Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake.

More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

The good old Commodore did not have nearly enough memory to store all these beautiful images as screen sized bitmaps. Most of the games used text mode with a custom character set.

I always wondered how this worked on the Amiga and PC ports of the classic games. Did they just copy the approach and use text mode as well or did they use proper bitmap images as backgrounds? Same question for games that were native to the 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?

I do not and have never owned a C64, but Monkey Island is (in my opinion) one of the pinnacles of gaming so this effort to extend it to yet another platform is wonderful to see!

I am assuming this will demand REU or an ultimate 64 to run it? Hard to believe they would be able to package this and make the game fluent without more ram.

Those backgrounds look so good. I wonder if they'll be able to do anything with the iconic music.

There had already been an attempt in 2023 https://www.lemon64.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island

Based on reviews, it was a bad conversion

I wonder how do they want to overcome the memory limit? Or will it be using cartridge extensively?

I was just wondering why this process is not automated. Why do these graphics require redrawing? Resolution difference from EGA?

Ambitious.

I wonder how many floppies it will be.

God, I wish a new modern game would capture the essence of Monkey Island, which for me was the ISLANDS themselves.

I didn't care much about the actual main story, Ron Gilbert was never serious about the story anyway (and he coldly murdered it in the long-awaited "official" sequel, Return)

But I loved how each island was like a unique mini world onto itself, and as a kid it really struck me how it was always night on some islands and always day on others (which I later liked to headcanon as being set on a tidally-locked planet :)

Chapter 2 of LeChuck's Revenge is one of my best memories in gaming. Why haven't any modern games tried to recapture that piratey seabreeze freedom of exploring many different islands?

Maybe they could pull a Thimbleweed Park and do a "spiritual successor" in all but name, like it did with Maniac Mansion, and call it Ape Archipelago or something :)

A very wise move! With the current state of AI, the loss and cost of RAM, with GPUs and CPUs being eaten up, we'll all need to move back to C64s soon.

Really, and I mean this honestly, I had immense fun on my C64 using BBSes, playing games. It wouldn't be the worst fate, if everyone moved back to BBSes + games like this on the C64.

A neat project.

Looks good, I had a C128 but played The Secret of Monkey Island around its release but didn't know there was an EGA version. It looks like the two were released apart by just a few months.

Definitely in this era the C64 hardware held up better for longer than expected. I didn't feel the x86 side caught up and surpassed the C64 as an entire package in both graphics and sound until the 486 era. A platform that was truly cursed on the gaming side for a long time due to its primary market focus being business use. And here I am using a 9850X3D with 5070 GPU, distant descendents of our old 286 hardware that I would play Monkey Island on.

Seriously good-looking gfx - kudos!

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