The Secrets of Monkey Island - An Evening With Ron Gilbert

The Video Game History Foundation
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2023
YouTube
71K views · 5 years ago · interview · historical

A long livestream event from the Video Game History Foundation in which Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island, talks about making the game. The session includes a look at the SCUMM scripting code behind the first game, which is edited and recompiled live.

HN people share it for the creator's own account of Monkey Island and for the live hacking of its SCUMM scripts, which they cite as an early example of minilanguage scripting.

“they take a peek at the SCUMM code for the first Monkey Island, and hack it almost on the fly”
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#rongilbert#monkeyisland#scumm#adventuregames#gamehistory

6 comments from Hacker News

d
@doener2021 · in “Monkey Island – An Evening with Ron Gilbert”
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@D_Guidi2020 · in “Monkey Island – An Evening with Ron Gilbert [video]”
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@guiambros2020 · in “Monkey Island – An Evening with Ron Gilbert”
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@bonki2023 · in “Welcome to the Video Game History Foundation Library”
Funny, I literally just watched a VGHF video of Frank Cifaldi talking to Ron Gilbert about the making of Monkey Island where Frank made SCUMM script changes and recompiled MI live on stream (sic!) [0]. I had no idea the VGHF even existed until 4 hours ago. I have been thinking a lot about (video game) preservation over the years and I'm excited to see there are people working on this with such dedication. With that being said, I'm not hugely thrilled about the interface shown in this clip, I think there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to accessing and presenting the actual data and metadata, but given this seems to be WIP I'm sure things will improve (and maybe it's better when you actually use it yourself). [0]: ▶ this video
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l
@lou13062021 · in “Roll your own minilanguages with mini-interpreters (1989)”
Just to be pedantic, ScummVM is a re-implementation of the original SCUMM, which totally was an instance of this approach. There is a (crazy long) Youtube video [1] where they take a peek at the SCUMM code for the first Monkey Island, and hack it almost on the fly. Pretty good for a 1990 game. Of course, Infocom's Z-machine may be an even earlier example. [1] ▶ this video (the relevant bit starts at around 3:09:30)
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d
@dividuum2020 · in “Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction”
The closest we ever got was in a recent stream with Ron Gilbert himself (from link). Jump to 4:29:23. If only there wasn't a cutscene :-) ▶ this video
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