CMI raccontato da Jonathan Ackley

In August, 1995 Larry Ahern and I locked a troop of monkeys in a room full of typewriters. "Who better than monkeys," we thought, "to design the next installment of LucasArts popular Monkey Island series?" Three months later we removed the completed manuscript and determined that it was not only completely unusable but it was also more than a bit unsanitary. Dejected, Larry and I decided that we would have to design the darn thing ourselves. We worked on it from December of 1995 until late February of 1996. In March, I joined up with our crack team of programmers Chuck Jordan, Chris Purvis, Livia Mackin and Aric Wilmunder and we began to build the game itself.

We then turned our attention to the art production. The first step to improving the graphics quality was to upgrade our game engine up to support high-resolution graphics (640x480), a huge improvement over the rectangular pixels of 320x200. When Monkey’s lead background artist Bill Tiller, who had done such a phenomenal job doing low-res backgrounds on The Dig, showed us what he could do at a higher resolution we were all completely blown away.

Our animation technology improved as well. Until recently, adventure game characters had to be drawn on the computer instead of paper. This technical limitation tended to make the characters blockier, smaller and less expressive than comparable animations you might see in an animated film. We wanted to give our animators, led by Marc Overney, the tools to do film quality work. So we worked with our ink-and-paint lead, Kim Balestreri, to develop a method of getting hand-drawn, fully anti-aliased animations into the game while still maintaining the level of interactivity found in previous LucasArts adventure games.

People always ask us what it’s like to work at a place like LucasArts, on a project like The Curse of Monkey Island. They’re always surprised to find out that it’s just a job like anyone else’s. Like most people, we roller-blade to work then stop by the sound department for a quick game of indoor hockey and some NERF weapon target practice.

Then it’s right to work, answering the same important questions you would associate with any other job. Dreary questions like; "Does the giant, man-eating crocodile need more teeth?", "Should the alien fire lasers, or friction-liquefied metal projectiles?" or "I wonder if I could break into the North American Defense command with just my web browser?"

Parts of my days are spent bug fixing...err. I’m sorry...I’ve just been reminded that we don’t have bugs. We have undocumented features.

Parts of my days are spent undocumented feature-fixing. It usually begins with a phone call from someone in the Quality Assurance department. The call goes something like this:

"We’ve found a new bug."

"LYING PIG! I’LL TEAR OUT YOUR HEART!"

"No, really. It’s in the love scene."

"Ah, yes. The love scene. So tender. So romantic. What seems to be the bug?"

"On slower machines, Elaine transforms into a troll and gnaws off Guybrush’s head."

"...my life is over..."

"What’s that?"

"Um...Let’s just mention it in the readme."

Of course, I do other tawdry tasks during the day. I peruse the art, listen to the voice actors telling their jokes, and recline in my chair while enjoying the music Michael Land has written for the game. I know, I know. It’s a tough job, but...

Jonhatan Ackley