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The Monkey Island is probably one of the most important landmarks in gaming history. For the millions who played it, it not only confirmed that games could become an artform, but also that they could be deeply, outrageously funny.
Over the course of five games, the Monkey Island series tells the tale of the endearingly hapless Guybrush Threepwood, and his quest to become the most feared pirate in the Caribbean.
[...] Monkey Island was just one of many iconic adventure games that came out of LucasArts. Its stablemates include the beloved Sam and Max series, Grim Fandango, and Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
When Disney acquired LucasArts parent LucasFilm in 2012, it signified the end of an era. Disney's never really been that interested in games, and in 2016 the company announced that it would cease in-house production entirely, and transition to an IP licensing model, leaving the future of the Monkey Island series in doubt.
In 2016, Monkey Island co-founder Ron Gilbert asked Disney on Twitter for the chance to buy the Monkey Island and "Mansion Mansion [sic]" IPs, adding he'll "pay real actual money for them."
So far, Disney has remained tight-lipped, but fans have launched a petition begging the company to agree to Gilbert's request.
Although the petition is over a year old, it's picked up momentum in recent months, and in total has attracted over 12,000 signatures in total. This puts it within a hair's width of its 15,000 signature goal.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday May 16 2018, @10:59PM (1 child)
Let's say you want to sell the game for about 40 € (or other currency). With 15k fans, the income for the game would be 600k. But let's double that - not everyone who'd buy the game would sign the petition. So, you're looking at 1.2 million. For that, you'd have to do *everything*. It's not just development, it's all overhead included. That's not a lot of money.
Case in point: Double Fine's kickstarter (3.3 million from the KS, maybe more from other sources) for what eventually turned out to be Broken Age - which according to some reviewer was okay but not a classic. And that's not what you'd want, as someone who signs that petition.
While there is no secret recipe that will guarantee that a piece of entertainment (game, movie, tv show, ...) will be great, there are quite a few ingredients that will ensure it won't. One of the big pitfalls is attempting to recreate something for nostalgic reasons. Doing that while underbudgetted.... not a recipe for success.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 17 2018, @01:35PM
How many developers are we talking about here though? If it were a single-man project and took a few months, $1M is a great return for that effort. This isn't some modern, cutting-edge game here, this is retro stuff, so theoretically it shouldn't be that hard to do with today's technology. Heck, just make it use the SCUMMVM engine like the old ones; the main thing they'd have to do is the artwork and story, and the artwork should be easier with today's tools.
This is all just hand-waving of course. But my point here is that fans would probably be happy to have something that's basically another one of the old games, not some fancy new game made with all the latest new game technologies. There's people these days making actual NES games, and it doesn't take some big team of developers, they're each made by one guy.