Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, a new special guest has joined the arena, so Ashley Day, want to introduce yourself? Hello. Well, I think it’s about time, isn’t it, given how many times you guys have mentioned me on this podcast. I feel like Columbo’s wife. That’s how I’ve always described you to my friends and family members. Hello, how are you doing? So who are you, Ash, and what do you do? So yeah, I’m Ashley Day. What do I do? I do a lot of things. I currently am head of developer relations at Team17. But I know you guys from the past, the glorious days of print games journalism. So I was on GamesTM magazine for about six years. And that’s where I knew you, Sam. You were, imagine, publishing at the same time on, I think you started on Play about six to 12 months after I was there. And then moved around a lot. What were you on, Sci-Fi now, for a while. And then I think you moved on to GamesTM not too long after I left. After the last great imagine brain drain, basically, it was like, who’s left? Who could actually make this magazine? And there was me, I was left. And I know Matthew because, well, I was like the one kind of like Nintendo head on GamesTM at the time. So whenever there’s anything Nintendo related to cover, I was the one sent out. And you had to be sent out because Nintendo very, very rarely actually sent anything to your office. So you had to, in the early days, we were going to the wheat house and the wheat flat, which I think your listeners have heard about quite a lot. And I would invariably meet Matthew nine times out of 10. He would be the person from NGamer who was there. And I thought, oh, this is someone who lives up to the persona that is presented on the page as a really kind of fun and interesting person. So yeah, always nice to bump into Matthew and have a chat. Yeah, the two giant men of Nintendo fandom. Yeah, I think I qualify as probably the third giant man of this podcast now. I’m six foot six and central stone. Yeah, it’s good to be able to join the dots on this because it’s true that I think anytime that Matthew wants to like reinforce a point or justify an opinion about an obscure Nintendo thing, he’ll invoke your name. Like a support trophy in Smash Bros. kind of thing. Like that sort of situation. So yeah, it’s nice to finally have you on here, Ash. So how are things going with you? Are things good on the development side? Things are pretty good. Team 17 is always really busy working on lots of interesting projects, many of which are kind of unannounced. So you’re only ever seeing a portion of what we’re working on at any one time, the passing of The Queen last week, just to date this podcast. It caused a tremendous amount of extra work for us, as I’m sure it did for lots of game publishers and all kinds of companies around the world. Generally, it’s just working with indie developers all around the world, trying to make some cool and interesting games and not go over time and not go over budget is, that’s the harder thing to do. But occasionally we do it. Yet to see any condolences from the worms socially. What’s that about? Must be an oversight by looking at that one. Epic fail on your part, I think there. I’m grateful that Ash is at Team17 because whenever they publish something quite tasty, I can just DM Ash and say, can I have a Steam Key please? And he’ll send me one. So I’m delighted. That’s true. That’s the kind of unwritten rule of having kind of like grown up through games journalism, is so many people go into the games industry. You kind of, you get into this mode of like, who can I collect along a network of game publishers to try and ensure that I can black out whatever I want. And if a friend goes to work at a publisher where you’ve already got another friend there, then they are useless to you. And you try and subtly encourage them to apply somewhere else. Yeah, try and change the trajectory of their lives in order to secure free keys. That’s the real corruption at the heart of the games industry. Okay, so it is great having you on finally, Ash. So tell us a bit about your history in games media and your time spent with us. So you say you’re the Nintendo guy on GamesTM. I feel like you’re also the retro guy, right? What kind of influence do you feel like you brought to that magazine? I remember the interview process at Imagine Publishing and they had a number of vacancies across the board because they had just acquired the portfolio from Hybe Publishing and had just gone under. So they had loads of mags, loads of staff writer positions available. So it’s quite an unusual position in that in each interview they asked us, what would you like to do out of everything that’s here? And I thought, well, I want to do the retro section on GamesTM. And they said, okay, that’s what you can do. It was a bit more protracted than that. Actually what happened was they said, okay, you’ve got a staff writer job. And I didn’t find out until I’d moved to Bournemouth, rented a flat and gone to my first day at work that they told me that I’d got what I’d asked for. So that was a little bit hairy, scary, but. Yeah, a bit unusual. Maybe someone just forgot to put it in an email or something, I don’t know. Honestly, I absolutely loved it. It’s still to this day, my favorite job that I’ve ever had working in games journalism, particularly doing the retro section, because that’s a huge passion of mine. I’m sitting in my games room now in view, just in front of me, I’ve got a Japanese Sega Saturn, I’ve got a twin Famicom, a Commodore CDTV. My desk where I work every day has an Amiga and an MSX on it. I’m surrounded by this stuff and I genuinely do love it. I think I might be more interested in old games than I am new games, I don’t really know why they bother making new games because there’s so many great old ones that already exist, it’s a wasteful. A bold statement from Team 17. Interesting. Yeah, I might not have much of a job if we start making new games, but we can re-release Alien Breed. I keep saying every week since 2017 and it still hasn’t happened. What we were talking about, retro section on GamesTM. You know, honestly, I could go on forever and I shouldn’t because we’ve got a very exciting topic to talk about. But yeah, one of the happiest times of my life to come into a, you know, I think a pretty big magazine for its time and pretty well respected. And to be given this enormous section of the magazine as a new staff writer who’s never done a job before and told you can decide every page, every word that goes into this section month by month, just do whatever you like because we don’t know anything about retro games. So off you go. In hindsight, that was a massive privilege. And I think it set me on a really good path because I learned so many skills, so much of the craft of magazine editing. I think it created a natural progression up to, eventually, deputy editor of the magazine. And I imagine, as I’m sure is the case at a lot of publishers, deputy editor often meant you were the editor. You just weren’t being paid to do it because there was no editor above me. There was Rip Porter, who was editor-in-chief. He was managing several titles at once. I had a lot of support from him. But really, there was a two-year period where I was just running the magazine. And that was, I’m not even complaining about that. That was awesome. I just really enjoyed it. And it was kind of a dream of mine as a kid and a teenager to be able to do that. I grew up reading like CBG and Edge and just thought, well, this looked like a fantastic life. And it really was, I think it’s, you know, so many people would love to be in that position of, you know, literally getting paid to play games. Like that’s, it’s a bit of a cliche. People think that about me now that I work in the games industry. It’s really not true. I don’t get to play games very often at all, but as a games journalist, yeah. And that’s what you’re doing. And you have the enormous privilege of being able to kind of transmit your voice and your opinion to tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of readers across the world. Like, you can’t, anyone who complains about it, I just think what you’re talking about, it’s a great privilege. Yeah, I mean, you know, I feel like your memories have warped a little bit in the sense that playing games, felt like it was only at most like 20% of the job, Ash, but like, maybe your experience is different, I don’t know. No, it’s probably not that different, but you know, once the playing is over, you’re then kind of, obviously, you’re formulating that play experience, you’re kind of mulling over that experience in your mind and trying to convey it to somebody else. That’s kind of just another form of play. Anyway, in my mind, it’s such great fun. I don’t think there’s much of a downside, except it didn’t pay very well. And that’s why I had to leave in my 30s when I wanted to do things like buy a house and have children and own a dog. Otherwise, I think I would have done it forever. Yeah, it was a particularly strong team, Yellow Games team at the time as well, right? Yeah, Matt Hadrahan and other people who I can’t really remember. You mentioned Rick. But there was that guy who went to join the police. There was that guy. That was Adam Harald. I feel like I have to give everyone a shout out now, just in case they’re listening. Adam Harald went to, came from the police, went back to the police, went to do PR for them. I’m not sure how that works. We’ve arrested 20 suspects this week. We thought it was hilarious, me and Dave Shaw at X360 to do the wire thing of shouting 5050 whenever he walked past, because he got the job at the police. I guarantee you, he hated that. I don’t think he even understood what we were doing, to be honest, but it was nonetheless quite enjoyable. But yeah, sorry to derail you there, Ash, but yeah, good strong team on TM, right? Yeah, Matt Handrehan went on to run gamesindustry.biz for years. He then went to PlayStation. I think he’s now working at an indie publisher, managing their portfolio, so a kind of similar path to me and one of the smartest cookies I’ve ever worked with and has beautiful, luscious, Prince of Valium style, blonde hair, which I’m just going to imagine as a podcast listener, but it’s a spectacular thing to see. John Denton, who went on to, he’s now a massive YouTuber doing music reaction videos and also somehow a part-time MMA fighter, interesting people in games journalism. You and I worked in the same office as Simon Miller, who’s now part-time YouTuber, rock star, professional wrestler. It makes the traditional path of just going and working in the games industry seem a little bit dull, by comparison. Yeah, it was nice just knowing lots of people around the same age who had similar sensibilities. Yeah, it was really, really good. You realize when you get to your 30s, you just don’t find yourself in workplaces in the same situation. I think the low pay and the specific subject matters, probably why all those people are in the same place, but in retrospect, for a little bit spoiled. It was awesome because there were a lot of magazines at Imagine because, like I say, they acquired the hybrid portfolio. They also had a lot of magazines that started themselves. It was just before the kind of like Prince is Dead thing started really to happen. It was, print is at its peak, even though nobody’s reading it. We’ve still got all these magazines. So you’re surrounded by, like you say, like-minded individuals, tons of them. We also got Every Friday Afternoon off. It’s one of the cool things that Imagine did. So invariably, you know, you all ended up in the pub every Friday afternoon and it created this workplace culture that I think we’ve all formed quite strong bonds that have lasted, you know, over a decade now, about 15 years of all of these great people who I’ve stayed in touch with whenever we’ve un-pinned to each other. It’s like meeting an old family member now. It’s one of the things I’m most grateful for in life. It’s that connection with all those like-minded people. Yeah, I’ll definitely try and get John Denton and Matt to hand your hand on the podcast at some point. That’d be awesome. Yeah, that’d be good, wouldn’t it? From afar, being a future and knowing about the Imagine afternoons off, I used to think if I was given the offer of an afternoon off, would I actually take it? Because things were so fucking stressful and the deadlines and the workload. To me, that would have been like, oh, I’d have to work half a day on Saturday instead. Was it like that or was it actually a bit more chilled? For a lot of people, particularly staff writers, it was a great opportunity to just get down the pub. For some people, this was an opportunity to do some freelance because there was a great internal freelance system. I say great, you kind of needed to do it to earn a living wage. I’m sure it was fairly similar in the future. People would spend their evenings and weekends doing freelance for other mags. Friday afternoon was great for that. Once you became kind of like DepEd or above, your Friday afternoons did tend to get swallowed, particularly if you were on deadlines. I remember me and Greg Whittaker, who is the art editor on GamesTM, there were many, many Friday afternoons where we’d still be sat there hunched over the computer as well. The office was more or less empty because everyone was down the pub. That felt a little bit… It was easy to get bitter. Just to be clear, Matthew, it wasn’t a DOS. It wasn’t a 9-to-5 job by any means. I’m not saying it was, but I don’t know if I would take up an option of enforced firm. That was cool. I do have good memories of that. I worked with you for five years in the end, Ash, so a long, long time. How was working at Team17? Which games are you currently working on that you can actually talk about? Generally, my job at Team17, when I left GamesTM, I went to Nintendo and worked in social media for about five years there. Absolutely amazing job. I got to work through the dark times of the Wii U, which was currently building. Went swimming with Miyamoto and went for a curry with him, different days. Wait, what? You went to… Sorry. We need to interrogate that. We need to interrogate that. This is 1E3. I love swimming. I think Miyamoto loves swimming as well, as come interviews. We didn’t like… It’s not like we met up and went, shall we go swimming together? I went down to the pool one morning. I could see the pool from my hotel window and I always check, is there nobody there? Because I’m a large man that wants to swim alone. There’s no one there. That’s so profound. Large men swim alone. I’m just dipping my toes in the water and then someone comes around the corner. I’m like, oh, for God’s sake, don’t ruin my lonely swim, please. And it was Miyamoto in his trunks. I can’t leave now. If I leave now, that’s it. Career over. I’ve snubbed him. You probably have no idea who I was. But yeah, I did a few lengths alongside him. He wasn’t thrown off by your impressive wake. Yeah, just like, tsunami-ed him out of the pool with me jumping into it. No, he’s a great swimmer, actually. He was running rings around me. Yeah, you can tell that you’re swimming most days. I got back to the hotel room, went on Facebook, went, oh, I’ve just been swimming with Miyamoto. And loads of people in my feed thought, I mean, with hindsight, this is kind of funny, but they thought I was referring to some unannounced, like, Wii or Wii U games that had just been revealed at E3. Endless Ocean 3. Yeah, like, Nintendo, well known and still well known for these kind of, like, lifestyle video games, fitness games. Nobody actually believed that I meant it literally, which I thought was… Well, that’s amazing. So, yes, that’s good. Were you getting to the games, Ash, before we took you down that path, sorry? Yeah, I went from Nintendo to Team17 and ended up running their community team. Did that for a couple of years. That was quite a natural transition from what I was doing with Nintendo. But I started to take more and more interest in the development side. At Nintendo, you are very far removed from development if you work in a local market in your marketing and sales. But somewhere like Team17, you’re interacting with your own studio and with indie developers all the time when you’re in marketing. I really took an interest in it and I was very kindly offered a new role running their developer relations outfit. Which, honestly, if I try to explain everything that does, we’ll be here all day. Basically, it’s a position there to ensure that publisher and developer are working smoothly together and that if any challenges arise, you’ve got someone who’s dedicated to solving those problems. It is often a problem-solving department. And I take great pleasure in that. I love a good puzzle game, as we’re going to talk about later on. And I kind of treat it as such. Every problem has a solution. You just need to figure out what it is. So actually I find it great fun and very satisfying to do that. It can be very stressful at times as well. Presumably you’re not combining something with something to solve these problems. It’s usually combining budget with time to get game, I think. That’s the way to do it. So I think at other companies, developer relations might be called executive producer role or something like that. It’s someone who sits between commercial and development and is able to look at the big picture and how all these things relate together and try to move forward in a way that makes