The International House of Mojo

So, that KindaFunnyGames interview with Tim Schafer dropped some Double Fine nuggets.

The headline: An Amnesia Fortnight Kickstarter kicks off on August 31.

We're going to do a Game Jam, live on the internet, in which our backers will get to choose which of our myriad of ideas get made into four new prototypes-- and which of those final four will become a real (small) game. You may even snag some sweet merchables and rarities along the way. All alongside the process, 2 Player Productions will be filming all the fun to produce one of their award-winning documentary spectaculars.

Also, it was confirmed that Double Fine has all their publishing rights back — buy their games and the money goes straight to Double Fine.

Aaaaaand, those were the main bullet points. You can watch the whole thing on KindaFunnyGames’ Twitch channel.

Elsewhere, Spaff embarrassingly forgot his Mojo password and instead posted this nugget on the Double Fine blog: over the Labor Day weekend (September 4-7), Tim and co. can be found at PAX West where they will show off a brand new game. Now that’s the juice. Plus, there’ll be a fan meet on September 6.

The ball mercifully keeps rolling — I’m very curious to see what PAX brings.

Yesterday's Bluesky post about sums it up:

Note that a time was subsequently nailed down, and that would be 11am-ish PT. Tune in for what is hopefully good news.

Source: Bluesky

If you’ve ever fancied getting your hands on a LEGO tribute to the original Xbox featuring Razputin and The Milkman from 2005’s Psychonauts, Mattel’s new collaboration with Microsoft may be of interest. Admittedly, it’s not actually LEGO and the Psychonauts part is very small, but it’s something. The ‘Brick Shop’ product line is similar to LEGO and supposedly compatible with it, so you may even be able to design and build something more substantial yourself to go with it.

The product is a bit of a curiosity, given that Double Fine recently detached from Microsoft to avoid being shuttered. Presumably this project was underway before that came about, but it’s nice that it saw the light of day in the end. Psychonauts was one of the few high-quality games that bolstered the debuting console’s library before the glory days of the Xbox 360, hence its inclusion.

The collaboration’s tribute to Xbox history feels even more poignant when you look at Psychonauts’ own history. It was originally to be published by Microsoft who dropped it in 2004, almost spelling the end for both the game and Double Fine. Majesco saved the day and got the game finished and released, only to be forced out of the video games industry by the costs.

Years later, Psychonauts 2 was crowdfunded but money started to run out and ambition was stripped back. Microsoft of all companies stepped in and acquired Double Fine, allowing Double Fine to bring its vision to fruition.

Now, we’ll see what the newly independent studio is able to do with the Psychonauts IP that was given back to it as part of the 'go away' deal. In the meantime, maybe enjoy building the Psychonauts diorama.

Source: spaceagemeats

We all know and love it – life around Mojo gets exceptionally easier when we can steal lift information from a game’s official blog. Case in point: The Thimbleweed Park 2 dev journal, which was recently left in David Fox’s capable hands. “Animation and Aseprite” mostly concerns itself with those two things, the latter being the name of the animation software Terrible Toybox uses. There’s even a video…

… note the ReMI-style inventory, though these things will presumably evolve rapidly over the next few months.

Go read the whole thing – it’s packed with information.

Ron McAdams logged his inevitable interview with artist Gary Winnick, best known as the co-creator of Maniac Mansion and Thimbleweed Park, about two weeks back. While this was recorded ahead of Thimbleweed Park 2’s announcement, Gary’s career to date provides plenty of fodder for a long-form interview. And yes, that includes primo Defenders of Dynatron City development lore.

One fun anecdote is Gary’s confirmation of an arcane bit of Maniac Mansion trivia: the surname of Edison came from the people who put together the pitch for the TV show, and it retroactively got applied to the characters in re-releases, as well as taken up by Day of the Tentacle. Ron originally called them the Schwartz family in pre-production materials, but since no reference was ever made to their last name in-game (well, almost no reference), it was a seamless bit of revisionism.

Source: Ron's Computer Videos

For those lucky enough to be attending gamescom next week, Germany’s popular gaming convention will be hosting ‘Monkey Island - The Audiobook; narrated by Chris Cord’ just after lunch on Thursday 27th.

After speaking to gamescom, we can clarify that the event is going to be a panel for the looming German audiobook edition of Nicolas Deneschau’s ‘The Mysteries of Monkey Island’, which debuted in French and was translated into English a few years ago. It also got an expanded German translation, the new audiobook variation of which will be narrated by Chris Cord.

Books aside, you may also remember Nicolas for his guest article here on Mojo where he talked to a few LucasArts developers about their early work creating an official voice-acted version of Monkey Island 2, plus got his hands on the dev-voiced prototype which remains available for you to download.

So, here we go, the first PROPER Thimbleweed Park 2 interview with Ron, courtesy of friend-of-Mojo, Cressup. It literally just went online, so I can’t say a whole lot about the content, but Cress did confirm via email that Elijah Wood is not his mystery investor. Nor are they anyone famous, which also counts out Thrik.

