there were more overall platforms back then, the hardware for any given platform was a lot more uniform than any modern PC. OSs barely did anything where they existed at all, which also helped. Finally, codebases were a lot smaller and everything was single-threaded so there was generally just less to go wrong.
According to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.
The original Doom code basically broadcast packets to every machine on the network, which on any large network would bring everything to a crawl. It's why network Doom was explicitly banned on many university networks.
The first patch I ever used (first time I heard the term) was the Doom network patch.
A rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle is still the most memorable item I've ever come across in a game.
Thanks Ron.
Also "Mug-O-Grog"
Just curious: How would I go about playing Monkey Island today? I know DOSBox comes to mind?
But, is there an official port, like the "remastered" versions of Final Fantasy that are in the Play store?
I've played it on PC/xbox/iOS, I think it's available on pretty much every store.
If you have an original copy you can run it with ScummVM: https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/
Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick made a new game in 2014 too, it's excellent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed_Park
Thimbleweed Park is awesome. It feels exactly like it had been made by Lucasarts in the early 90s, and is definitely on par with others in the genre.
When making the Thimbleweed park game, they kept a blog. Its decent and has some interesting tidbits on how they designed the game. I read after I played through to avoid spoilers, but it was a fun game.
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
There is even some code in there.
Steam [0] and GOG [1], at least, have Monkey Island 1 & 2 special editions. Looks like GOG has them 65% off right now too.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col...
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_special...
[1] https://www.gog.com/game/monkey_island_2_special_edition_lec...
I don't have a link handy, but there is a "monkey island 1 ultimate talkie" version of the original Monkey Island that I highly recommend.
My understanding is that someone backported the speech from the remastered version into the original game. So you can play the original MI1 in SCUMMVM, with speech. It's great.
edit: this might be the link https://archive.org/details/MONKEYISLAND_201903
Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I prefer playing the game without the voice acting.
It's a bit hard to describe why, but there's a lot of both dry and surreal lines in the game, and hearing Guybrush deliver them all in the same bemused voice can get a little monotonous, and makes the character come across differently from just reading them.
I second this most strongly. Both Monkey Island 1 and 2 are available in unofficial "talkie" versions, which work in ScummVM.
It's technically piracy, so buy the originals at GOG so you don't feel too guilty.
Great games, and this is the best way to play them.
Played MI1 and 2 recently with my 6 year old from steam. We had a great time. Worked flawlessly with proton.
> Worked flawlessly with proton.
The game runs in DOS. DOSbox should be fine...
Not the new "remaster".
it's also on the app store and it's a very good fit for tablets, slightly less so for mobiles
I played through them on iphone and it was great.
Check out gog.com
I highly recommend scummVM.
Considering how successful Thimbleweed Park, the spiritual sequel to Maniac Mansion, has been, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaffer and Dave Grossman could just reboot Monkey Island with a different name, say Ape Archipelago or something.
Fans would only love a chance to return to that world as envisioned by its original creators, and even if all the character etc. names have to be change it would be better than waiting forever for Disney to do anything with the IP given how it conflicts with Pirates of the Caribbean.
For anybody that needs to scratch the nostalgia itch after reading this post I highly, highly recommend the free web series "Double Fine Adventure"
It chronicles Tim Schafer (ass't designer on Monkey Island and designer of numerous other LucasArts classics) and Ron (early on, he eventually leaves) building out their kickstarter adventure game.
I played Monkey Island ten years ago, when they launched the Remaster. It was such a great game. And I've got to say the follow up ranks as one of the best games I've ever played.
It's funny that having played Monkey Island 1 & 2 well into my adulthood, I still get somehow very nostalgic and tender vibes from it.
I remember my brother playing (and me dicking around a bit with) Zack McKracken first and then Monkey Island. It's always the sword fighting part I remember the most. It's a pity I don't have time for anything anymore, I would love to revisit them some time.
I loved Maniac Mansion,Day of the Tentacle and Zack McKracken. A modern game that may be comparable is "Trover saves the Universe" by Justin Roiland, probably best played on the Oculus Quest. I haven't had that much fun playing a video game for a few years.
It takes a tenth of the time to play after the first play through. You could play 10 min at a time and get through it reasonably quick.
I really loved the Lucas Art point & clicks. I remember being stuck for hours in those games. Eventually, I finished most of them (or I remember I did, but maybe I didn't, honestly I don't remember).
I want to deeply thanks everyone who worked on those games. Thank you.
Love it when something is labeled 'final 1.1'
You make final gold masters like a dairy farmer
I'm shaking, I'm shaking
This is a nice (short) post, but the one with the great storytelling was 2015's celebration: https://grumpygamer.com/monkey25
Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam n Max made me want to study CS away from my home country. I loved those games as a young teenager. 30 years later I still do...
.. better than Batman Gotham ?
>> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
Tsk. Please. We've all seen CD disks before, you know.
Fun fact, the D stood for disks, so you're literally saying "Compact Disks Disks".
I'm fine with that. Like "SAM Missiles" (in the sky) or "CMS System" etc.
Also, it's "pedant", not "pendant" :P
The D stood for Disc.
Consensus at the time was a disk with a K was writable, a disc with a C was read-only.
Or disc for optical, disk for magnetic
Monkey Island was great. To this day I occasionally use insults learned during the swordfighting part of the game. Also, the MI theme was once my ringtone on a good old Siemens S65i
You fight like a dairy farmer
How appropriate, you fight like a cow!