all parties happy. Yeah, that’s what I do at Team17. A couple of games that we’re working on right now. I think one that will be really relevant to anyone listening to this episode is Sunday Gold, which is a point and click adventure with turn-based RPG battles, if you can imagine that one, set in a kind of dystopian London set against the backdrop of dog racing, which is where the name Sunday Gold comes from. It’s the name of one of the dogs that is being raced. Yeah, so that’s out very, very soon. That’s due out this month. Made by a team in Canada who normally do kind of like work for hire sort of work. But this is their first kind of original IP, their first indie game. So they’re obviously really excited about that. Can I ask Ash? Beautiful art. Sorry. Can I ask, are they releasing the game on a Sunday? No. You should see some reviews coming out pretty soon. And we’re feeling pretty confident that people are going to like that game. A rad art style on that game looks really good. Yeah, really beautiful artwork. And fully voiced, as you would expect, from an adventure game made after 1993. No need to put it on CD-ROM. And the other one I would shout out is a game called The Night Witch, which is going to be out later this year, around November, December time, made by a Spanish team, one of whom was designer on Rhine, which you may remember. And that is a Metroidvania shoot-em-up hybrid. So you play as a witch, exploring a cavernous kind of Metroidvania level design, but dealing with enemies and bosses that spew out these Japanese bullet hell patterns at you. So a really, really nice kind of hybrid design that I think either hasn’t been done before or hasn’t been done very much. And made by these awesome designers who really know their onions when it comes to hardcore game design. Enrique, the lead designer, I speak to him about once a month and have done for the last couple of years. Every time we have a call, one of the questions he asks me is, what game are you playing at the moment? Me being me, I’m usually playing some really obscure PC Engine game or an MSX game. Nine times out of ten, he knows that game. He remembers reading about it in magazines or seeing it in a shop window, he’s played it himself. You can’t take that for granted with game designers. Often they’re so close to making games, they have tunnel vision and the rest of the video game world becomes hazy for them. This is a guy in a team who, I think they’ve absorbed the best of so many great games that are out there and they’re putting it into their own games. So I think that’s one to watch. Like I say, we’re working on a load of games, but they’re the two I want to shout out for back page readers, you know, discerning people of taste. Is it really difficult at which one? I keep asking for it to be made harder and everyone else keeps asking for it to be made easier. Now that’s not me saying that I’m awesome at shooting games. Like all extra games, I’m terrible at games. But suffice it to say, there’s a little bit of debate of where that difficulty balance should be and they’ve put some nice accessibility options in there. So I think that’s the way they’re going. Keep it challenging, but put some optional tweaks in there for people who want to make it a little bit easier for themselves, I think is the way to go. That’s cool. Is that Game Dredge one of yours, Ash? That’s the Team of 17 one. Yeah, so like a kind of Lovecraftian horror fishing game where you’re on like a trawler boat. I don’t know the technical term, like a tugboat sort of thing. So not a fishing game like you would see in an RPG where your legs are dangling off the end of a pier. You’re sailing around in a little boat and there are unknown horrors lurking beneath the waves. We showed that at Gamescom and it got really good pick up. I think Joe Scrubbles wrote a pretty enthusiastic preview of it, for example. Yeah, that’s how it came to my attention. Yeah, people like it. Well, that’s nice to get a little overview of what you do there. So yes, as Ash mentioned, this is the Lucasarts Adventure Games Hall of Fame episode. While we are 25 minutes in and we haven’t talked about that yet, I assure you we will get to it very soon. So Ash, just a couple more questions for you. So how do you feel about the number of times you’ve been mentioned on this podcast today and which of our opinions have you been the most offended by? There have been a couple where I’ve had to tweet you afterwards and express my dismay. Right now I can’t remember exactly what they were. And I think whenever I do tweet you guys, it’s always a little bit tongue in cheek and it’s usually something that only I would care about, as Matthew stupently points out every now and then anyway. In terms of getting mentioned so often, well, naturally I’m a great egotist, so I just love it. Every time I get mentioned, it’s fantastic. And the best thing about it is that it’s really annoying Dave Scarborough, who I think is a mutual friend of ours. He’s a big fan of the podcast and talks to me about it. I think he’s desperate to come on. And I think he said something to me or you said something to me about how occasionally you will make reference to him, but you’ll always talk about him as my friend rather than mentioning his name, which is hilarious. You’ve got to keep doing that now because… He thinks I’m deliberately erasing him from history by doing that. There’s no intent behind it. I think it’s just that because I’m in constant conversation with Dave all the time, I don’t want to feel like he’s always… I guess I don’t want to make him accountable for his past actions on the air. I wanted to spare him that, but you’re right. It is borderline turning into a big deal. So yeah, I’ll have to mention Dave Moore now. He’s been mentioned now, so that’s it. He can shut up for six months, I think. He can still get me friends and family rate on Game Pass Ultimate, which is what matters. Okay, good. I must admit, I sometimes feel nervous treading into topics which I know are like specialist topics for you. So, you know, like I consider myself a fan of like Kimura, for example. But am I right in thinking you… Can you run a blog about his games? I did a long time ago, probably about 10 years ago. I ran a blog called Love Delic Life, which is still out there. So Love Delic was the kind of boutique developer that Kimura and… Kenichi Nishi is the creator of Chibi-Robo. They ran that company. They made three games in the late 90s. So I ran a blog about them. So, yeah, am I an expert? At the time I was running that blog, I felt like I was one of only a handful of people in the world who knew about these developers. But brilliantly, they kind of exploded in recent years, I think mostly thanks to Onion Games, which is Pomura’s current outfit. It’s been great to see people embrace these games so much and great to see Moon, which was one of Ludelic’s three games, described as an anti-RPG. It’s actually more of an adventure game, really, that got re-released on the Switch and translated into English for the first time. That’s kind of like a dreams come true event for me, something you’d never imagine would happen. In some ways, it was nice to be an authority on the topic for a few years, but it’s even nicer that mission accomplished people actually know about these great games now. You’ve got that Games from the Black Hole blog too, right, Ash? I don’t know if that’s currently on a short hiatus, but I very much enjoyed reading about the James Bond Game Boy game on there. Definitely not on hiatus. I started this in the pandemic, finally scratching that itch I had of really missing writing about games, and I thought, look, I’ve got the time during the pandemic, I’ll play an old game every week and write about it from a very subjective viewpoint, something you don’t really get to do very much in traditional games journalism. And successfully did that for about a year and a half. And then my daughter was born in December last year, and I thought, I can’t keep up with, you know, completing a game every week and writing about it. Oh, boy. That was taking up a lot of spare time. So now I just do it when I can. Last article I did was a couple of months ago, it was about Shining the Holy Ark on the Saturn. Actually the most popular blog post I’ve ever done. So even though I’m not churning them out, it’s nice to see people reading it and engaging with it. So, yeah, I definitely want to plug that at the end of the podcast. That’s my passion, really. I do want to, it’d be great if a few more people knew about it. Yeah, we’ll link our listeners to it. Don’t worry, it’s all good. Last up before we get to Lucasarts and Ash. So last week we talked a little bit, a tiny bit about Chibi-Robo, and we were struggling on that because, I don’t know, me and Matthew have an alright games knowledge between us, but you’re encyclopedic, particularly about certain areas of games. So why is Chibi-Robo good? Because I know that you’re like the world’s number one Chibi-Robo stan. Yeah, I think that might even be true. I remember I joined GamesTM the year that Chibi-Robo came out, and I was campaigning for it to win best sound in the GamesTM awards that year. I failed because no one else had played the game, and they all thought I’d gone quite mad. But I hadn’t. It’s a great game. Chibi-Robo, what is it? Let’s see how quickly I can do this without just droning on about one of my favorite games of all time. For Nintendo heads, I’d say it’s probably… The game it has most in common with is Zelda, in that it has this semi-open world structure. You start out being able to explore a limited area, but the more you interact with people, the more skills and equipment that you unlock, the more the world opens up for you. Only that world is a normal domestic family house. You are a tiny, three-inch high robot designed to clean the house. It’s your job. You have a toothbrush, which from the scale of this little robot is the size of a broom. You go around the house cleaning up, earning happy points by making the family in the house happy by cleaning for them, but also talking to them and solving some problems for them. The more time you spend with this family, the more you find that they are actually dysfunctional. The dad is sleeping on the couch at night. The daughter has retreated into a fantasy world. She wears a frog costume and only speaks in ribbits. Actually, I think she might be having some sort of serious breakdown. If this was a really serious game, you’d be like, oh my god, what’s going on in this family? But it’s kind of like tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted, but it’s got this nice emotional undercurrent to it. So you’re solving the problems as a family, bringing them back together, introducing love back into their lives through the resources of this tiny, unfeeling robot. And I think one of the great things about it from a gameplay perspective is that as the world of this house kind of opens up for you, exploring it is a real joy because of the verticality that comes from being a tiny robot in a house, just climbing up a chair or a table or scaling the curtains and getting to the top and looking down over the house gives it this really epic feeling in a limited, familiar space, gives you a new perspective on something we all see every day in our own lives. I think without drowning on far too long, they’re the headlines for you in terms of what makes Chibirabo pretty special. Unfortunately, it came out on the GameCube at the tail end of its life, limited print run, not many people played it, and aside from a Japanese-only Wii release, it’s never been reissued. There is a game out on Game Pass at the moment called Tinykin. I don’t know if either of you guys have played that. I’ve got it installed and ready to play. I think I played this when it was in development a long time ago, but I haven’t played it since it was released, but I think that’s going to capture some of the joy of Chibi-Robo, a similar sort of thing, a tiny little fellow in a house. And I think anyone who’s playing that and loving it, as I know people are, I was listening to the computer game show the other day, and they were saying it was Game of the Year material, so I’m very excited to try it. If you are enjoying it, there are ways you can check out Chibi-Robo without having to spend $200 on eBay, which, you know, Nintendo were getting you about $200. Cut to Miyamoto shaking his head with disapproval in just his swimming trunks. Ash, how could you do this to me? It is true that, yeah, it is bizarre that that has not been salvaged for the West in some form. Maybe someday. So we’re recording this episode on Lucasarts Adventure Games because return to Monkey Island is imminent from original creator Ron Gilbert, something that seemed impossible for years when Lucasarts was shut down after George Lucas sold Star Wars and Lucasfilm to Disney. And so for a long time, it just seemed very tangled up in that. And slowly it seemed like things were thawing where you had these remasters of classic Lucasarts Adventure Games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle at Full Throttle made by Double Fine and re-released so people could play them on current hardware. But this is very different. It’s kind of a breakthrough where the original creator has been able to license the rights to his series back and make a follow up in the image of the games that he worked on. So I guess, like Matthew, to start with you, how are you feeling about the fact that there is a new Monkey Island coming out? Is this a series that’s special to you? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a series that got me into point and click games for sure. To be honest, a little bit nervous about it just because the original games were made at a particular time and place and a particular time in my life. And one of the things going back to some of these games for this episode has made me think maybe they spoke to me when I was like a teenager very specifically and maybe my own sensibilities moved on a little bit, so I don’t know if it’s going to gel. Also, when these older creators sometimes get to go back to their work, sometimes they’re stuck in a particular time and it’s not always great. I hope it’s good. I haven’t really liked most of what we’re on Gilbert’s done in the modern era. I haven’t really liked much of what I’ve seen of the new game. It’s kind of an annoying one because there’s obviously a bit of an outcry against the game from some assholes about the art style or whatever a bit. I completely disagree with those people, but I can’t say I’m particularly in love with the clips I have seen and the Gamescom banter about all the downloadable wholesome or whatever was a little bit like a joke from 15 years ago. I’m just nervous, is the short version. Yeah, yeah. Ash, what about you? I feel like you’ve had more affection for Ron Gilbert’s recent output. How are you feeling about Return to Monkey Island? Yeah, I definitely did. But I think also I’m a little bit older than you guys and obviously more kind of retro-facing in my tastes. Thimbleweed Park, I thought, was a really fantastic exercise in trying to do something deliberately old-fashioned. You know, it still had the text inputs that the Lucasarts Adventures gave up, you know, around the mid to late 90s. Gilbert deliberately wanted to recapture the style of the original Maniac Mansion because he felt some things had been lost by moving away from the text. You know, some of the kind of the puzzle elements of just figuring out how should I construct these verbs and nouns together. By getting rid of that, some of the gaminess had gone and to a certain extent, I agree with him. I was pleased to see that in amongst that kind of retro-ness, he also included some modern concessions. I thought he did a really great job on that. I also thought the cave, which he did with Double Fine, was a completely different twist on the Maniac Mansion formula of having a pool of characters and selecting only three and then seeing how those three characters can interlink with their unique abilities to create a slightly different adventure every time. It was a really interesting idea that Maniac Mansion did and then nothing else really did for a long time. The cave did it in a more action exploration style and I really enjoyed it. Monkey Island, Return to Monkey Island, it’s got a lot of pressure and expectation on it that those two games wouldn’t have had because of the brand. There hasn’t been a Monkey Island game in 13 years. There hasn’t been a Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game since Monkey Island 2 in… I don’t know when. Sam’s probably got the notes in front of him. 1983 is it? No, 1981. Famously, Monkey Island 2 ends with this twist ending that was certainly never resolved in the way Ron Gilbert would have resolved it. He’s now got this fine balancing act of how do you continue that while also not disrespecting the… Frankly, very good sequels that did come out without his involvement. I think he’s being very careful not to disregard or disrespect those, but also wants to make his own thing. I don’t really like the graphics, but I won’t be telling that to Ron Gilbert’s face, because again, not an asshole, I’ll try not to be. I’m not saying you’re not allowed to hold that opinion. It was more the aggressive internet behaviour as it always is these days. Awful. Honestly, they should have their pre-orders cancelled. They’re not allowed to play the game, in my opinion. I like the art style. What I don’t