Monthly Archives: August 2010

Previously-Owned HD Coffins

Dear LucasArts,

Thanks for releasing the Monkey Island special editions. It’s great to be able to play through the games again on modern systems, with all the beautiful new artwork and voice acting. They look beautiful, the second one especially.

A screenshot of Stan's coffin shop in the special edition of Monkey Island 2.

There’s one thing I don’t understand though. In the bonus features unlocked as we play thorough Monkey Island 2: Special Edition we can view lots of concept art from 1991. We know from the commentary track with the original designers that the digital backgrounds in the game were just scans of these paintings. So, if you still had the artwork lying around to scan and feature as bonus content, why didn’t you just use that for the HD backgrounds in the new versions? It would presumably have been cheeper for you than recreating everything with new artists, and it would have allowed us to play through the games we first fell in love with nearly 20 years ago as you first intended them to be seen.

A screenshot of the concept art for Stan's coffin shop, as seen in the bonus features to Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.
A screenshot of Stan's coffin shop in the original Monkey Island 2.

Don’t suppose you would give the lovely guys at ScummVM access to the archives to knock up an HD version that would play with the files we already have and the new scans? No?

Guess I’ll just keep hoping Funcom still have the original 3D files to produce an HD version of The Longest Journey.