The International House of Mojo

As promised, Ron & Co. launched their Thimbleweed Park 2 dev blog: Check it out.

There's already a lot of info there, including additional platforms: Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. The game's text, but not voices, will be translated into EFIGS, which… if your language is in there, then hey, woo. Who even knows if the G is German or Greek?

Finally, big box releases look more than plausible -- if you're in the market for a good used car, I'm willing to bet eT is ready to give you a deal. Physical media doesn't come cheap.

Ron says "I’ll post updates on Mastodon or you can use RSS like it’s 2004 or you can hit refresh obsessively." and that's great, but Mojo's DevOps division is already designing even more practical solutions. The expects nothing less.

Cateia Games promised routine Steam updates to Duke Grabowski throughout the year, and their latest came earlier this summer. This time it’s not an enhancement to the game itself, but some nifty DLC content: the soundtrack and a 22-page artbook PDF. Get all the details here.

Due to its budget-conscious, Kickstarter origins, the game’s soundtrack consists primarily of recycled Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island tracks by the great Pedro Macedo Camacho, though a few pennies that were kicked in toward the end of the process when the game found its original publisher allowed for some original music for the wraparound cutscenes composed by the also great Jared Emerson-Johnson. This marks the first time the OST has been offered officially, and you can get it in both MP3 and lossless FLAC versions. Kind of makes you think it wouldn’t be too much more trouble to give us the Ghost Pirates album, to be honest.

As for the art book, I’m pretty sure it’s a digital version of the one that was offered as a Kickstarter reward. I can spot the hardcover on my shelf right now. Settle down, ladies.

Source: Steam

Ordinarily it would feel like bad form to just reprint Ron's blog post, but it seems to fit the situation here:

I have good news and bad news.

First the good news.

The good news is that we just started production on Thimbleweed Park 2, due out in early 2028.

We will self-publish with the help of a private investor.

Mark Ferrari, Gary Winnick, David Fox, Octavi Navarro, Robert Megone, and others from the original team will be back!

Wishlist on Steam!

I’ll be starting up a Thimbleweed Park 2 dev blog like we did for Thimbleweed Park and posting regularly to keep everyone up to date.

Now the bad news

There is no bad news, it’s all good news.

Source: Grumpy Gamer

So reports Kotaku and, literally as I’m typing this, it was confirmed by Double Fine:

Today, Double Fine Productions let go of 23 members of our staff.

As a small, tightly-knit team, these actions are not taken lightly. Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action. Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain.

The people we are losing were all important.

They all made an impact on our games and culture, and they will be missed.

We are committed to supporting each affected person as best as we can, and we thank them for their hard work and commitment to the creative spirit we cherish here at Double Fine.

-Tim

That’s from Bluesky. Definitely a bummer and all positive thoughts to those affected by the layoffs.

Source: Kotaku

You might not know this, but Mixnmojo's very own Zaarin moonlights as a professional footballer for the Norwegian national team. While I can't reveal his real name, I can reveal that he never capped off his reviews for Telltale's 2009 WASD'n'click Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, stopping at three.

In fact, he still hasn't; he was slacking off scoring against Brazil when I decided to pick up his work for him. Read our long-awaited review of "The Bogey Man" here. Still haven't played it and afraid of spoilers? The game is back on Steam and GOG, so grab it at your earliest convenience before licensing issues take it off again.

LucasArts documentaries come and, unfortunately, go, so it’s good to see one that falls squarely in the former category. Johan Albrechtsen, a Danish film editor, is close to releasing a documentary on The Dig, and a trailer featuring luminaries such as Sean Clark and Michael Land is already available.

Looks promising, and whatever you may feel about the game, I’m sure you agree that it has an interesting backstory. Keep a lookout for its final release on Moovy TV.

One glimmer shone its way through this morning’s news that Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees – Double Fine is going independent.