like is that Guybrush himself seems quite diddy. I always feel that Guybrush is a lanky character, and maybe that doesn’t matter. But to me, it’s kind of like that’s how he looks, and I would have liked him to be a bit more adherent to that style. I’m still very much looking forward to it. I don’t think we’ve really seen what this game is from the marketing. I think it will be a linear narrative adventure, and when you’re marketing something like that, you have to keep a lot of it a secret. So I’m just looking forward to being surprised and to playing a new game in one of my favorite series made by the original creator, something I had honestly given up hope on. So I’m just grateful it’s coming. I just worry that the absence of Tim Schafer might be felt. How did you feel about Tales of Monkey Island? Because that was Dave Grossman and not Schafer. I didn’t like it, but I don’t know if that’s slightly colored by, and I’ve definitely mentioned this on the podcast. I’ve had two super unimpressive encounters with Dave Grossman about Tales of Monkey Island, and he just seemed like a guy who couldn’t give less of a fuck. It was a bit of a Don’t Meet Your Heroes moment for me. Probably the only one I’ve had. And I just don’t find him very funny in any of his internet output, and he’s been putting out little clips of the game, and I’m just like, eh, yeah. I mean, yeah, this seems about right for you. Because, yeah, I don’t know. I just wonder if Tim Schafer was maybe the secret source of that original kind of combination. That’s not, you know, they made plenty of good games without any of them. So, you know, the curse and the scape. Yeah, I hope it’s good. Yes, I’m enjoying the anticipation. What comes next? Let’s see. So let’s take a break, and we’ll come back with a new format for us, which is the Hall of Fame format. We’re gonna do this for Lucasarts Adventure Games, the entire output. So let’s take a quick break and come back. Welcome back to the podcast. So, new episode format time. Another one we stole from the big picture, our favorite film podcast, The Hall of Fame. So, the goal is to go through the library of Lucasarts Adventure Games one by one, and then along the way, select those we think belong in a hall of fame. The goal is to boil down the entire library to five games. Now, we’ve kept this to be genre-specific, because if you try to do all of Lucasarts output, that encompasses an absolute, you know, a million Star Wars games of varying quality. We don’t need to get into all that. And we want to draw a focus to this particular era of adventure games anyway. So, it’s interesting. So, I think me and Matthew have both been rereading Rogue Leaders by Rob Smith, which is, I think, a 2008 or 2009 published sort of history of Lucasarts. And what’s great about that book is, it tells the story of how Lucasfilm games and then Lucasarts came to be. And it tells the story of different teams in parallel. So, you have basically what is Ron Gilbert’s kind of adventure game, kind of like Outfit, which would also encompass Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. But then you also got Larry Holland’s Simulator Games, which would become, obviously, the X-Wing series. And then alongside that, you have the various games that were licensing out. You have them wrestling with making CD-ROM games in the shape of Rebel Assault. And that would later end up crossing over a little bit tech-wise with Full Throttle. So it’s a really good book in terms of boiling down that sort of history. So that’s what we’re borrowing a lot of our background info in this section from, I would say. So first question, this seems obvious to the two of you, but why are these games still held in such high regard after all these years? Do you want to kick off, Ash? I think for people who lived through the era, it represents, in retrospect, a pretty brief moment in time, right? Like, basically, the 90s and the late 80s of a developer on top of its game, just pumping out consistent quality and really, I think, owning a genre. There were many, many point-and-click adventures from different companies, but the Lucasarts ones just felt, like, on another level. Amazing art, great scripts, and I think also, like, a real desire to keep pushing the envelope as they go, like, you know, innovating, but within a narrow field. They never settle on, like, well, this is how an adventure game works, and we will never change it. It feels like there’s always a way to refine, refine, refine, make the player experience smoother and, like, kind of remove the barrier as much as possible between the player and the world and the characters that they’re interacting with. And I think that’s one of the great things about Lucasarts Adventures is, it’s certainly the thing that made me fall in love with The Secret of Monkey Island the first time, is, you know, you sit in front of the computer in a dark room, and you just absorbed into that world, like, the outside world doesn’t matter. All that matters is, is this guy who wants to be a pirate, he’s exploring a beautiful world, but also a kind of strange world. You want to see what happens next, you want to see what the next screen looks like, because it’s always interesting, it’s always unexpected things happen, it’s going to make you laugh. For me, it’s as simple as that. Like, you know, great worlds where the game designers do a great job of getting you to connect with them. Yeah, so a lot of the emergence of these games, I think was tied to some frustration by Gilbert with text adventures, right, and the amount of trial and error involved in them. So wanting to kind of boil that down a little bit, that was at least the kind of impression I got from reading Rogue Leaders. Do you think that’s accurate, Ash? Well, if you go back to when the Scum Engine was made for Maniac Mansion, Sierra were the dominant force in adventure games. You know, games like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry. And those early Sierra games, they were graphical adventures, but they were still using text adventure mechanics. You’re still having to type in commands and that doesn’t really take advantage of where computers were at the time. So I think it was smart of Lucasarts to take it into more of a kind of point and click direction, giving you a more kind of direct command of the story and the characters. And I think what Gilbert did later on with The Secret of Monkey Island of making it impossible to die, you could argue that makes it less of a game, but for many people it brought out the strengths of the genre, which is I want to enjoy the story. Yeah, I think a lot of it is, in a historical context, is a response to what else was popular at the time. Matthew, what about you? Why do you think these games are still held in such high regard after all these years? How do you feel about them looking back? I don’t want to spar at a lot of what Ash has said, but I’m in a lot of agreement. I’d say the slight difference is I think I discovered point-and-click games through Lucasarts, so I wasn’t as aware of the context at the time. I was just like, oh, this is absolutely amazing. If anything, you’re starting with the peak, so to fall in love with the genre here and then go, well, I’m going to try all these other point-and-click games, and then, yes, you push into some of the Sierra stuff, which I really never got on with. And I don’t even have the affection of having… I think some people have an affection for it because they maybe worked through it and put up with the problems or the limitations, then got to sort of enter this Lucasarts era where everything’s kind of improved quite drastically. But going the other way is quite hard. I don’t know if many other people would have gone the other way. It hit at a time when I was really getting into films and books. These were some of the more sophisticated interactive stories. I mean, most people’s first encounter with an interactive narrative in the 90s could well be one of these point-and-click games, and they seemed so sophisticated in terms of the world building and the depth and the characters and the humour. Definitely the humour was a big, big part of these games. The idea that you could sense that there were people behind them and the same group of people behind them. There were lots of in-jokes to the other games. There were references between them. There was like a… They don’t exist in the same narrative universe, but there’s definitely a Lucasarts shared universe, and you could sense the kind of comedy minds. And you could almost hear the office banter kind of in it, in the way that you sometimes could between games, magazines or whatever. It was a very personality-rich time, which really resonated. As Ash says, there’s a huge amount of evolution within this genre. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about games in a particularly sophisticated way back then. I just thought I liked point-and-click games, but actually, when you go back and look at them, you’re like, these are radically different things, and they’re pitching radically different ideas, and they’re approaching it, and they’re challenging their own conventions, even though, you know, they’re instantly winning people over. They don’t really have to evolve, and I wonder if that’s actually part of the wider Lucasarts, Lucasfilms ethos. I don’t know if you watched the recent documentary on Industrial Light and Magic on Disney+, and it seems that it’s this environment and time and attitude that exists in these companies where they’re like, let’s employ just genius people who we can leave to their own devices and trust that they’re going to move things forward. They’re people who have deep ambitions. You’re not just having to crack the whip. They’re naturally innovative. And you can sense a lot of that same stuff that made ILM come to be in Lucasarts, I think. Very nicely put. Yeah, it’s really interesting to see that when you read the rogue leaders back, the impression I get is that George Lucas is just interested in technology and being the best at technology and exploring these spaces and seeing what they could be capable of. At the same time, Lucasarts always seems slightly out of his interest range. I think his philosophy was make great stuff and don’t lose money. That was basically his take on it. So really interesting to read about that. He basically found Lucasarts and Pixar in the same sort of window. And then all these things coexist alongside ILM and go through quite a turbulent history. So maybe George Lucas’s legacy is good. Well, the thing is that I would say that, but he didn’t do much to protect Lucasarts when he sold to Disney. That Star Wars game went away. All those people lost their jobs. I don’t know. That’s the thing I feel about it. There is a definite early glory years of Lucasarts. And then it ends in a big flaming ball of disaster because they switch presidents. I think there’s four presidents in about five years or something like that before they close down. So not long enough to have a consistent strategy, basically. And so the types of games they make change a lot. And then they’re just gone. And then EA sits on the Star Wars license for years making very, very few games until recent years. So they finally started making some. So, I don’t know, it’s a mixed legacy. But it’s a net positive for sure when you think about these games. So why in retrospect do you think the adventure game died out in this particular form? There’s a very specific sales reason why I think this happened. But what do you think, Ash? Is there anything creatively that changed? Did the market around them change and the appetite for these games disappear? What do you think happened? If you go back to around 2000 when this was happening, the scapegoat for this was the FPS, or like the Doom clones that would have been known in the 90s. Doom and Quake came along and it was just an explosion of popularity. The fashion changed as well as consumer tastes. I think that’s true to a certain extent. I think probably another way to put it is that the video games market opened up and there were genres that appealed to a wide range of players. And adventure games, certainly adventure games in the point-and-click form that Lucasarts were doing, didn’t really appeal to as wide an audience as say RPGs and first-person shooters. So if you’re a publisher looking to, you can only make two or three games a year, let’s say. Are you going to put your time and resources into something that will only sell to a narrow margin of enthusiasts? Most businesses wouldn’t, right? And I think it took a couple of things for that to change. I think one was the rise of the indie games market. So obviously these kinds of financial decisions are much easier for a one or two person team who can release independently. There is a counterpoint as well that maybe adventure games didn’t die at all. They just evolved. Some of the things that were great about them were absorbed into other genres. If what you love about adventure games is a character driven story, maybe something like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII, maybe they tick some of those same boxes. Of course you’ve also got things like Telltale Adventures or Life is Strange which carry on some of the legacy of adventure games. But for me they do lose something. For me the puzzle element, the inventory management, is very key to this genre. So it’s a complicated answer, I’m afraid. Just a murky swamp of thoughts from me on that one. No, that’s fine. I think when you read Rogue Leaders it seems like the fact that they made Grim Fandango in 3D and spent quite a lot of money on it relative to the budgets of some of those earlier games and it flopping. Just kind of spelled the end and then they just, Full Throttle 2 had a very turbulent development process and got cancelled. There was a Sam and Max game that got cancelled. A lot of game cancellations along the way with Lucasarts. So it just all comes to a halt as consoles are exploding in popularity with the start of the PS2 era. By then they were already huge, but it just felt like the world was moving on and it actually takes quite a long time for Lucasarts to become interested in making Star Wars games. That takes longer than you think. Obviously by the time they do start making this stuff, they realize how mega profitable they are. And then it’s a business, so they end up overtaking it. So I think there’s a little bit of that too. What do you think, Matthew, as someone who’s maybe less tuned into the genre than Ash is? The crude observation is a genre that never truly navigated the shift into 3D. Lucasarts have a couple of go’s at it. This is a period where people are a little bit sniffier about 2D games, and other genres which are traditionally 2D, if they don’t make that shift into 3D, like 2D fighting games maybe aren’t as in vogue in this particular period as they were in the 90s. There are a lot of genres that slip, and it takes a while to get back to a time where there is either a nostalgia or… it’s not even a nostalgia, it’s just an acceptance that games can be many different things. We’ve definitely talked about this before on the podcast. It’s like why the 2D treasure games get slightly sniffy reviews in N64 magazine, where if they were making them now, that probably wouldn’t happen. People know that there are many different approaches to making many different games. There’s that tension that these games weren’t exploiting that or weren’t operating in the space which everyone found exciting at the time. To add some historical context to what Matthew is saying there, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. PlayStation was the dominant platform of the 90s and certainly the US arm of PlayStation, which was very powerful, had a rule early on of no 2D games. It would not approve them to be published. There are some exceptions that had to be fought very hard for. Worms, funnily enough, is one of them. Broken Sword is another. On the whole, PlayStation were not approving 2D games for release until much later in the system’s lifespan. Only if they thought they could be big breakout sellers for some reason. That’s because it was the selling point of the console over something like the Super Nintendo. They wanted to emphasize that 3D was this new, bold and inventive perspective for games. If you have a market that’s flooded with 2D games, then your console doesn’t stand out. That’s really difficult when it is the dominant platform. Certainly also at a time when PC gaming isn’t as mainstream and accessible as it is today. I think that would have really limited Lucasarts’ potential market. You’ve got a small number of hobby enthusiasts using PCs. Everyone else is on console, and they literally won’t let you publish your game on a console. You either have to evolve or you go away. As Matthew points out, they did struggle to evolve. Of those two 3D adventures that they made, only one of them made it to console anyway in Escape from Monkey Island, which was the weaker of the two games by far. In retrospect, it’s quite easy to see how that happens. The incoming FPS genre and the explosion of popularity in that in the late 90s, early noughties. It just seemed slightly out of time, as unfair as that is. But that’s just the time period they’re in. Here’s a deeply Samuel question for you. If Lucasarts ever made a Star Wars adventure game, what would it have been like? I thought about this today. I think being one of the other bounty hunters in The Empire Strikes Back