Well, I’ve just found a glitch: When I put the disk into my PC it won’t even start!?!
What happened there?
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I think they saw something they were familar with AND THEY CLAPPED!!!
I agree with you, but, if we used contents from the official games, we could share that remake without those respective contents, because every owner of the official games has got these contents anyway. They would just have to get imported from there by a script. So, the remake could be seen as a mod somehow.
All new artworks in the remake would not be protected by a copyright of Disney, so they could be contained in the download file.
If extraction tools are illegal, we could refer to an external tool. Perhaps even the dialog lines could be extracted and imported from the official games with a special script, in order to avoid legal issues.
The only question would be: Is it allowed to rip-off entire puzzle chains of another game? I’m afraid it’s not, but I’m not sure.
But isn’t the idea of a “remake” to replace the whole content (the music, the graphics, the UI, the engine)? The only things left are the game logic and the texts. And even those two things are often changed in “remakes” - an example is the paint remover/brush puzzle in Maniac Mansion Deluxe.
Yes and no. One problem are trademarks. For example if you redraw the intro sequence you have to redraw the Indiana Jones logo.
Actually, I was thinking of an EMI remake. But yes, we would have to avoid any trademarks, but this might be feasible.
I was rather thinking of a demake, which would look (and play) like one of the predecessors, in order to make it more enjoyable. This would allow us to reuse a lot of character animations from there, in order to reduce the amount of work. A lot of fan projects were never finished, just because the team members had underestimated the amount of work.
If we decided for the pixel-art style from MI 1, we could even reuse several room screens for Melee Island and Monkey Island.
Also, we could reuse the voice-acting from the official EMI and even add some voice-lines from MI 1 or CoMI, if we really liked to include a sword fight.
But, such a demake cannot be shared legally with all these contents, and my guess was that most of us might have these games anyway. That’s why I suggested to extract them from the player’s own copies. This could also be an opportunity to include the some of the trademarks legally.
Seeing that there are five MI games with well-done voice-acting (some of them are even translated), I would have preferred to keep most of the lines from EMI and include some from the four other games in addition (e. g. the insults). I just think that voice-acting has some charm.
Fan remakes are puzzling to me. Why not just make new stuff? It’s good for practice to do a scene or two, but to do a whole game is a huge project that needs some serious skill and management to pull of. All this creative energy seems to be wasted in the end.
That’s what I’m saying too. But they would like to do a remake, so I won’t stop them. 
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Basically I agree with you. The legal situation makes it very difficult to do a remake. But, creating something entirely new would be even more elaborate and may turn out to be in vain, too.
However, I’m not sure if I would have enough time anyway.
Famous last words of so many projects. 
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The problem of most (fan) projects is that they start and think (too) big. Why don’t you just start with a small adventure? Maybe a dozen of rooms and a small story. A challenge would be a one-room adventure.
The first time I wanted to program an adventure game, using an Amiga, was in 1991 and in my mind there were 20 locations.
I had to program the engine, a friend of mine had to draw all the art (backgrounds, sprites, animations).
The project lasted 1 month, then we surrendered due to lack of time.
The plot involved the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.
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I would say that this is already a big adventure. And programming an engine from scratch is a lot of work. Nowadays we have several engines available. So it should be a little bit faster to create an adventure.
Sure, you need some (spare) time, even for a “single room adventure”. But if you are able to do a de-/remake of an existing adventure, then you have also the time for a new adventure.
if I wanted to do an adventure game today, just for fun and in my spare time, I would use AGS to create it.
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Why AGS? (And not for example Visionaire?)
I tried both of them, when my friend and I had created Woaky, many years ago.
For that adventure, which was aimed to 6th-8th grade students, we used AGS for its easy-to-use engine. But it had some limitations on the number of rooms or sprites.
So, we moved to Visionaire, not for free, which is more professional and powerful than AGS.
That’s the difference: easy-to-use (less time to produce your final work) vs. professional tool (more time to fine tuning everything).
Anyway, even with AGS it’s possible to create a full-length excellent adventure.
Maniac Mansion Deluxe is a perfect Maniac Mansion game, rebuilt enterely with AGS from scratch.
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Sounds interesting!
Due to the amount of work, I would prefer to work as a part of a team. And, for a non-professional dev team, the risk of getting lost in endless discussions about minor design decisions might be much smaller if you did just a remake, because most of the creative decisions are already made by another team then.
Of course, creating a completely new game has even more charm. And, I have tons of ideas for new adventure games. But, I think the TWP dev blog has shown well that it’s still way more work to figure out the game logic, play test it, improve/cut contents and create all room screens from scratch.
I’m definitely going to start my own little project one day. However, if I really ended up making a “big” game, I would try to sell it, because it would be really really time-intensive.
But this is the fun part!
If you make a remake, you don’t have to be (very) creative. It’s just the stupid work. Even the illustrators/artists have templates/references.
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Instead of a full remake one can make just a scene. For example the airplane scene from Zak would be perfect (waitress, toilet paper…), it’s small but very complex (not to mention funny).
And if we’re talking engines, Unity paired with the plugin Adventure Game Creator seems to be an excellent choice. I bought the plugin on sale but I still can’t get around to do something. Both AGS and Visionaire seems to be ok for old school 2D stuff, but Unity can do that too and is such an amazing tool to do other things as well. Not to mention there’s a marketplace with assets (often free).
So… when are we going to design our own adventure game together?
When you’ll have the TWP italian dubbing project finished.
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