I can’t exclude a kindhearted homaging re-enactment.
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I wasn’t very fond of Escape when it was the last game in the series. After it wasn’t the last game in the series, I started to like it much better.
I have to confess that Escape is the only MI game that I might have not completed.
I say “might” because my memory is quite fuzzy about it: I remember playing it and disliking it quite a bit, but I don’t remember reaching that famous giant monkey scene.
I really hope that the developers of RtMi didn’t add too many references to Escape; I wouldn’t get them.
Marco!
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Exactly.
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El Pollo Diablo!
I’m watching the interview of David Fox announced here a few days ago and, replying to @ZakPhoenixMcKracken , David has said:
… so re-playing MI2 sounds now pretty much necessary for me.
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So, “not required”.
As the game starts in the amusement park, I wonder how it is not required. Maybe they will provide an illustrated recap of the first two games?
I wish I didn’t remember the puzzles, so as to play it again…
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Here’s a fun excercise. Sit down and write/type out a walkthrough of MI2 (or whichever game you prefer) using only your memory. See how long it takes. If you forget a section or puzzle, then maybe you should replay it! 
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I just found this video about speedrun history of Monkey Island:
Many details, I knew, but there are a few things I didn’t. Especially the schrödinger’s safe was new to me.
Also Carla’s insults with multiple comeback options are mentioned there, which is an essential part of speedrun strategies, obviously.
Also the part about the annoyances of the navigator is interesting. It behaved much more straight forward on those back/front-paths in all floppy versions. Some engine changes in SCUMM V5 made it rarely look to the front or back. The script itself was not changed. Annoyingly, ScummVM also exhibits this unintentionally changed behavior on the original floppy versions, so only on real hardware or in DOSbox, the navigator really works as intended.
What the script does to find out the correct direction for the very next step instead of just showing the general direction, is spawning an invisible actor at Guybrush’s location and let it walk to the correct exit. The script remembers the direction the invisible actor is facing right after it started walking and gives that parameter to the navigator’s script. That way, the script can make use of SCUMM’s pathfining algorithm. Very clever. This is repeated every time Guybrush stops walking.
I don’t remember why exactly this script fails in this manner, but I remember that it was quite a hassle to get this fixed. For the Ultimate Talkie Edition, it works as intended.
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I’ve watched that video a few days ago and I loved all the techniques that the speedrunners found to decrease the time. I was particularly surprised by the trial & error routine to attempt opening the safe without knowing the combination.
It’s a nifty solution but, I would dare to say, not an extremely elegant one in my opinion. 
Does this mean that the speedrunners would completely avoid that issue playing the Ultimate Talkie Edition?
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Speedrunners avoided that issue anyway, since they don’t wait for the slow navigator to begin with. In the video, they just reload a quicksave whenever there are multiple paths or one with a long walk.
Unless, it is a no save run, which indeed has a chance to have an advantage due to this bug fix. The floppy version in DOSbox certainly is no option for a speedrun, since it doesn’t have the “.”-key feature.
If anyone wants to run the Ultimate Talkie, it should be considered its own category, I guess. Quite a few alterations have an impact on the timing, some things are a bit faster, some things a bit slower.
Also some of the fixes could be a reason to avoid the Ultimate Talkie for a speedrun. Especially the exploit where the storekeeper walks through the air straight to the safe is fixed. Then again, that is only relevant when not going the early-credit-route.
Yes, I was referring to that type of run because, frankly, I find the entire idea of using savegames quite controversial. I didn’t like the speedrunners’ decision of merging the two categories in which runs were (aptly) divided, for example.
I think that I feel this way for reason related to the fact that I’ve never accepted saving as part of gameplay dynamics. In many old games there were unwinnable situations that could be solved only if you had saved the game before and I have always disliked that.
Yeah, I understand why a different category would be needed.
But did your version introduce improvements that could be beneficial to a speedrun, instead?
I don’t know… new options/modes that might help the speedrunners to skip something and save time? Or some fixed bugs that made Guybrush walk faster?
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These interesting tidbits aside, speedruns on an adventure game fall in the same category as speedreading a book by jumping to the last sentence.
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I can’t think of any. While I tweaked some scenes to get rid of ugly delays, those would be skipped at a speedrun anyway. A big disadvantages would be the need for hitting the “.”-key quite a lot more, since many voiced lines were split to individual lines which previously had a single command and thus could be skipped at once. In some cases, it also disables input temporarily which wasn’t necessary in the original version.
Also related to the “.”-key, but not effecting speedruns is the special care I took at the number splicing script at Stan’s, unfortunately not applicable in ScummVM due to an unimplemented feature.
Any spliced line is a tiny cutscene in itself. The cutscene-skip-key is temporarily assigned to the “.”-key, so the player can skip it as a normal line and isn’t even aware that he actually skips a cutscene. Unfortunaley, the cutscene-skip-key is hardcoded in ScummVM, and hitting “.” only skips single segments of a spliced line, but you could hit ESC to skip the entire line instead.
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I did pay close attention to the top speedrunner’s haggling with Stan. His method is: Walk away once (-1000), reject all seven extras (-2700), offer 5000 (current worth 10000-3700=6300) for success.
He could skip one of those extra rejections (stop at simulated wood), for a worth of 6750 that would let him make the sale. But I’m not sure if that would save him much time.
How long does it take for Guybrush’s walking away animation, versus the time it takes to skip more dialogue? I wonder, because I’m not sure if they know they can get a sale without walking away. They could reject the first five extras (stopping at elevator), offer 2000, then offer 5000 twice for the sale.
And of course, on your Ultimate Talkie Edition, they could simply reject all 7 extras and then offer 5000 for the fastest sale.
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After I saw the video, I just had to go back and get the 5000 credit merely for fun. It means you can buy a ship from Stan before LeChuck is seen kidnapping the governor, which I find hilarious.
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Why don’t you contact the speedrunners and suggest them to try it? 
It would be up to them to calculate whether it saves time or not.
Sometimes I have done things before there was a need to do them, but I’m not sure if I ever did that with the ship purchase.
By the way, I was wondering… but would a CTRL-W count as a legit speedrun? 
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I commented on the recordholder’s Twitter account, but I haven’t heard anything.
Love the Ctrl-W idea.