who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing would be like my pitch for one of these games. Which one? Dengar would be perfect. Dengar teamed up with one of the other ones, maybe the lizard guy Bossk. He was a little bit scary. Maybe he was too competent. But yes, I thought that’s my pitch. But Ash, I believe you asked someone about this, right? Yeah, I did. I mean, there’s a couple of good reasons that there never was a Star Wars adventure, unless you count, what was it, Yoda desktop stories. Yoda stories, yeah. Don’t count that. It actually was a rule within Lucasfilm Games early on that they weren’t allowed to make Star Wars games because they’d been licensed out to other companies. And I think that’s what made Lucasfilm Games and Lucasarts great, is that they weren’t allowed to do that and they had to invent their own characters and their own worlds. Later on, of course, they were allowed to do it. I wrote an article for GamesTM back in 2009, very proud of the title of the article, which was The Empire Strikes Out. And this was about the fall of Lucasarts Adventures and the cancelled games that you were talking about earlier. There were two cancelled Full Throttle sequels. There was a cancelled Salmon Mac sequel, so we did a big feature on that, interviewing the major players involved. And we asked Sean Clark, who was a programmer on some of those early adventures, he was director of Escape from Monkey Island, Why There Was Never A Star Wars Adventure. And he revealed in that article that actually they considered it several times. They concepted some, unfortunately, didn’t go into detail about what they would have been. It doesn’t sound like they would have got very far with this. And he says that actually the reason they never happened was there wasn’t much enthusiasm on the team for working with Star Wars. They were much more invested in their own creativity and creating their own worlds, which I think probably isn’t a surprise really when you look at the people involved at Lucasarts, what they were doing at the time, what they’ve gone on to do since. They are extremely creative people, so they just didn’t want to. In that Rogue Leaders book, there was a little side note at one point where it mentioned that after Grim Fandango didn’t do amazingly well, one of the pitches that was in circulation was an adventure sounding game anyway about going undercover where you played as C-3PO. Yeah, it was so funny to read about that. It was set after Return of the Jedi, and you were in the remnants of the Empire, undercover as C-3PO, investigating whether a new emperor was going to be anointed. I do love that idea. That’s the other thing, it’s like a droid’s angle too, that sort of game would work too, right? So I can sort of see that. They didn’t make it clear whether that was an adventure game or not, but it sounded like it, didn’t it? I think it was headed up by Hal Barwood, who was like the Indiana Jones Point and Click games, one of the Indiana Jones Point and Click games guys, so you’d think it would live somewhere near there. Yeah, a game where you had the two of them, and R2D2 was your inventory or whatever, I’d be up for that. Like, luggage in Discworld. Yeah, I think I’ve seen mock-ups over the years of people imagining games like this too. But I also do admire the fact that they did make original worlds and that the management at the time was supportive of this too. A lot of people, when you read that book, say they went to work for Lucasarts, not to make Star Wars games, but to work on the Scum Games essentially. Is it Scumlets I think they were referred to as when they were new employees? That was funny to read about. You know, sort of slash toxic working culture. I don’t know, whichever. Take your pick really. Choose your own adventure. Okay, good. So let’s go through the games and boil this down to a Hall of Fame. So I’ve got more written out here, sort of chronologically. So we’re going to start with Labyrinth, which was based on the film with the same name and unusually featured some collaboration with Douglas Adams, at least early on in development. Yeah, it’s fairly interesting as a kind of precursor to some of the other games. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this one, Ash? I played this for the first time this week in preparation for the podcast. It got a bit of a mixed reception when it first came out and reviewed by magazines. I can see why. It’s frustrating in parts. It is a maze adventure. There are a lot of dead ends. The way the maze is presented to you on screen sometimes you walk very far to the left or very far to the right. You’re asking yourself, does this hallway literally go on forever? Is it going to loop around? I’ve been walking right for about 10 minutes. What’s going on here? There are pitfalls that seemingly are game over states, but it doesn’t really tell you. I fell down a hole. The only thing in the hole was a coin slot. I put a coin in the hole and it said, well, you’ve jammed up the coin slot now and I turned it off. I found it very frustrating, but also at the same time quite interesting. One of the coolest things about the game is that, and I think this idea did come from Douglas Adams, who’d also worked on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventures. It starts out as a text adventure. So the opening, you’re in the quote unquote real world. You’re interacting with that world via text inputs through a strange kind of what they call a carousel system. So you select your verb from a predetermined list that you can scroll through and then you select the noun from a similar sort of thing. Already they were playing with what was possible in this space. But yeah, I thought it was really cool that it starts off in this text adventure world. You go into the cinema, you see Labyrinth, and then David Bowie starts talking to you through the screen and magically it turns into a graphical adventure. Kind of like Wizard of Oz, like going from black and white to colour. It’s introducing you to this new world and a new way to play adventure games. Really cool idea, but then the graphical adventure itself, actually I found less fun than the text adventure part. So ultimately disappointing for me. Well, Matthew, make sure Ash gets his 40 quid, because playing Labyrinth for the first time just for this podcast. I watched 10 minutes of Labyrinth being played on YouTube and was impressed by the similar transition. Tough break for Labyrinth being criticised for being a mace. Yeah, if only there was some way for people to know for the title. Okay, so that’s not going in the Hall of Fame, is it? It’s a precursor, but it’s not super… It’s, I guess, important along the way, but it’s not going to be in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, it’s not a scum game either. Not every Lucasarts Adventure is a scum game, but the vast majority of them are, and they have a particular way of doing things that is appealing. At this point, they obviously haven’t quite figured that out yet, so it’s quite experimental. You know what, though? I’m really happy that we’ve got one where it’s easy to very clearly say no to it, because I think this exercise might be impossible. Just narrowing this down to five great adventures, I find really, really tough. I guess one thing we haven’t quite established is whether… Is this the Hall of Fame a kind of important games or to play right now? It’s got to both be the best of the best and also represent this period of history, like a kind of like flagship games representing this period of history. So I think it’s got to fulfill both purposes rather than… Otherwise, you’re more likely to pick the more recent ones to play now. The temptation would just be here’s the remastered ones. And then you’re like, because they’re technically better. Well, what they do on Big Picture is like Tom Cruise Hall of Fame, Cocktail No, Top Gun Yes or whatever. And you’re like, OK, fine. So that’s kind of what I’m basing my logic on here, Matthew. So I don’t think any of these are really the cocktail of the catalog. Labyrinth is probably as close as it gets, to be honest. OK, cool. So it immediately gets hard as we move on to 1987’s Maniac Mansion, where Scum comes from. That stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. This tool set will be used throughout the 90s on Lucasarts Adventure Games. Kind of a B-movie riff, but a lot of the tone of these games starts here. Why don’t you take us in there, Ash? Yeah, cards on the table. I love this game. I played this. I played it after Monkey Island. Weirdly, my introduction to it was through the NES version, which was kind of sanitized and weird. But what is this game? I think some of the great things about this game is that they didn’t really know what their design limitations were, and they really were super ambitious with it. So most Lucasarts Adventures later on are quite linear stories where you’re guiding a single character through a narrative. This one, I think there’s a pool of six or seven characters, and you choose three of them to take on your adventure, and you can switch between those three characters at any point. And in fact, you have to do that to finish the game. Some of them, most of them really have their own kind of unique skills or different approaches that they can take to the dialogue and the puzzles. So it really does matter which one you pick, and you’ll have a different experience depending on who you pick. I think that makes this probably the most, this is going to sound strange, but the most video gamey of all of the Lucasarts Adventures. There’s a lot more player agency involved, if that makes sense. When we get to Day of the Tentacle, there’s almost a refined slash incredibly streamlined version of this. I think the problem I have with Maniac Mansion is that it’s definitely more interesting from a design perspective than necessarily a writing or world perspective. And I think Ron Gilbert, of all the people involved, is the brain most invested in the form of point-and-click adventures. He’s written essays and manifestos about how these things should be done, where I think, to compare him to Tim Schafer, Tim Schafer is much more of a narrative and character and story and writing guy than maybe… I think he’s happy to go with the basics of the design. So I definitely came to this game too late, and I find it a little cold to the touch, even though I am impressed by its ambitions. I think that’s perfectly valid. I’m not sure I would call it cold, but it’s got a… I think I talked earlier about how as Lucasarts Adventures go on, they file down that barrier between the player and the characters. This game still has those barriers well and truly in there. With the early Lucasarts scum games, some of the text commands are not really very natural. There’s no look command, for example. There’s one called whatis, which allows you to hover over sprites and just get a simple one or two word description of what they are, but you don’t get your character kind of remarking on those things, which is essential for clue giving and world building. And you can die, which some might think is part of the fun, but I think most find that it gets in the way of enjoying the game. So to a certain extent, they’re still kind of finding their feet with this one. I think if this was my personal Hall of Fame, I would crowbar it in there. But I think for most people coming to the genre now, I think a lot of people would probably bounce off this one, unfortunately. We can also smuggle it in in another game. Oh, yes, that’s true. Okay, well, let’s put it as a maybe for now, shall we? And then we’ll revisit. Because at the end, we’ll total it up and then we’ll kick out whichever takes us over five and to get to our five. I will say I’m happy with Ash having the final word on these, because he’s definitely our expert. And then I won’t complain to you on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, but that said, though, Matthew, I know there’s one of these games that you messaged me this weekend and said was just playing X, it’s ass. We’ll see if you fight to keep that one in the list or not. If Ash is a fan of it, let’s see. OK, so next up is 1988’s Zack McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which is about a tabloid journalist who uncovers the idea that this telephone company has been taken over by aliens, and they’re making humans stupid, I believe, is the idea. In fact, did that future arm episode rip this off, Ash? Is this kind of a similar deal? The brains that make everyone stupid, is that a thing? Let’s say, yes. I can imagine this is the sort of game Futurama writers were playing while they were at college. Yeah, for sure. So, yes, second game to use the SCARM engine. So, do you think this is significant in the overall arc of these games, Ash? No, definitely not. I’m very curious to know if this was the game Matthew was describing as Ass. No, it’s not. I wonder what it was. I don’t think it’s Ass, but it’s got a lot of the same flaws that Maniac Mansion has. It’s got some new flaws that Maniac Mansion didn’t have. Jetting around in aeroplanes to get from one location to another is mind-numbingly tedious. You don’t really do the flights in real time. They don’t take hours, but it can feel like hours. Walking up and down these aeroplanes and being told to get back in your seat. Why is this in here? Maybe there’s a reason later on that I haven’t discovered. It just makes the game a bit of a slog. I don’t think the game really pushes out much further. It doesn’t really evolve the formula in the way Monkey Island later would. It has a lot of the same flaws. You can still hit dead ends. You can still die. It doesn’t really evolve and introduces some new flaws at the same time. I didn’t really like it. One of the other things is there’s a monetary system in the game. You can go to a shop and you can buy items that you need to complete the adventure. You can buy items that you don’t need. You can sell some of your items. This is a headache. How do I know I’m not going to sell something that I need or run out of money and dead-end myself in this game? It’s just like it’s too stressful. Okay, good. Well, to be honest, it sounds like reassuring that we’ve got another no here to make this process a bit easier. So that’s good. Any to add on this one, Matthew? Or did it pass you by? I played this at my friend Dan’s house. And I remember this is like an awakening in terms of maybe I don’t like all point-and-click games. Like this is maybe the first one I encountered. Because I have a feeling, didn’t this come with something that you needed to sort of solve it, like a newspaper or something? I think in its like original format, in the box it had something which actually made some of the obscure puzzles less obscure. I think it probably did. Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade also does that. That sounds right to me. We maybe had a less than honest version of this that we were playing. And I remember just thinking, well, we just couldn’t get on with it and none of it made any sense. But I’ve definitely seen people slag it off in reviews online and then in the comments there’s always someone like, well, it sounds like someone didn’t buy a legit copy or play with the whatever it was that you needed. No one would ever buy a copy without a newspaper again now, so I see that GOG has it. Yeah, I think GOG has whatever you need in the files. Yeah, Steam also has all of these things as extras. So yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s nice, actually, that almost all of these games you can buy on modern PC services. It’s probably something useful to point out. Some of them have horrible smoothed over graphics, which isn’t very nice, but it’s great that they’re there and you can buy them. Many of them work on the Steam Deck, I found out this week. I think Labyrinth is maybe the only one that doesn’t, isn’t available now. Yeah, it’s not. I think all of the rest of them are in some form, so that’s really good. Okay, cool. So we have another no there, which is reassuring. This list may be possible after all. Okay, so next up is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which I think was called the graphic adventure at the time, but now when you just go onto Steam, it’s just called The Last Crusade. That was a differentiator from another Indiana Jones game from the same time. This is 1989, obviously a tie-in to the film. It was made in under nine months, I believe. Reading that Rogue Leader’s book, it was suggested that this is an absolute sprint to the finish, but they saw what a massive opportunity it was for them to have a game that ties into this. As a result of them using the shooting script to make this game or an early version of the script, there are scenes in the game that are not in the film, which I think is quite neat in retrospect. I personally think this is not going to end up in the Hall of Fame just because there’s another more obvious game that would take its place, but Ash, what are your thoughts on this one? Honestly, I don’t have much to say on this one. I played it for the first time this week, I’m a big fan of the second Indiana Jones game in this canon. This one seemed, you know, it’s another kind of pre-Monkey Island adventure, feels a little bit kind of slow and cumbersome in retrospect. Hard not to talk about it in comparison to Fate of Atlantis, which comes later and in comparison, it feels less slick, less confident and I kind of lost interest pretty quickly. I think if I wasn’t trying to cram a load of research in a week, I probably would have played it a lot longer, to be fair, but I just had this voice in my head that said, oh, well, you could be playing Fate of Atlantis instead of this. Yeah. That’s kind of what I expected. Any of your thoughts on this one, Matthew, or did this one pass you by? I’ve definitely played this at some point in the past, not all the way through. It’s really difficult. Like Fate of Atlantis, there is a combat element to it, which is like what if this fights but with point and click interface, which is, well, we’ll discuss it when we get to a Fate of Atlantis, but that’s good. There’s a tiny bit of fun in seeing those scenes from the games kind of recreated. As film tie-ins go, it is quite kind of true to it. But there’s a lot of like weird sort of like trial and error and not like necessarily dead ends or anything that frustrating because it’s almost like self-contained scenes, you know, it’s got the flow of a film to it. So you can’t go that deep without really screwing yourself over, I don’t think. But it’s lacking in the kind of production values that came in some of the later games. Fair enough. Well, that’s good because we have another no. So making space. So far we only have one maybe, so that works. Okay, we have arrived at the game that Matthew Castle called Ass on Discord to me yesterday. 