Double Fine and Compulsion Games are returning to their founders, so Tim Schafer will take Double Fine back to independence along with Guillaume Provost making Compulsion Games an indie game studio again. Ninja Theory, the makers of Hellblade, and Undead Labs, the developers behind State of Decay, are also being sold, with agreements in place to ensure Senua and State of Decay 3 continue to ship.

More to come.

And here comes more! Double Fine published a statement on their website:

Once again, Double Fine Productions will be an independent studio.

We're thankful to everyone at Xbox for seven great years together, and for working with us to reach an outcome which preserves our history and culture, and returns ownership of our games to us.

To everyone who has reached out to us these past few weeks: Thank you so much for all your kind words, we've been deeply touched by all your messages. We will share more news soon on what comes next.

Your continued support is greatly appreciated,

Tim & All at Double Fine

Oh, and here’s the whole official Xbox spiel.

Source: The Verge

The June 20th passing of prolific British actor Michael Byrne was reported by all the usual trades this week. Though you’ve likely seen him in a number of productions, his celebrity status in Lucasfilm world is secured by his role as sadistic SS officer Ernst Vogel in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- a performance he's manifestly having a ball doing.

Source: Variety

Telltale’s two Puzzle Agent games may have brought the story to a satisfactory conclusion, but the world can always use some more Nelson Tethers.

Well, creator Graham Annable is on the case. And now, so are you. It may not be a new game, but maybe it’ll raise your appreciation for the Ancient Etruscans who had to do all their Puzzle Agent-ing strictly in a web browser, terrestrially.

Source: Grickle

You might have thought all SCUMM esoterica had been found by now, but damned if they don't just keep digging more up:

The Video Game History Foundation took the liberty of uploading the demo to Archive.org if a mere video reproduction isn’t enough to get your boulder rolling.

Like a good betrayal story? Jake Rodkin, game developer and First Generation Mojo Alumnus, decided to sell out to The Adventure Game Hotspot Network.

Which is to say, he’s the latest person to get interviewed by Ron McAdams of Ron’s Computer Videos.

But mostly, he’s a traitor.

Source: Ron's Computer Videos

Mike Levine, an old LucasArts hand perhaps known best in these latitudes for his work on Insecticide and Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual!, is these days flogging an AI video workflow platform, because what right do you really have to read pleasant things.

In a display of…judgment, he had the radical idea to try to sell the “charms” of this service to people who enjoy high quality, human-made works. He accordingly fed the opening cutscene of Full Throttle through the patented Make Things Awful™ machine and seems quite proud of the results. But let’s not prejudge. I’m sure with an open mind, we’ll all be won over:

...or maybe we’ll all want to pitch ourselves off a sheer cliff after rubbing lye into our corneas and lamenting the evolutionary curse that saddled us with consciousness. Everyone sees a different statue in the marble, is my point.

Source: Mike Levine's Twitter

When the Adventure Gamers forums got executed by the site’s venal new masters last year, people rightly wondered what would become of all that historical discourse, which the Wayback Machine doesn’t capture to any useful degree. There were rumors floating around about offlined backups and frustrating innuendos about “somebody” eventually hosting them.

Well, thanks to the heroic efforts of Huz and Remi (and I’m guessing some other unnamed allies along the way), today is the day we can start speaking of these things in declaratives. The AG forums archives are now available, hosted by Mojo. In part, anyway: You may recall that the AG forums got relaunched in 2012, and that era corresponds to a separate backup. It’s being worked on, probably. But really, the 2003-2012 archive contains all the stuff you actually care about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have seven hundred and fifty broken links to fix in the Freelance Police article. ¬¬

Source: The New AG Forums Archive

I guess it was too good to last.

According to TheGamer, The Wolf Among Us 2’s director is none other than Zak Garriss, a man who, when taking time out from being a massive creep, called BLM a “hate group,” and removed a transgender character from one of the Life is Strange games (Footnote: Worth noting: They did bring a transgender character back for Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which was released after this yahoo’s departure.). So yeah, good times all around.