With that said, enjoy!

I wasn’t expecting the first Thimbleweed Park 2 interview to come from Bloomberg – gift link here – but that’s 2026 for ya. Not surprisingly, the financial publication’s article mostly revolves around the game’s funding:

“I don’t mind the publisher earning back their money,” Gilbert said. “It’s just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of the money. Or there are really goofy terms, like you don’t make anything unless it’s a major hit. I always felt that was unfair.”

[..]

The outsider — who, for the time being, has requested anonymity — turned out to be the real deal. Gilbert put together a budget — “a very realistic one,” he said — for roughly two years of development on Thimbleweed Park 2. It would cost more than the first game, which came in at just over $1 million, both because of inflation and because he wanted to ensure that people were paid properly this time around. (On the first game, some of his developers worked for reduced rates.)

More interestingly for those of us who don’t follow the world of finance that closely: He said there will be a few changes to make things more approachable, such as streamlining the verb box that the first game used for interacting with the world (but not streamlining it quite as much as Return to Monkey Island).

There’s more, so give it a read, though presumably the gift link will expire at some point.

Ron also says he’s open to doing another Monkey Island, so hey – we’ve got some crazy years ahead.

Source: Bloomberg

Telltale is hosting a Choices Matter Festival Steam sale. It runs until August 17 and includes discounts on the game by Telltale 2.0 and Deck Nine, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, games from the original Telltale including The Wolf Among Us and Batman: The Telltale Series, as well as The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series, the remaster of Telltale's entire catalog of The Walking Dead games by Skybound Games.

There are also discounts on games by other companies in a similar choices-and-consequences style, such as the Life is Strange series, Heavy Rain, and many more.

Check it out on Steam if you are interested.

You might recall that the Monkey Island 30th Anniversary Anthology set that Limited Run Games put out featured, among its ludicrous tchotchkes, a 6” inch resin statue of Guybrush squeezin’ the chicken, so to speak:

Well, the concept artist behind the figurine, Feli Tomkinson, took to Reddit to share the sketches that led to the final design. Enjoy your privileged glimpse at The Process™:

Source: Reddit

We're no stranger to messing around with Monkey Island's colours here, so imagine our delight to find Neil Cicierega, filmmaker and musician (and old Mojo friend), finding yet another set of spectacles through which to see The Secret of Monkey Island — tweaking the EGA colour palette so it's a bit softer.

Broadly speaking, if we discard the much later Special Edition's effort there are two main versions of SMI's art: the original EGA version which had little over a dozen colours to play with, and the slightly later overhaul where the art was drawn over with the much richer set of colours afforded by VGA.

This led to a number of variations for Atari, Amiga, FM Towns, etc which used one or the other as the basis for their port — in itself leading to some amusing anomalies such as chairs going missing in VGA yet returning in the VGA-derived Amiga version — but the main takeaway is that the pixels comprising each scene were mostly redrawn to add more colours and detail that was never originally there.

Neil's take is an attempt to bring the EGA version's overall colour palette closer to that seen in the VGA version, creating a compromise that preserves most of the original release's artistic intent while giving the game a hue that leans towards that of the VGA version. It is truly a compromise though, with some scenes such as the place where the giant monkey robot is hidden looking a bit muted with this new treatment, although when played properly without a side-by-side comparison it may not be too jarring.

Here's what that palette change looks like in practice:

Want to give it a try? See Neil's instructions:

To do this yourself, open dosbox-staging.conf and change the cga_colors parameter to this:

cga_colors = #000000 #111C7A #00B05E #4996AD #944343 #5F2B82 #965E38 #B0AAA0 #3C4854 #2F53B5 #8DD44A #6FD7E3 #DB8E7D #B669C7 #FFDD6E #F7F6F0

To see a fuller set of screenshots covering other LucasArts games too, check out Neil's Bluesky post and ScummVM thread.

So, what do we have here…

First, Ron has posted the first PROPER Thimbleweed Park 2 dev-blog entry. It has the type of technical info twisted individuals like myself enjoy reading, and also this nugget:

The big changes were in the Dinky scripting code since I want to re-look at the UI and verbs. I wasn’t happy with Thimbleweed Park 1, Delores or Return to Monkey Island and wanted to try something new, kind of a hybrid between the best of the three.

Intriguing! Check out the whole post.

Second: If you haven’t checked out Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie yet, do yourself a favor and do so right now. It’s the type of film any Thimbleweed Park and Monkey Island fan will love. And it goes both ways – in an interview with IGN, director/co-writer Matt Johnson professes his love for classic LucasArts adventures, citing Last Crusade and Monkey Island as the type of game he’d use as inspiration for a highly hypothetical Nirvanna the Band the Show the Game. Jay McCarrol doesn’t look entirely sold, but I’m sure he’d come around.

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