1990s Loom, Matthew, how was your experience trying to play Loom this weekend? For years, like many people, I only know Loom as a punchline in Monkey Island. There’s a guy with the Ask Me About Loom, which I never really understood if it was just a piss take and Loom was terrible and that was the joke. That’s how I always took it because I didn’t know what Loom was or if it was genuinely like an affectionate thing. This is like a really different kind of point and click game in that it’s super straight back and you only technically have one item. You play as a character called Bobbin Threadbear, which is cute I guess, and you have a magical staff that can kind of tune itself to elements of the universe and play music to sort of pull magic from the world. It’s really hippy-ish. I guess the easiest way of explaining it is that instead of the traditional verb sheet, you’re playing spells, which are the verbs. So you see some birds singing a song, and when you repeat that song, it opens something, and you’re like, well, if I ever need to open something, I play that song. So there’s this kind of strange sort of at one with the world-ness to it, a kind of slightly new age-y-ness to it almost, which is kind of interesting, but I found it so stripped back to just this core system, and I didn’t think that core system was quite interesting enough. It’s very narrative-like. There’s not loads of people to talk to or interact with or anything like that. But I don’t know if this is some cult classic that I’m blaspheming here, but it’s certainly one of a kind, but I didn’t instantly fall in love with it. Ash, is this a cult classic? Yeah. Is Matthew wrong? Yeah, I mean, I can totally understand that. I first played this one about 10 years ago, and I bounced off it too, I was like, I don’t really think this is working. I think it’s interesting and experimental, but I’m not sure it’s really achieving very much. I went back to it this week, and I’ve always known, I think one of the reasons it’s called out in Monkey Island is it didn’t sell very well, but it has its hardcore fans, and particularly within Lucasarts, there were a lot of people who were very proud of it and affectionate of it. So I gave it another chance this week. I first played the version that’s on Steam, which has the horrible blurry graphics filter on it. The Steam version is also the enhanced VGA remake, so the original was done in EGA, which is this kind of old, impressionistic, low-color graphics that PC games had in the 80s. They then re-did it with VGA graphics and with voice acting. That’s the version you get on Steam and you think, wow, that would be the better version. Actually it’s not the better version, and I think a lot of people who are playing that version are more likely to bounce off it. I went back last night and played the Amiga version, which is based on the VGA one, and it’s a lot better for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the introduction of voice acting in the remake meant that they had to cut out a lot of the original dialogue, a lot of responses to the world are missing, any dialogue with a character that would have required a close-up shot, they’re all gone as well, so it’s a massively reduced script in the VGA version. Having played them quite close together, I can see that you lose a lot of the story and the backstory about what this world is and who the main character is, and you lose a lot of the incidental comments that flesh out the puzzles and help you draw these all-important connections between the audio that you’re creating and their effects on the world. I felt that you got a lot more subtle hints in the original version, and it helped me to get to grips with it more. Full disclosure, I played that Steam version. I think it’s one of those things where you would have to play both versions to appreciate it and most people won’t do that. They’ll play the version that’s more easily accessible. That one’s on Lucasarts, I’m afraid. I think the core system of the game does get really interesting later on. I think one of the things that’s interesting about it is that it’s not truly explicit about what the equivalent verbs of each tune are. That’s kind of the main puzzle itself is the more you use these tunes, I think they’re called drafts in the game, I call them spells. The more you use those and the more you see their effect and the more people talk about them, you start to work out what their intended use is. So that’s a different kind of puzzling element for this genre. You can also reverse them. So yeah, that is cool, like where the puzzle is the interaction mechanic. Yeah. So most of the, I think all of the spells, actually, you’re clicking on notes, B, C, D, F, A, that kind of thing, and a lot more notes as you go along. So you play four notes in a row, but if you play them backwards, it reverses the spell to an open spell becomes a close spell. You can dye things green, which does sound boring, but actually it makes for one of the most interesting puzzles in the game. You can reverse it to bleach them, that sort of thing. You can turn invisible, you can reverse that and become invisible again. There are also palindrome spells. So the heel spell is a palindrome. So in terms of the letters that you’re clicking on, it’s the same forwards as it is backwards. And whether you do it forwards or backwards, it’s always a heel spell. You can’t reverse it to make someone more ill. And so that’s quite interesting as well. I think that’s a nice little design touch that they got in there. And honestly, this is the one this week. There are about three or four adventures that I felt I had to play to either play for the first time or brush up. This was the one where I felt I really want to keep playing this and finish it. Somehow, I don’t know how I did it and I used to lose my save game on the Amiga last night. Served me right for using a 30 year old machine, I suppose. And I was gutted, honestly gutted. And I think that that says a lot. But I think it is old enough and is kind of weird and unusual enough. You kind of, you have to kind of, it’s one of those games where you have to be in the same mindset of the era and of the people who are making it. You have to kind of get yourself into that zone. And if you can’t get into that zone, because either it’s just not for you or there’s certain barriers getting in the way, I think you are going to bounce off it really hard. So for me, like objectively, this one is like no more than a maybe. In the same class as Maniac mentioned. I’m glad we got Ash on with like a more measured take. I still enjoyed Loom his ass, dropping in time DMs. That’s like, you know, I had a lot of fun as a result of Loom from that. Yeah. OK, so that’s in the maybe pile then, as I was requested by Ash. So we’ll revisit that. We come to what is surely the first slam dunk of the Hall of Fame, which is The Secret of Monkey Island, 1990. Gosh, where to start with this? Matthew, do you want to kick off? Ron Gilbert apparently dislikes fantasy, or always sick of fantasy worlds, wants to create a game in a world which people have, you can sort of easily place themselves into, thinks Pirates is a good starting place, allegedly because of both of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride being very popular at Disney, and he thinks, you know, this is something everyone gets their head around. Also the excellent Tim Powers’ novel On Stranger Tides, which has been cribbed for Pirates of the Caribbean film. If you haven’t read it, I really, really recommend it. Kind of a sort of slightly comic pirate fantasy adventure. Works with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Is this their first big writing gig at Lucasarts? Yeah. The three of them create this incredibly fully formed universe off the bat, where you are Guybrush Threepwood, who is trying to become a mighty pirate and encounters a world of undead pirates and voodoo and strange trials to become a pirate. He meets the eventual love of his life, Elaine Marley. And I can remember playing this and feeling like… I was big into Terry Pratchett at the time and it was like stepping into something as fully formed as a Terry Pratchett novel, you know, these characters just absolutely lept off the screen. You know, I fell in love with them. I actually, I’m telling a slight lie there. I played Monkey Island 2 first, was my first ever big point and click game. I fell in love with the world there, but you know, going back to this, everything I loved about it is all there. They definitely get better at making these games, but like the core ingredients of like the sort of surreal comedy logic of the puzzling, the volume of banter and puns and witty things that can happen in this world and the encouragement to click on everything and see what can happen. You know, that’s the stuff I loved and it’s definitely, definitely all here. I don’t know how I’m going to follow that up because I think you nailed it. And I think Secret of Monkey Island is one of those games that is in some ways, it’s like a games journalist’s double-edged sword because you really want, you know, you want to spend your time talking about these monolithic great games, but then you’re like, how do I do it justice? How do I say something that no one has said before? And like with some games, you just can’t, and you just have to infuse. Like it’s an all-timer, this game. It’s the first, I think what I can do, what I can offer that’s unique is my own personal experience. I’ll talk about that. This is the first adventure game I played, first Lucasarts game I played on a makes Amiga, lived on the next street from me. I fell in love with it so hard. Like I just needed to be around his house every night for several weeks playing it together. Surprisingly, a great co-op game in a rather unintended way, I think, because you can work on the puzzles together. You can laugh along at the humor together and talk about which dialogue options you’re gonna pick. Couple of things that I really personally love about this game, one of them, I think, kind of relates to all adventure games, but Monkey Island does it so well. And that’s the sense of progression of simply going from one screen to another. Early on in the game, you can do that quite easily. Later on, you need to overcome challenges and puzzles in order to progress. But every new screen feels like the reward for progressing. The environments are so interesting. The world is a fascinating fantasy world without feeling cliched. It felt very original at the time and I think still retains that. And beautifully drawn pixel art. A lot of this game takes place at night in the dark and that allows the Lucasarts artists to play with light and shade and color in a way that honestly, for me, makes every screen of this game a viable work of art in its own right. So I will always love it for that. And then the other one is Guybrush himself, who I think is one of the great video game characters. I don’t think you’d call him a hero. He’s kind of a bumbling idiot, really kind of bumbling through his own story, but that makes him quite relatable as a fellow bumbling idiot. And I love the way he announces himself to the world. He steps onto that first screen like he’s entering a stage from behind the curtain. And he says, I’m Guybrush Threepwood and I want to be a pirate. Straight away in the first line of the game, who he is and what he wants and what this game is about. And that’s something a lot of adventure games don’t do. Go back to Loom, you watch the intro to Loom and you’re scratching your head going like, who are these people? What’s going on? This is a really like alien world that I’m entering. But Monkey Island, I think, gets you on board like instantly. I think that’s key to how successful it was, how many people love this character and love being in this world and wanted to see the story continue, wanted sequels. Yeah, I think this is obviously, it’s got to be straight on the list. The only problem for me is depending on which way the wind is blowing, sometimes I think Monkey Island 2 is a better game, but it’s not a more special game, it’s not a more important game. Okay, well then this is down as a yes as we move on to Monkey Island 2, 1991. One weird thing about Monkey Island I didn’t know, and actually like a weird presence throughout that Rogue Leader books is how much Orson Scott Card is involved in these games. Yeah, yeah. He wrote the insults for the insult sword fighting, apparently, you’d think that was just classic, like, you know, shafering, growth and kind of joke smithery, but apparently not. Yeah, I mean, there was a period where he wasn’t, you know, his views on certain subjects weren’t, either weren’t as well known or weren’t, and, you know, impeding him getting work or credibility from the entertainment industry. See also Shadow Complex 2009. So yeah, that is a bit of a strange thing to read about in much respect. Yeah, so he wrote the dig as well, or he co-wrote the dig. Yeah, loads of this stuff, he just like, even sort of small roles he would just have. He’s supposed to be an inmate. Supporting narrative guy, like a free-roaming writer type, you know, that seemed like sort of the deal. So yeah, okay, Monkey Island 2 then, 1991. So do both have a place on the list, or must the first one, you know, kind of like overcome the other? What do you think, Matthew? I do think Monkey Island 2 is the better game. A little bit more accomplished, it’s got a slightly darker vibe. It has a different approach to art style. This one, they start using a technology to sort of scan in these sort of hand drawn backgrounds, and it just has a very different energy to it. I thought that thing Ash said about the reward of seeing a new place or a new location almost being the reward of playing this game is absolutely like spot on. And this is like the bigger game, the more ambitious game, like the sort of central part of this. You can go to multiple islands and there’s so much going on, so many different puzzle avenues you can be going down at any route. I mean, this was my big first one that I played and it’s kind of a nightmare place to start because it’s probably got some of the biggest scope of puzzles and the richest inventory and the weirdest item combinations that everything after this seems like a little bit more measured by comparison. I actually don’t know in the wider Monkey Island fandom what the rankings are, I don’t have a read on that. It’s not a community I’m part of. Yeah, I think there’s some stuff in this that jumps out at me more, the spitting competition and the nailing Stan into his coffin. There’s just so much iconic stuff. Maybe it’s a bit of a Mario Galaxy one and two situation where they’re just such of a piece that you kind of need both. Thoughts, Ash? I think they do go together very well and it’s hard for people to pick one or the other. I get the impression Monkey Island 2 is generally regarded as the better and the favorite game of the two. And that’s very well deserved. I absolutely adore this game. I remember for a while going to video game conventions, I used to carry the Amiga version around in my backpack, wherever I went, just in case I bumped into Ron Gilbert so I could get in to sign it. And so I found that hasn’t happened. But it’s also kind of like a totemic game for me. It’s like, this is an important game from my childhood. Some things it technically does over and above the original, you talked about the graphical style, which is, as I understand it, all of the backgrounds were hand-painted and then scanned and digitized into the game, which was kind of revolutionary at the time. I think some people mistake it for pixel art. It is not at all. So I think that’s really cool. It does give the game a more kind of textured detailed look, in my opinion, while also feeling quite classical. It’s also got the iMuse system, which is where they would program all the different music of the scenes so that when you transition from one screen to another, no matter what screen you are going to, the music would naturally transition from one to another by blending the notes together programmatically, which apparently was so complicated