I keep wondering about that one screenshot of the courthouse. I’m a bit perplexed as to how an island in the Caribbean is icy. Not exactly usual, is it? I wonder if the chilly nature of the island factors into the plot of the game; perhaps a voodoo curse has been unleashed and caused the island to become a frozen land.
So the real world is not real, the pirate world is the real one. I’d love that…
And this way the secret would be an entirely pirate world thing.
Nice reply by His Majesty on this month’s controversy.
My favorite part is “the Monkey Island games weren’t pixel art games, they were state of the art games”.
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Climate change.
Aha. The title was so similar, I didn’t realise it was a new post at first. Good to see the site is back up!
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I thought his post was awesome. He’s making the game he wants to make. This is exactly what I’m looking for. He’s a true artist. I’m hyped.
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My favourite part (so far, still reading) is where he spoils the original secret(?) or idea for MI3a
The totality of that idea was “Guybrush chases the demon pirate LeChuck to hell and Stan is there.” That’s it. That’s all it was.
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The music Michael, Peter, and Clint are doing is equally amazing. It’s not AdLib, Sound Blaster, or even Roland MT-32 music. Its stunning, interactive, and recorded live.
Does the word “interactive” suggest that the game contains an equivalent to the iMuse technology? I certainly hope so.
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He already integrated FMOD to his old engine, so I’m pretty sure they’ll have something similar to iMuse using FMOD
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The more I think about it, the more I think single-digit-aged me playing the game for the first time had the right idea. The Secret of Monkey Island, if anything other than titular prose, was the recipe to get to the island. This seems solidified by not including ‘Secret’ in the second game’s title; it suggest the secret has already been revealed.
More games came to pass and those were just more stories in that world. I don’t expect a big ‘secret’ reveal from the new game but I personally wouldn’t mind clearing up MI2’s wonderfully ending, since one would expect that kind of closure from such a wild, open-ended and ambiguous ending.
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In the new post he says
I never liked the art in DotT. Technically and artistically it was fantastic, but I never liked the wacky Chuck Jones style.
yet the similarity with RTMI is striking. Strange that he didn’t address this further.
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It took until about a decade ago, but that’s not necessarily unusual anymore. Mark of the Ninja is a pretty good example from 2012.
Could he have just revealed the secret, just like that?
I find it hard to believe he would tell us in this way…
but that’s how I was expecting the secret to be like .
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Yes! That’s exactly the feeling I had back then. First, the 256 VGA graphics were stunning, then the hand painted and scanned(!) graphics. And that’s why I fully agree with Ron to use the graphic style he has chosen.
I hope you’ll jump on with the rest of us.
@RonGilbert: I would love to jump on your rollercoaster and I can’t wait to do this!
I suppose I can see that a bit in the environments, but the characters don’t look like that at all to me. 
yep, I was talking about the environments
It looks like he has, yeah…
…and he did it in order to explain why that idea would have probably changed even if he made MI3a back then, and how they discussed it as a possibility for RtMI but it didn’t make sense after the later MI games…
Had I stayed at Lucasfilm I might have started with that idea, but by the time the game was done it would have been something completely different and better.
We talked about my original “hell” idea but other Monkey Island games had already done much of that (by pure coincidence) and there was little point in rehashing it.
So that looks like the “just a kid’s dream” twist was only ever a cliff-hanger for the end of MI2.
Although…
read what Ron wrote in this forum in june 2017:
This was 2017. Then, in 2020, Ron decides not to do it because "other Monkey Island games had already done much of that (by pure coincidence), and there was little point in rehashing it. "
?
Didn’t he know that in 2017?
I’m still clinging to the possibility that in the new post Ron is not talking about the “secret” but only about the very initial idea.
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I don’t think that "Guybrush chases the demon pirate LeChuck to hell and Stan is there” was the Secret™ at all. I think that Ron was merely talking about what he’d thought of in terms of what would have happened during the game (i.e. very little in the way of planning and ideas). There’s no way that he would have just casually revealed the Secret™ in an interview like that.
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I think he didn’t want to write down the initial idea, because like he says in that post, it seems kind of underwhelming just written down so plainly. So much so that you have to go, “wait… did he just reveal the secret?”
I think he felt he had to write it down now, to get people to understand that they won’t get the original MI3a with those graphics and that ending, and they wouldn’t have gotten that back then either, because the idea would have probably changed as they worked on the game.
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And yet… “stan is there” does not look like it could be described as “a secret”…
a “twist” maybe, but not a “secret”…
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