I don’t know. Can The Wold Among Us 2 not catch a break? It certainly doesn’t seem so. Check out TheGamer’s story for more on Garriss’ life and works.

Source: TheGamer

Things have been a trifle chaotic at Xbox Game Studios lately, and it probably wasn’t lifting too many hearts when its recently-appointed CEO spoke of a need to “reset the business”.

Now comes word that Compulsion Games, Double Fine and Ninja Theory, all award-decorated developers that the giant collected during 2018-2019, are at risk of being shuttered. Reports Bloomberg:

The potential closures are part of a broader reorganization being overseen by Asha Sharma, who took over as Xbox’s new chief executive officer in February. Last week, Bloomberg News reported that the gaming division is planning significant layoffs. Sharma sent out a memo to staff lamenting the bleak state of the business, which has seen revenue and margins plummet in recent years. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” she wrote.

As an alternative to oblivion, the studios in the crosshairs are currently in negotiation to spin themselves off, which means Double Fine becoming an independent studio again is a possible outcome. That best case scenario, however, would come at a high cost. It’s a developing story, so more as we have it.

Source: Bloomberg

Or, to use ScreenRants’ headline: “Elijah Wood Pitches TV Reboot Of Lucasfilm’s Underrated 33-Year-Old Adventure Franchise.” Apparently, the former Hobbit and confirmed Monkey Island fan, has set his sights on Sam & Max:

Now, in an interview with ScreenRant's Ash Crossan about his work in Among Us, Elijah Wood shared his hopes for a new Sam & Max TV reboot, specifically based on Lucasfilm's Hit the Road title. The Emmy nominee praised the 33-year-old title for having "a really great art style," which he further feels "lent itself to an animated series."

Not a bad proposal. ScreenRant proceeds to serve up a shaky Sam & Max story, which you should read all the same.

Source: ScreenRant

Yep, it’s that time of year again – another The Wolf Among Us 2 announcement. This time, though, it looks like it’ll stick.

Sweet!

Release date… well, year… is 2027, so maybe it’ll hit your device before we turn thirty. Check out the official Telltale(!) website.

Oh, and a remaster of the original – a perennial Mojo favorite – is slated for a 2026 release, so hey, no complaints from me on that front.

Daniel Albu hasn’t posted an interview in a while, but he gets the floor today because it turns out we overlooked his latest upload a few months back. And it’s a doozy, a near five-hour conversation with compatibility tech Lynn Taylor, who worked from 1995-2008 at LucasArts.

Obviously, at that length, Daniel and Lynn go through one heckavu deep dive of her career. I’ll turn your attention to two moments that might be of particularly interest: at 35:49 there’s talk of the Young Indy game that was being made at LucasLearning, which Taylor calls “basically done” and reveals actually had River Phoenix voicing Indy. And at 4:33:56 comes some talk about the fates of Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max 2.

Here again with an interview round-up. The latest from Ron McAdams is a chat with Collette Michaud, whose many credits at LucasArts were predominantly artist and animator roles. You may also know her for a choice bit of trivia: she was the rotoscoping reference for Sophia Hapgood’s animations in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Sure, we'd all like that on our resume, but only she can claim the honor.

Elsewhere we have an interview with the much-elusive designer Sean Clark, and that means you get recollections about Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig, Escape from Monkey Island and Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels. He even confirms a longstanding rumor that he pitched in on Sam & Max: Freelance Police toward the end, specifically helping out on its many minigames. You know, the ones you never got to play. Too soon?

We haven’t heard a whole lot about Puzzle Agent in a while, so I was somewhat surprised to see Graham Annable update his Grickle store with Nelson-Tether-related products. Pleasantly surprised, as it is – a patch, a sticker, and a combo pack. Not exactly a new game, but hey, we take what we can get.

Now go shop.