to do. They basically just never really wanted to do it again. I’m not sure if they did do it again or if it only happened a couple of times. There’s probably more sophisticated or easier ways to do that nowadays with modern technology, but it was lauded at the time. The thing that really sticks out for me with Monkey Island 2 is the story. This is a storytelling team between Schaefer, Grossman and Gilbert, who they know what they’re doing. They know these characters. They know the world. And they just knock it out of the park. The quality is top notch. Just the storytelling structure. I love the way it starts with Guybrush hanging from a thread while trying to hold this enormous casket of treasure. And you just kind of, you just know. It then goes into, you know, like a flashback. How did I get here, you’re wondering. That sort of thing. And you just know, like, if you played the first game familiar with Guybrush, like this story is not going to work out for him in a way it would a traditional hero. And he’s like, he’s not really the hero in many ways. Like, Elaine Marley, his great love. Like, she’s the real hero of the Monkey Island story. She’s the competent one who knows what she’s doing. The ending, can we spoil the ending of Monkey Island 2? I think we can because isn’t the new game picking up directly from it? It’s always been suggested by Gilbert that if he did another game, it would carry on directly from that ending. I think he is now trying to do that while also recognising the other games. I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to work. We can talk about it. If you’re really upset about hearing the ending of Monkey Island 2 from 1991, you can skip ahead three minutes. So, one of the things I love about the ending, which I’ll describe in a second, is that for me it goes all the way back to Guybrush’s entrance, which we were talking about in the first Monkey Island. The way I said that it feels like he’s stepping onto a stage. For me, Guybrush is almost very similar to Gordon Freeman, as weird as that might sound, in that it feels like he only really exists when the player is playing the game. He’s inserted into this weird world. And that very much becomes true at the end of Monkey Island 2, where the artifice of the Monkey Island world starts to give away. And it does start to become very stage-like. And actually, it’s revealed that it was a theme park all along that Guybrush and his brother, Chuckie, who is LeChuck, the villain of the game, they step out of the theme park back into the real world, and they’re kids again. They’ve been lost in the theme park, and their parents were looking for them. I think that’s a really sweet ending, but it’s also an ending that captures your imagination. It’s kind of suggested that it might not be as clear cut as that. I think you get some, like, demonic glints in the eyes of the kid version of LeChuck. And it was always this feeling of, like, my God, how are they going to follow this up in the third game? And then they kind of hand wave it away, actually, in Curse of Monkey Island. For me, it’s one of the all-time great endings of any video game. That is quite the thing. That’s, yeah, that’s cool. It kind of seems impossible to pay that off and also follow up the other two games in the same game, but I suppose we’ll see. It makes for New Monkey Island the Twin Peaks, the return of video games. Yes. But even that acknowledged every single bit of bullshit you can imagine, the part what weighed it down. But anyway, we’ll just get to that. Ash, a very quick wider question on Monkey Island. Did you prefer three-point voiced or unvoiced? Because I have a real affection for this unvoiced era. Like, there’s sort of fonts you can hear when they talk in these games. Yeah, and I suspect you’ve said similar things about the Ace Attorney games, I think, in that the act of reading is an important part of how these games work. Some people at Lucasarts, including Ron Gilbert, have said similar things. The way the first two games were written were not written with a voice in mind. They are designed to be read, which is interesting. However, you know, Dominic Armato, who voiced Guybrush from Curse of Monkey Island onwards and then went on to voice him in the remakes, I think he does add an essential extra layer to Guybrush, like really brings him to life. So I’m a big fan. I like him too. I’m not a zealot about it or anything. I just, yeah, the different coloured fonts for different characters and stuff, like that’s like burning my head as just how those characters sound, I guess, from playing on the Amiga without voice. Well, we’re going to put this down as a yes as well. And then we’re going to revisit it, I think, is the way to do this. Yeah, I think honestly, I am quite happy if one or both of our maybes is sacrificed for Monkey Island 2 because it’s just that good. Yeah, okay, that’s good. That’s what the maybes are for. Okay, moving on then to 1992’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Obviously an original Indiana Jones story that was notorious for giving players different approaches. They kind of knew they had to have some kind of combat content because obviously it’s an Indiana Jones game. But you could also play it in these kind of like a more thoughtful, puzzly way. There’s a third way as well, right? There’s a sort of co-op one where it’s you and Sophia. Yeah, so it’s like co-op, solo mega hard puzzles, the fists path, and then co-op, which is like the two of you. It’s not actually a co-op game, what do you know? Yeah, it’s just more interaction between the two. Yeah, so it caused a lot of headaches for them because it was like basically making three times the game, is kind of how it comes across in the Rogue Leader’s book. But obviously Beloved, a kind of really, really kind of interesting sort of extension of Indiana Jones after the films were seemingly done forever. You know, spoiler alert, they wouldn’t be. But you know, kind of years later has a great reputation. Feels like one that instinctively should have a spot here, but who knows? Like, let’s get into it. So Matthew, what do you think? I absolutely love this game when I was a teenager. Like, in my head, this is just like Monkey Island 2 quality, but with Indiana Jones. I have played it again since. Weirdly, it was bundled in on the Wii Indiana Jones game, Staff of Kings, as like a bonus unlockable. And I dabbled with it then and was like, oh, it’s maybe like still good, but not quite how I remembered it. And I think that’s really how I feel about it. Like, it’s quite a lot more linear than Monkey Island. It’s a lot more like cinematically driven. It’s almost like scenes and set pieces that are kind of self-contained. There are places where it opens up more, but then it does have the, like you say, this branching three different parts, which are quite substantial and have different puzzle design in different areas even, I think, some of the different places they go to. So I think it really captures the spirit of Indiana Jones. I think it really gets the character of Indiana Jones. It’s really fun to like interact with people and talk and have all the indie wisecracks. They may even internally have referred to this as like Indie 4, I think was like its code name. They did, yeah. This feels like, oh wow, another Indiana Jones. It feels like it could have been a film. I remember thinking as a 10 year old or whatever, why don’t they make another Indiana Jones film based on this game? Because it’s right there and it just works. The mythology of it is good. It’s so much better than Crystal Skulls or what they set along with Crystal Skulls. So I think it’s not quite the game I remember. I think it’s definitely like smaller in scope. But the Indiana Jones-ness of it is undeniably excellent. What about you Ash? Yeah, I think this is awesome to be honest. This is the point where I think Lucasarts Adventure has started to become more cinematic. And rightfully so when you’re dealing with such a cinematic character. The opening of the game is one of the… I replayed specifically the opening twice yesterday because it’s so much fun. It’s full screen. So most openings on early Lucasarts Adventures because you have the inventory and the verb commands at the bottom of the screen. If they want to do like a cinematic opening and they just make that area of the screen black and then you’ve got the top portion of the screen in a narrow window. Fate of Atlantis draws that out completely and gives you a full screen experience which feels really expansive and cinematic weirdly so because actually you think cinematic is widescreen. But just getting all of this extra image on your screen so much more kind of foreground detail, background detail is a real treat in that section. It’s also quite action packed for an adventure game. So in this opening section, you’ve got the credits playing over the top again, very filmic. And you’ve got a very small, very limited playable sequence through these credits as you start off in the loft of the university. You’re looking for an artifact that’s been stored away. I think he says a statue. You start clicking on all these statues that are in the loft. One of them, you go up to it and a trap door opens below. You fall into the next room below. And it turns into this series of like Indiana Jones pratfalls as he investigates things in these dusty old, beautifully painted rooms. It just like crashes through a floor, falls through a coal shoe, just bang, bang, bang through all of these rooms until he eventually finds what he wants. And within seconds, you’ve gone through this beautiful, still interactive opening sequence. You’ve already met one of the villains, who’s scarpered off with something, and Indiana Jones had a tussle with him on the floor in a really well animated sequence. And I think all of this lasts about two minutes. And you’re like, right, I’m in. This is such an exciting way to open an adventure game. Yeah, it just grabs your attention. I really like the voiced version of this, which I played on the… Is this Staff of Kings? Staff of Kings on the Wii? I bought that. Staff of Kings was a grotesquely terrible game. I bought it just for Fate of Atlantis, which I think is pretty hard to come by in any other way at the time. Played it with the Wii Remote, had a great time. This version had the voices. You’ve got a Harrison Ford sound-alike. But actually, I think he does a pretty good job. It just lends to that cinematic feel. It lends to that Indiana Jones-y-ness of it all. You have a good time with it. Whether it’s top five material, whether it’s Hall of Fame material, I’m not sure just because I think there might be better, more important games. It is great. Ten-year-old me or 12-year-old me, no matter how old I was, would have said this was 100%, one of the greatest games of all time. But I think they have made better games. I had huge frustration with it, because I originally had this on Amiga, and it was on 11 or 12 floppy disks. I remember when I got it, one of my disks, I was missing a disk, one of the disks was duplicated, I didn’t have disk 8 or something, and I had to send it off. I had to write to… George. Yeah, Uncle George, and say, please send me this disk, and they did. But for ages, I could play it up until it said, insert disk 8. Because you’d be changing disks every other couple of scenes, it was a real ball to play these games back in the day. But you’re right about the voice in the later version, it’s a great indie voice, and the indie writing is just really spot on as well. It’s pretty cool. It sounds like this has to go in the maybe pile, doesn’t it? Yeah, let’s pop it there and come back to it. Okay, 1993’s Day of the Tentacle. Oh boy. So, Ash, kick off Ash. So this is the sequel to Maniac Mansion. In many ways, a less ambitious version of that game, but in some ways a more ambitious version. So rather than picking three characters from a pool, you have three set characters, with one of them Bernard being a returning character from the first game. Back to the mansion, back to evil Dr. Fred and Nurse Edna in the purple and green tentacle. All this kind of cast of cartoony villains and anti-heroes back again, but this time in a kind of Chuck Jones, Warner Brothers animation sort of style, which visually I just think was incredible at the time and still holds up really well. The recent, I say recent, but 10 years ago remaster doesn’t monkey around with it too much because it just looks so good. This was getting into the era of like CD-ROM adventure games, so games have to feel bigger and better looking. Sound was more important. This one was fully voiced. It might have been the first one to come fully voiced as standard. I’m pretty sure that’s true. And yeah, just really like invited you to play it because it looked and sounded so great. And then when you did play it, yeah, it lost some of the innovation of the multiple characters, but it got so much back by having this time travel structure and narrative. So each of your three characters is in a different time period. And much of the puzzle solving comes from what you can learn in different periods, but also how you can use time to your advantage. And I haven’t played this game in years. I’m going to really struggle to remember the best examples. I always remember you could send a bottle of wine from the past into the present or the future. And at age, so far, it became vinegar. So I then had a particular use that you would need vinegar for. There was something to do with cutting down a tree, which I think was to do with George Washington. Yeah, the Washington cherry tree. One thing I will say about this game is a lot of it hinges on quite American-centric history. Which as a kid, I was like, what the fuck, who the fuck are these guys? Not with that language, obviously. There’s definitely a big puzzle about rewriting the Constitution to change stuff in the future. The historical period is when the founding fathers are writing the Constitution, so you can impact that to change what has then happened in present day. You decree someone has to have a certain item in their house and so it appears and things like that. Yeah, you’ve got Benjamin Franklin out in a field flying a kite and I think you have to try and attach a key to it so you get struck by lightning. And it’s really weird for me because I think everything I know about that period of American history I know from Day of the Tentacle. So I have no real confidence of whether my historical knowledge is completely warped on top. Amazing. So do you think that sort of ingenuity to, approach to puzzle design means it deserves a place in the Hall of Fame, Ash? I think this is one of the finest games that Lucasarts made, both in terms of its structure and mechanics, but also its presentation style, which presentation is hugely important to these games. Although, you know, it’s been, I don’t think I’ve played it since the remaster which came out in, I don’t know, I was going to say like 2014. 