No art survives for this (assuming it was ever drawn) – the above is the single in-game map split in four for illustration purposes. The mansion is visually reminiscent of the one seen in a prior Gilbert game, Maniac Mansion, and this is likely not coincidental – a surviving unused object definition file has objects called mansion-doormat and mansion-key, suggesting a throwback to that game’s first puzzle.Īccording to clues left behind in the code, Melee Island was originally split into four different screens – much in the same way that Monkey Island is split into five.
The reason this one survived at all is because in the final game, the exterior mansion has no z-plane, meaning the artist never overwrote the original version! In this case, characters would be able to walk behind the front of the building’s porch. An explanation is due here: whenever a room lets characters walk behind areas, that room requires a separate z-plane file to define those areas in white pixels. It is the only animation (in BYLE terms, “chore”) that doesn’t have a name in these files, suggesting perhaps that it was never used in-game.Ī very different concept for the governor’s mansion, which survived only as a “z-plane” file. As far as anyone remembers, this puzzle was never actually in the playable game, and likely existed only as art.Īnother unused animation – most, if not all, of the sword-fighting costumes in the game have an unused jump, as demonstrated here using BYLE, the Lucasfilm Games costume animation tool. In the final game, the bridge is guarded by a troll, but an early concept for stopping the player here involved a booby trap instead. Some of the art that survived in the Monkey Island vaults might have never been intended for the game at all, some may have been ideas that were abandoned early on, and some are from other game projects entirely!Īn early concept for the bridge puzzle. The artists at Lucasfilm Games in 1990 were, by all accounts, prolific.
Special thanks in no particular order to Marius Winter, Aric Wilmunder, Jake Rodkin, and our own Rich Whitehouse for helping make all of this possible. The following was a combination of art extraction, code restoration, and heavy research. We also showed quite a bit of cut content, which is what I want to focus on in this post. We even do a live coding demonstration of the game’s famous SCUMM scripting language, and take a look at a few of the development tools used in the making of the game, including FLEM, BYLE, and SPIT (they had a house style…). It gets better!ĭuring the stream, Ron and I go in-depth into where the ideas for the game came from, the development process, the environment at Lucasfilm Games, and more. Important note: The microphone audio starts off too low for the first couple minutes of the video.
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