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

&gt; <i>The day has come and gone and I didn&#x27;t get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside.</i><p>Disney got the Monkey Island IP when they bought Lucas Arts. The first thing they did with it was to pull an <i>excellent</i> MI remake off the iOS Apple Store.<p>The explanation was that it was diluting their Pirates of the Caribbean brand... which is clearly some Grade A bullshit.<p>So I really doubt that Ron will ever have his wish granted :(

It was a great game.<p>I also remember making gold master floppies for our products going back to 1987. It&#x27;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.<p>Thinking back now I think there were still dinosaurs on the earth at the time too.

When I was growing up my brother and I used to spend a week each summer at our cousins&#x27; house. They had a copy of Monkey Island and each summer we would tell ourselves, &quot;This is the year we&#x27;re going to beat Monkey Island.&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;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 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&#x27; 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.

When I was 9, in 1993, I hurt my eye and couldn&#x27;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&#x27;s head with the bottom of a different pirate&#x27;s head (IIRC). This was defeated by the office photocopier.<p>Eventually I got stuck on a puzzle that I just couldn&#x27;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.<p>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.

Monkey Island brings back very good game memories and who the whole Lucas Art series had good stories!<p>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.

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.<p>He says they didn&#x27;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!<p>Man how times have changed in 30 years.

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.

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&#x2F;nephews (choose to) play now.

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.<p>As to what makes the game great, I think it&#x27;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.<p>Look! A three headed monkey!

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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&#x2F;Quest for Glory, Indian Jones), Monkey Island was by far our favorite.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s almost an homage and has a few shout outs to those in the know. Check it out here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.landlubbersgame.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.landlubbersgame.com</a>.<p>Thanks Ron and team for the good times!

I&#x27;m still not willing to accept that it&#x27;s all the imagination of a child running wild at a theme park.

The thing I always wonder is how testing&#x2F;QA worked back in the days for cartridge&#x2F;disk games. I mean, there&#x27;ve been a few quirks here and there but no game I can recall ever became unplayable — As opposed to nowadays where you can&#x27;t even launch something before applying 50GBs of fixes.

A rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle is still the most memorable item I&#x27;ve ever come across in a game.<p>Thanks Ron.

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

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.<p>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 &quot;Double Fine Adventure&quot;<p>It chronicles Tim Schafer (ass&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE</a>

I played Monkey Island ten years ago, when they launched the Remaster. It was such a great game. And I&#x27;ve got to say the follow up ranks as one of the best games I&#x27;ve ever played.<p>It&#x27;s funny that having played Monkey Island 1 &amp; 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&#x27;s always the sword fighting part I remember the most. It&#x27;s a pity I don&#x27;t have time for anything anymore, I would love to revisit them some time.

I really loved the Lucas Art point &amp; 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&#x27;t, honestly I don&#x27;t remember).<p>I want to deeply thanks everyone who worked on those games. Thank you.

Love it when something is labeled &#x27;final 1.1&#x27;

You make final gold masters like a dairy farmer

This is a nice (short) post, but the one with the great storytelling was 2015&#x27;s celebration: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grumpygamer.com&#x2F;monkey25" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grumpygamer.com&#x2F;monkey25</a>

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 <i>loved</i> those games as a young teenager. 30 years later I still do...

&gt;&gt; For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can&#x27;t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.<p>Tsk. Please. We&#x27;ve all seen CD disks before, you know.

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

is this it? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retrogames.cz&#x2F;play_492-DOS.php?language=EN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retrogames.cz&#x2F;play_492-DOS.php?language=EN</a>

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.

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&#x27;s how you use those things:<p>You slide back the metal shield to expose the surface of the disc. Carefully, you engage the read head or &quot;needle&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>That thing is known as a floppy disc, which was pretty rubbish marketing, given that the 5 1&#x2F;4&quot; effort was actually ... floppy. I don&#x27;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...<p>I had a real ball playing this game.

&gt;&gt; It would be great if you could release the source code under an open source license<p>&gt;Yeah... talk to the Mouse. I don&#x27;t own any of it.

&gt; For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can&#x27;t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.<p>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&#x27;s jacket and told him that we had 3D printed save icons here.

Love that footer :) wouldn&#x27;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 -<p>For some reason, I love the universal impulse to throw ironic shade at millennials&#x2F;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.<p>It’s nice.

&gt; For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can&#x27;t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.<p>I know that this is a joke, but let&#x27;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.<p>Computers have a long and complicated history. And the technical parts are being abstracted away more and more.<p>I think it&#x27;s important to help people understand how we got to where we are today, and why it is (or isn&#x27;t) an improvement from the way things used to be.