2014, I think. Yeah, so enough time to have forgotten some of it and having gone back to it recently. But it’s recently enough that I can confidently say this is a great game. And one of those games where you see like the Tim Schafer difference or what Tim Schafer brought to these games, he was more in command of this one. And it just oozes his personality and humor. Yeah, I think it’s great. Well, that sounds like a yes. So we’ll give it a yes and then circle back. Okay, good stuff. So we move on to… How many yeses do we have now? Three. Three. Oh, it’s getting tight. Yeah, I can see at least like at least two other yeses coming up. I know which two I want in and I’m not confident that Matthew or yourself will agree. Okay, interesting. Yeah, okay. Well, we’ll get into that. So, okay, we move on to 1993. Sam and Max hit the road. So, my understanding this is Steve Purcell was a Lucasarts employee, right? And he had created this kind of underground oddball comic book. And essentially, like Lucasarts licensed it to make this game, which is actually that licensing element as part of why they wouldn’t end up making sequels down the road, why they would cancel sequels they were already making. So, this seems to have a, you know, we’re in the kind of firmly in the era here where all of these games have like outsized reputations. But I think like the sort of very specific like vibe of the characters is maybe one of the reasons this has endured in the memories of people. Where do you think it sits in the cannon, Ash? This is one of my two yeses, to be honest. I think it’s a great game. In terms of the history, so Sam and Max were characters created by Steve Purcell for his own comics, but they also kind of became like unofficial Lucasarts mascots, like, within the company, so they used them. They had a Sam and Max sprite that they would use in a scum training exercise when they were interviewing new designers, and they would say, look, here’s the scum engine, here’s these two characters, make a scene with them, and they, you know, they crop up in little cameo appearances in other games here and there. It’s this kind of natural happy accident that they were like, well, we’ve got these characters, let’s do something here. And I think sometimes when an idea evolves that organically, that’s usually a very good thing, because the creative team have become used to this. They want to do it. They have, they already probably have some ideas percolating away. And, you know, Steve Purcell is a great artist. He did the box art for the original Monkey Island games, for example. Did a lot of the in-game art for these games as well. But he’s also kind of like, as much as he is an artist, he’s also like a cartoonist and a storyteller in his own right. He works at Pixar. Now he was co-director on Brave. Not the best Pixar film. But, you know, it’s still a Pixar film. Summer Max Hit the Road is a very Steve Purcell game. It has a lot of his sense of humor in it, which is to use these absurd comic book animal characters to very much poke fun at the real world. So you’ve got a couple of things going on in this game. One is that it’s kind of like a parody of hard-boiled detective fiction, which works really well with the voice acting. So you’ve got Sam being this film noir style detective, but he’s also a dog whose mate is a kind of savage rabbit. Or rabbit-y thing, as they say. So that gives it this really unique feel, I think. But also the hit-the-road element, which is them on a road trip around America. They’re taking in all of these kind of weird side-of-the-road like tourist attractions that you might find in America. Things that have been standing there for 60 years and are still somehow going, because when you’re on a road trip for a thousand miles, you need to stop somewhere. You’re probably going to stop at something a little bit eye-catching, like the biggest ball of yarn in the world, for example. And again, similar today to the Tentacle. It gives a young British child this strange kind of window into American history and Americana. Gives it a feeling that’s unlike anything we grew up with. And I think it makes it a great game. I haven’t talked at all about the gameplay. I think actually the gameplay and the puzzles are pretty traditional, more kind of Monkey Island style. I don’t remember much innovation. Aside from you can use Max as an item in some puzzles, which is pretty good fun. But mostly the charm of this is the story and the characters, I think. So despite being more traditional, that’s enough for you to give it a yes, Ash. What about you, Matthew? Controversially, I’d say Sam and Max is the one I probably gel with the least. I really hate the rabbit character. I never found him funny. I still don’t. I kind of grouped this in with the slightly ugly cartoons of the 90s, you kind of Ren and Stimpy’s and that kind of stuff, which I wasn’t into either. That kind of adult zaniness has never really done it for me, despite being a zany adult myself. That’s just the through line in my tastes. The things that occupy a similar space now, you’re probably like Rick and Morty’s or whatever. Don’t do it for me either. What is considered the edgier animation of the day has just never really spoken to me. If you don’t gel with the characters, this game is quite hard work. I do like the Americana element of it. It’s beautiful. It’s got really distinct art style. I enjoyed it enough. This wouldn’t be in my personal Hall of Fame. I think this has to balance out to a maybe based on that. Sorry, Ash. I suspected that might be the case. I think objectively the thing that lets this down is that it doesn’t really push the medium forwards. It came out around the same time as Day of the Tentacle. Day of the Tentacle is much more forward facing. That lets it down in a Hall of Fame context. If you don’t click with the characters, then there’s not much going on at all. I will say though, I felt sort of similar for a long time about Day of the Tentacle. I thought Day of the Tentacle was a little bit in your face in places. But actually when the remastered thing came out, I was like, oh, I fully get this. So maybe I’m just like a big Sam and Max replay away from like really clicking with it. Do you think the Telltale games might have affected your view? Yeah, maybe. Is there kind of not very funny? Hard work. Oh boy. I reviewed one of them and I just thought it was just didn’t laugh for very, very long hours. And then, yeah, it was tough because I’d only played a little bit of the original game then. And I think that definitely put me off going back to it, which is tough. But yeah, good God, how could they have no jokes in that game? Okay, we’re going to balance out to a maybe because we’ve still got at least three classics to go through, five games in total. So let’s move on to 1995’s Full Throttle, a game that sort of represented a bit of a step up in cinematic presentation. You had a full professional voice cast. You had them using this Rebel Assault 2 sort of animation system, which basically made the game look a lot shinier in sections than the previous Lucasarts Adventures. It was a big seller, like a legit success for Lucasarts. And yeah, it seemed to represent maybe like what you might call the next generation a little bit at the time, but I don’t know. Let’s pick it up from there. So, Ash, you got a lot of affection for this one? Not really. I have played it. I played it and finished it, which isn’t particularly tough to do because it’s a short cinematic adventure. A lot of the more kind of frictional elements in terms of puzzles are smoothed away almost entirely really to the point where actually I think some of the action sequences that they put in are more difficult than the puzzle sequences or at least are for me. I found myself struggling with trying to play action within the scum framework. I don’t dislike this game. I think the characters are really fun. The art is great. Voice acting is fantastic. It’s got some real credible actors. I think Mark Hamill is in this one, if I remember correctly. Yeah, he’s Rip Burger. Right, yeah. And it oozes that Tim Schafer personality yet again. You can draw a through line from this to Brutal Legend, I think, in terms of… It really shows off his personality’s interest. It’s got a real kind of like heavy metal feel to it. So in terms of like artistry, like the creator of this work is right there to see, which I always admire. But as a game, it feels a little bit like disposable to me in the way like the best Lucasarts adventures don’t. And I think that’s because they smooth the way so much of the friction that it then doesn’t stick to you quite as much. There’s something to be said about getting stuck on puzzles and spending… even when you walk away from the computer, you might spend the day thinking about those puzzles. And that does make a game quite sticky in a way this one isn’t for me. Well, I do believe that they updated the action a little bit in the remaster to make it a bit more… a bit smoother, a bit easier for modern players. Yeah, so Matthew, how about you? What’s your take on this one? In the same way that, like, mainly at Mansion is kind of like the real Ron Gilbert’s interests distilled, like the more mechanical edge, this is like the extreme of Tim Schafer, this is like big narrative world, really like singular, like very sort of complete bold vision. I was always surprised this was the breakout sort of hit it was, because if you look at their other games, I’d say they’re set in like more traditionally like nerdy, dweeby universes, and suddenly this world of like bikers and metal. I don’t really see the through line from the other Lucasarts games to this. In my head, before I knew the sales figures, I had always assumed this had like crashed and burned commercially, just on the grounds of like, well, surely the bike. I had no interest in buying it when I was a teenager, for example, but I’m obviously very wide in the mark on that. But I really agree with Ash. I think this is like a really good bit of storytelling, but almost doesn’t want the adventure game to get in the way of that storytelling. And so it kind of just pairs it back a little bit too much. But if this was Tim Schafer Hall of Fame, this is a yes. Well, we’ve had our first no’s since 1989 here, so that’s good. But we did need a few. I think this one is on Game Pass, by the way, on both Xbox and console, along with Day of the Tentacle as well. So, you know, well worth playing, even though we’re poo-pooing it a little bit. You can complete it in about four hours, I think. Definitely worth playing. Yeah, it’s also, I think it’s, I don’t know if this is running when we’re going live, but there’s a humble bundle that’s launched with a bunch of Disney-owned games in it. And all three of the remasters they did are in that humble bundle, and I just bought it so I could have these games on Steam Deck to play, because that sounds like a nice thing to do. I wish I’d listened to this podcast before recording this podcast, because I bought both of these full price on Steam this week. Oh, man, okay, that hurts me. I am dumb. It’s good for double fine, at least. Okay, good. Well, we’ll just take some out of the Patreon pot, Matthew, to make yourself feel better. Bounces out, probably. Okay, so next up we’ve got The Dig, which feels like a no on the surface, but is an interesting game. So if this is one of Ash’s yeses, I won’t be too surprised, given some of the contrarian opinions of Ash that I’ve kind of contested over the years. But this kind of emerged from Steven Spielberg, who wanted, kind of like came up with this, the idea of this story of like trying to stop an asteroid from colliding with Earth, but then there is essentially like, sort of like alien races advanced technology on this, this asteroid when these people arrive to destroy it. Now, when it came along, I think it was dinged for being a little bit out of date graphically, and it seemed like it was a headache to make. In retrospect, like a few friends of mine who play these games say that kind of like it is also ran compared to some of the others, but I don’t know, I’m really keen to hear the Ashley Day take on this. This is not one of my other yeses. You’ll probably be relieved to hear. It is interesting. Do you know this, according to, I think this is in the Rogue Leaders book, it might be in another book I was reading this week. This is the best selling Lucasarts Adventure game. I think it’s the Spielberg involvement. I think, because you mentioned that Full Throttle sold well as well. I think it probably has a lot to do with the rise of CD-ROM and Windows 95 at the time. It just broadened the market at the right time for these games. But yeah, it’s strange because they are definitely not the best games that Lucasarts made, but there you go. Yeah, this one feels, it’s a very cold game for me and hard to connect with. I think part of that is that it’s a more kind of serious mature tone. It’s got the tone of a novel that your dad might read, I think. But aren’t we now at an age where that resonates? Well, it still feels like something my dad would read. It’s just that now he’s older. Yeah, I really want to like it. Our mutual friend Simon Miller is a big fan of this game and has been telling me to play it for years. And I finally played it this week for the podcast. I’ve always put it off and put it off because it just didn’t appeal to me very much. In the end it still didn’t really appeal to me. I think in some ways it’s similar to Loom, which did click with me eventually. So maybe if I played it a few more times I’d get into it. But it’s similar in that you’re in this, largely in this like alien environment. The objects that you’re finding, the things that you’re interacting with are also alien, to use that word again. They’re also abstract, but it makes it hard to connect with. Also makes the puzzle solving a bit of a pain in the neck because I’m like, oh, I’ve got no context to go on whatsoever here. I just feel alienated by it. So yeah, I wasn’t a big fan. How about you, Matthew? Did you cross paths with this at the time as a big Spielberg guy? Yeah, I did. And again, this was another like, I love all point and click games. And I play this when I’m like 13 and like, oh, this is so boring. I thought this was terrible when I originally played it. Playing it again now, I actually quite liked it. I quite like the dodgy sci fi. I quite like the more cerebral sci fi. You know, it’s not funny. There are a few jokes between the characters, but it’s a lot more kind of like realistic. It’s the most, I wouldn’t say grounded. It’s still very filmic. Again, another big Orson Scott card involvement in this, along with Spielberg. I think what hobbles it still is the alien planet. And like Ash says, the more abstract element. In places, it almost begins to feel a bit more like a mist or something, which I kind of fucking hate, because it’s just pattern recognition and sort of very vague feeling design. And it’s a good soundscape, though. It’s got a nice sort of like ethereal, kind of ambient, sci-fi kind of drones and whatnot. That kind of stuff speaks to me now. And I like Robert Patrick’s voice is the main character. And it’s quite a nice grown up performance. It’s definitely a mature work, which resonates, but it’s not Hall of Fame. There is one thing I really thought was clever about this game, and it’s that although you control one character, you’ve got these two companions with you at all times, a man and a woman, fellow astronauts, and they can get into danger. They can and do become trapped in these alien hazards, and there’s a constant risk of death around these people that you feel somewhat responsible for, I suppose, as the protagonist of the game. I thought that was a great way to introduce a sense of peril and danger into a genre that typically post-Monkey Island doesn’t really have that because you know you can’t die. So I thought that was a nice touch, and if that was in a different kind of warmer game, I think it could have really helped, but didn’t. All right then. Well, it’s again a relief to have another no. I thought that would be a no, but definitely an interesting one in terms of its background. I think it’s like yet another sort of like Steven Spielberg being vaguely interested in games and then sort of getting distracted and going off to make like three other things that aren’t a computer game and then the end result only being like partially connected to him. It’s kind of a weird history of him in video games. But yes. Okay, so next up is The Curse of Monkey Island. So this is the first in the series that didn’t feature Ron Gilbert’s contributions. It was the first kind of like CD-ROMified entry in the series in terms of like having cutscenes and voice actors, musical score, all that stuff was taken to the next level. It was the last game to use scum. Matthew, I feel like you have a big affection for this game. Is that right? Yeah, I absolutely love this. After I got into point and click games, this is the first one I can remember like anticipating and like seeing screens of it in the mag and thinking like, holy shit, this looks like an animated movie, like the cartoon graphics of it. And like maybe it’s a superficial take, but you know, for me, I think it has all the core ingredients of The Monkey Island. I think the writing is still pretty funny. I think the puzzles are zany. I like the story, but I love the production values on this. I thought this was such a leap. So sad that this is their last 2D game when it is such a leap and then they kind of move out of this era. Like I’d love to have followed a strand where they’d kept on just stuck to their guns and made increasingly gorgeous, like interactive animated movies. Because I think for a period, you know, this did look kind of close to what you could imagine a 2D film, you know, the cut scenes are kind of film quality, I’d say. And like the big orchestral takes on like the music from the original games. You know, I think I talked in the PC draft about like rewatching the opening to this game when the theme tune kicks in. Like it’s a real, still a kind of hairs on the back of the neck moment for me. And they just, even though it’s different writers, I just thought they kind of they got the characters. I thought they added in Murray, the demonic talking skull, like an all time great Monkey Island character. Yeah, I really love this game. Yeah, that is interesting because I think even like Gilbert himself was praising it in Rogue Leaders, saying that he was quite, he was pretty impressed with what this other team did with his series. How about you Ash, how do you feel about this one? Very similar. I absolutely adore this game. I really do. I have a very specific memory of this game, which ties me to my grumpy retro roots. I remember, I can’t remember what city we were in, but me and my family walking around a city shopping. They were talking about buying a new PC. My mum had had like a DOS machine that we didn’t really use very much, but this was like Windows 95 era, let’s get a PC. I was railing against it because I was like this diehard Amiga fan. I was still using my Amiga. I was like, no, we shouldn’t have a PC. You can do everything you need to do on an Amiga, which is not true. I think we walked into HMV and my brother and I were looking at games and I picked up the Curse of Monkey Island box and I was looking at the back of the box, looking at the screenshots and something in my brain went, you need to change your stance on the PC right now. We need a PC in the house today. It must have seemed really strange to my parents that I had this instant change of political stance. I don’t know if we actually did get a PC, but it was years before I managed to play Curse. I think I played it in the early 2000s. Even then, I still thought it looked and sounded absolutely gorgeous. It captured a lot of the feeling of the first two Monkey Island games, even though it was so much more modern. It still felt like Guybrush. It still felt like that world. Voice acting for the same