Oh sweet memories. I did not play the game, my daughter did. But I absolutely loved the music and still have it in my playlist.
I played it using a basic Soundblaster card in the 90s and it’s already amazing. Lately I used DosBox with the MT32 emulation and was blown away by how good it sounds.
Here’s an instruction on DosBox MT32 emulation if you’re curious: https://blog.zyrain.org/2016/11/roland-mt-32-and-emulating-i...
Here’s a clip of the MT32 opening soundtrack if you just want to have a listen https://youtu.be/i3dB0qEcG20
You might check out the Super Mercato Bros podcast. They've done a couple of episodes on the Monkey Island franchise:
http://www.supermarcatobros.com/podcast/tag/monkey+island
(And FWIW, my brother played marimba and some assorted percussion on Escape from Monkey Island. One of his weirdest gigs ever...)
Music is very memorable! I kept the original game disc at my parents’ house so I wouldn’t lose the music. Silly me! There’s an entire internet of folks who won’t let this stuff die.
Guybrush Threepwood, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle so many good memories. I remember the anti-piracy message in Guybrush where the main character was sent to jail, the inner game (Maniac mansion) in Day of the tentacle.... I think Monkey Island was the game I spent the most time with, it was full of humour.
Ahh that takes me back. For the kids, here's how you use those things:
You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or "needle" as we used to call it - a joke riffing on those archaic record player things that mum and dad danced to. We would of course be listening to our modern cassettes in our dodgy knock off Walkmans and rubbish headphones.
You will notice that there are two small square cut outs on each disc. That means that grumpygamer had access to the latest double sided discs. When you got to the end of side A, you turned it over and engaged side B to continue loading.
That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1/4" effort was actually ... floppy. I don't miss them at all but I still have a few around the place.
which reminds me that I still need to complete Thimbleweed Park...
I spent two months trying to cross the bridge at the beginning of the story keeping all money, gold, treasury bonds...
I had a real ball playing this game.
>> It would be great if you could release the source code under an open source license
>Yeah... talk to the Mouse. I don't own any of it.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
Makes me remember this open day we organized a year or two back at work. We had some floppy disks laying around and this one kid pulled his dad's jacket and told him that we had 3D printed save icons here.
Love that footer :) wouldn't dare copying it for my websites!
Thirty years ago today and I was in Saudi Arabia getting ready to go to Iraq. It would be another 4 years before I started using my first computer and a year after that my first Linux OS.
Tangentially related -
For some reason, I love the universal impulse to throw ironic shade at millennials/Gen Z whenever a floppy disk comes up. Like, we’ve all independently decided to embrace our deepest boomer tendencies when it comes to a single innocent topic.
It’s nice.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.
Computers have a long and complicated history. And the technical parts are being abstracted away more and more.
I think it's important to help people understand how we got to where we are today, and why it is (or isn't) an improvement from the way things used to be.
> For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can't text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
>> I know that this is a joke, but let's remember to be inclusive and kind to our younger readers and take the time to explain (reiterate even) what pieces of old tech are, and what they were used for.
Expect it's not even funny, it's just super cringey and reeks of gatekeeping and condescension.
This attitude is why I never finished Thimbleweed Park, it’s full of “hey remember when it was the late eighties/early nineties, wasn’t it better then” jokes and it just wore the whole thing thin for me.
Thimbleweed Park has a setting to turn on/off the "annoying in-jokes". Maybe that could help?
(I personally enjoyed the jokes)
Whats funny to me about this too is that retro gamers come in all ages and would probably think this guys an idiot for writing something like that. "Youngsters" who would even be interested in this article probably already know about Monkey Island, at least theres a good chance. I wouldnt underestimate younger gamers, I know some that know more than me about games I know like the back of my hand.
I know that this is a joke
It's humor not a joke. There's deep wonderment at how much the world has changed behind it. A 16GB thumb drive holds 10,000 times more information. A floppy disk doesn't even have the most rudimentary electronics built in. You can't even turn one on.
The problematic part is "for the younger readers out there." Leave that out and it's fine. Replace it with "Fuck, I'm old" and it's pretty good.
Technical articles are (well) technical and the author is not responsible for explaining what a floppy disk is in a world where google and wikipedia are eleven keystrokes away. The reader has to work too.
He should of said he 3d printed the save icons
I hate this stereotype. "Hurr durr, stupid Millenials don't even know what a book is, amirite?"
I think it's more a moment of realisation that a lot of time has passed, that things have changed to such an extent, and that it's hard to imagine something so large having so little function, relative to today's tech. I don't think it's written in the spirit of the stereotype you suggest.
Millenials aren't even young anymore
Yeah this type of curmudgeon sarcasm is how you end up with "Ok, boomer".
I feel a better way to be jokey about the old tech, is to just be amazed at it. Folks know how to google something when they don't know what it is
I like that.
Those four disks cost less than $1 each, and each individual one holds over one million bytes? Amazing.
They sound so useful that I bet people built whole collections of them, including devices just for organizing and protecting.
I can even imagine a hobby industry of unneeded tools for dealing with them.
Kind of a patronising comment in itself, as if the poor little snowflakes are so weak that they'll run away from tech after an extremely minor bit of ribbing at their expense.