time for me didn’t contradict any of that, only added to it. I thought it was an awesome game. I’ve replayed it a couple of times since, and it still holds up. I’m baffled as to why it hasn’t had a HD reissue. I just want the same thing, but a bit crisper and cleaner. Don’t change it, just make it up-res. Maybe there’s some technical reason that that can’t be done. But I think over the years, I think this one is perhaps not as well played or as well remembered as it should be. And it really deserves to be. It’s a crappy game. Well, it sounds like we have another yes here. Well, do we? Well, let’s put it as yes and come back to it, shall we? Can we fill three or five slots with Monkey Island games? That feels wrong. Well, that’s something we can litigate shortly. Right, second to last. 1998’s Grim Fandango, a Tim Schafer joint, first fully 3D adventure game they made. Mexican Day of the Dead theme. We most recently discussed it on the 90’s PC gaming draft. When I picked it in that draft, I didn’t win. So our listeners certainly don’t have much respect for it, Matthew, seemingly. So Matthew, I know this is like an all-time fave of yours, so why don’t you kick us off? Yeah, a bit like I was saying with kind of Tim Schafer building a really singular universe in Full Throttle. This is, yeah, just a mad fantasy comic vision set in the afterlife where you play a kind of travel agent who kind of visits people when they die and then moves them on to their final destination, sort of a purgatory world, I guess. Sort of mixed in with this sort of film noir sort of genre, sort of tropiness, in a really compelling, sophisticated way. It’s a really adult story in that it’s about death and literally not moving on in terms of not being able to make it to your final destination, but also just sort of dwelling with unrequited love or regrets of not having lived the sort of life you want to live. Thematically, such a massive leap. I think as entertaining as most of the games we’ve discussed are, I don’t think any of them have as deep an emotional core as this game. As an actual puzzle game, I think they’re still sort of wrestling with the 3D of it. They were sort of relearning everything, and so they’re almost a little simpler within it. It’s not a game I would remember for its puzzles. I remember for its world, its characters, its story, and just really thinking that this was this playable film that I fell in love with. Again, like I said on the draft, there are cutscenes in this that I just burnt into my brain is like not just some of my favourite game moments, but some of my favourite film moments. I just thought it was so film-literate and the cinematics in this are just so well done. This for me is a big yes. OK, good. Well, I expect Ash will also go to bat for this. Yeah, of course. I think this is an all-time classic. I think it transcends its genre in many ways, and it does that because of the world and the characters and the story that it has. I think it’s relevant to modern games players who, I think, in the indie age have grown used to a kind of higher class of storytelling in games. I think it fits in in the modern era, maybe even more than it did in the late 90s, really. Thankfully, there’s a fantastic remake readily available that preserves everything that was great about it whilst moving away some of the rough edges. I will say, critically, I think as the first Grime Engine game, they moved on from Scum to Grime, which I think just means Grim Engine. Might need something else. It’s a bit wonky in terms of the way it controls. In the original version, I found myself sometimes walking in the wrong direction, not understanding how the 3D space operated or struggling to point and click in as natural a way as I would have done in 2D. I think that’s moved out a little bit in the remake, but it’s still kind of an issue. But I can easily forgive it because the world and the characters and the story are just so good. I think this is easily the most kind of mature and adult story in the Lucasarts canon, you know, without losing any of the kind of originality and personality that Lucasarts games are known for. But it does have this very relatable human emotional driven story, beautifully told and beautifully kind of visually represented, poetically at times, I think. And I’m conscious, you know, we did spoil the ending of Monkey Island 2. I don’t really want to spoil Grim Fandango, so I think there’s still a lot of people who haven’t played it and it is readily available in many places now. I think you just have to play it, go in with very few expectations and I think it would really surprise people. And I think it’s, you know, unlike some of the other games we’ve talked about, unlike Full Throttle, another Tim Schafer game, I think it does stick with you. I think it’s something that once you’ve played it, you kind of carry it with you for the years to come. So yes. All right, then. Good. Yes, it doesn’t have Monkey Island in the title. It’s good to see. So last up then, we come to the, what is largely renowned as the black sheep of the Monkey Island series, Escape from Monkey Island. First, a 3D entry and the end of the Lucasarts Adventure Canon. Grim Vandango’s poor sales seems to put it into their appetite to make this. At the same time, we are about to be awash with mixed fortunes of prequel games, some good, some absolutely terrible, but they would nonetheless make a lot of money for Lucasarts. So that coincides with people, I think, calling out the genre generally as being old hats, whether fair or not, not fair, really. But yeah, so this is kind of like last hurrah. Matthew, let’s start with you. You big escape guy. I think I got it for Christmas. I really wanted it. I liked it enough. Where Curse has, I think, does continue, like the tone and the characters spot on, I think this one is a lot more hit and miss. I think the central storyline of this game, which revolves around, well, there’s several strands, but one of the strands is about a kind of an Australian who’s a bit like Rupert Murdoch, kind of buying up the Caribbean and sort of gentrifying the Caribbean. And for me, it was a little bit too much of a, like a real world problem for this fantasy universe. And it never really clicked. I remember thinking it was slightly out of sync with what I wanted from this universe, which was more of a kind of a sort of wry pirate lens at real world habits. This was just too much of a collision of like reality. I don’t know if it’s because, you know, we’d seen what Three Monkey Islands looked like in 2D, but for me, like, I thought this was a much uglier, harder game to fall in love with visually than Grim Fandango, you know, that really felt very kind of cohesive. This just felt like quite a crude 3D attempt at recreating Monkey Island. It has like none of the visual clutter of it, just due to the nature of the engine. It’s a lot simpler to look at. I don’t really like how this game looks now. I don’t have much fondness for it, but it has got some good stuff. Arguably one of the things Curse does a bit more poorly is Elaine as a character is quite sidelined in it. You’re basically trying to kind of… She gets turned into a statue and you’re trying to turn her back. In this she’s much more of her own character like she was in 1 and 2. That’s definitely something to be celebrated, but I don’t have the happiest memories of this one, to be honest. I think this is probably going to be a no, because we have three other Monkey Island games jostling for its place. What’s your take on this one, Ash? I think this game was a mistake. It sounds pretty brutal, I know. When you look at the first three Monkey Island games, they’re such beautiful works that they really hold up, they last for a long time, they’re a pleasure to return to. I played this once, I played it all the way through on PlayStation 2. Actually, the 3D controls worked pretty well on the DualShock, so that was something. It felt like they were starting to understand how to make a 3D game. But graphically, it was so ugly at the time, and it’s only aged with time. So I don’t think it, visually, it just doesn’t hold up in the way the other three games do, which feel more timeless. I don’t remember much about the story that really grabbed me, but what Matthew was saying about it being too much of a real-world problem, I do remember thinking that. It kind of throws you out of the fiction for me. It jolts you out of the world. When you go back to the original Monkey Island, sitting in the dark and being immersed in this world, Escape from Monkey Island is achieving the opposite. So it’s a failure in that respect, I think. Puzzles and gameplay. It gets criticized for the Monkey Combat Sequence, which is a tremendously difficult puzzle. I kind of liked it at the time I played it. It was one of those puzzles where you have to get out a notepad and pen. It’s kind of like a code-breaking puzzle. So you’re writing down patterns and sequences. I played this over a weekend when I was a games journalist. I was in my 20s. I had the time to sit down and really work it out. I felt quite satisfied and smug that I did. That’s always a great feeling in life. But ultimately, I’m clutching at straws to think of something positive to say about this game. For a long time, it was the last game in this fantastic series. I think it’s a real bum note for it to go out on. Yeah, yeah. Tough times. This is actually the first of any of these types of games that I’ve ever played, actually. To be honest, I quite liked it. I found the tone of it genuinely funny. I wasn’t appalled by the graphics. I guess because I didn’t have the experience with the 2D art Lucasarts games. Didn’t have that particular problem. I liked the voice actors. Just was kind of amusing. Borrowed it from a friend. Paid like two or three hours of it. I have quite good memories of it, but I’m sure I can see exactly why this would be unappealing to veterans of the series. Yeah, I would say… I don’t think it’s like a total car crash for me. It’s just like… I love the other games. It’s still better than… It’s better than the Telltale Monkey Island games. And it’s better than the Telltale Sam and Max games. It’s still better than a lot of modern point-and-click games. It’s just not the final full stop of this particular story you were hoping for. Well, that’s fine, because we needed another no, so that works for me. But some good take there between the reasonable and the appalled. I will add, because I feel like I’ve savaged it. I liked this game enough to finish it, and I think it’s not as bad as people say. When we’re talking about a Hall of Fame, it wouldn’t even get into the Monkey Island Hall of Fame, let alone the Lucasarts Hall of Fame. Yeah, okay, good stuff. So in which case we’ve got four maybes and five yeses. So let’s just go through the yeses. We’ve got our Hall of Fame so far contains The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, The Curse of Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango. That’s a good list. Not much variety to it. So my question to you is, should any of the maybes move up and take a spot? So we have Maniac Mansion, Loom, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max Hit the Road. I feel like the Hall of Fame is too Monkey Island heavy. It is. Of the maybes, for me personally, Indiana Jones is the one. But Ash, what would you elevate from the maybes? I mean, this for me goes back to the question of what are we trying to achieve with the Hall of Fame. Personally, I would put Maniac Mansion in there because I think it established so much that is critical to this genre and was ambitious and more game-like in a way that none of the other titles were. But you are right that with Day of the Tentacle, we didn’t talk about this, but in Day of the Tentacle, you can go up to a PC, click on it, and Maniac Mansion is fully playable within it anyway, so that probably gets by on a technicality. Yeah, you smuggled six games in. If Judge Samuel will allow it. Yeah, I think I will allow that. We accept the premise that Maniac Mansion is included in the Hall of Fame via Day of the Tentacle. That is allowed. So, yeah, I completely agree. It’s too Monkey Island heavy. And I think as much as I love Curse of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are just so important, so timeless. I would swap out Curse. For what? I think I’m happy to go with Fate of Atlantis. It’s a cool game. It does some interesting things that the others don’t. And you know, it’s very Lucasfilm. Is it your true heart pick of those remaining maybes? Oh, no, my heart pick would be Salmon Max. Listen, I think… I don’t know. Personally, I would rather defer to your heart pick than don’t try and appease me just because I don’t like the comic tone of Salmon Max. Well, here’s another way of looking at it. If you add up… If you look at this mathematically, if I award Fate of Atlantis a score of how much I like it and you do the same, and then we did that exercise for Salmon Max, I think the total score would be higher for Fate of Atlantis. But I’m going to give you final say on this, Ash. I’m going to give you final say, Sam. Because you can resolve a tiebreaker as the judge. OK, I personally think Indiana Jones is like a kind of cool wrinkle in the sort of history of these games. It’s not exactly like the others. In some ways, I think it represents maybe the slightly wider tonal variety of these games. Just in terms of like it’s not just a kind of comic adventure. It’s got other strings to its bow. So maybe that way you’re getting a bit closer to some of the other games in this list that don’t get a look in. It’s obviously got the Lucas heritage and being tied to the Indiana Jones film. So that’s got some value too. If you’d have really gone to bat though, Ash, I would have taken Salmon Max over Fate of Atlantis. So, yeah. In terms of variety, I think Fate of Atlantis adds a different tone. Salmon Max has some shared DNA comedy wise with Day of the Tentacle. They both kind of have that kind of playable cartoon energy to them. And so Indiana Jones definitely represents a slightly more mature, maybe, Lucasarts, which would then also account for like, it would take a little bit of like the dig box as well. It’s the mature Lucasarts game that’s not boring, which I think is quite an achievement. And I think also like, you know, the thing it does of having three different gameplay paths you can follow, that is pretty innovative. I mean, when it’s up against Salmon Maps, which really does nothing innovative, I think that makes a strong case for it. I’m happy with Fate of Atlantis. Well, that’s really interesting, because you’ve got four games in a row there, four releases in a row that get into the Hall of Fame. So, Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, all within a four-year period. Yep, and then you leap forward to Grim Fandango, which I think is important to have in there too. That’s a good Hall of Fame, guys. I think that’s good. Yeah, I’m happy with this as an experiment. If you are not happy at home, let us know via the Twitter Back Page pod or on the Patreon if you’re on there. Just let us know what you think of our suggestions there. Oh, they will let us know. That’s what point-and-click fans are like. This is really fun, though, and thanks so much for coming on the episode, Ash. It’s been nice to have you. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you for allowing me to corner you at Gamescom and basically suggest this topic, a very kind of you, to tolerate that. No, it’s something that I know that Matthew is passionate about. You refuse to come on the Kirby Games episode for some reason. We don’t need to go into that. But no, it’s been really good to have you, Ash. Thanks for sharing some of your memories and your immense expertise on this subject. Where can people find you on social media, et cetera? I only really use Twitter. Let’s see how long that lasts, the way things are going. But you can find me on Twitter at Jelly Scare. People ask me why it’s Jelly Scare. I like the visual image of a scared jelly shaking and quivering. I just like it. What can I say? And if you search for Games from the Black Hole on google.com or Twitter, you’ll find my blog where I talk about old games. I’ve covered a couple of point and click adventures on there, very obscure ones, Universe on the Amiga, which was a sci-fi adventure by Core Design, and Operation Stealth on the Amiga, also known as James Bond the Stealth Affair, a James Bond themed point and click adventure that is largely rubbish. Well, if you want to go into the very depths of Asher’s gaming knowledge, that blog will take you there. You also regularly contribute to RetroGamer, is that right, Asher? Yeah, I do a bit of retro writing here and there, so I’ll crop up in RetroGamer from time to time. Most recently did a top 25 light gun games article. Also contributing to… Where did Ghost Squad sit? Ghost Squad sat in number one, Matthew. Yes! Nice. You can come back on the podcast now, that’s good. We’ll welcome you back after that, that’s good. OK, good. Well, thanks so much, Ash. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBazzill underscore Pesto. This podcast is supported by Patreon. patreon.com/backpagepods supports us if you’d like to get up to two extra podcasts a month for the Excel tier. Your support helps us pay our guests, so Matthew will eventually pay Ash 40 pounds ISU. I’ll let him take care of that. I’m Samuel Dobby-Rox on Twitter, and thanks so much for listening. We’ll be back next week.