I started working on Monkey Island II about a month after Monkey Island I went to manufacturing with no idea if the first game was going to do well or completely bomb. It sold well, but not nearly as well and anything Sierra released. And also a company management structure that knew to leave creative people alone and let them build great things. From Dave and Tim to Steve Purcell, Mark Ferrari, an amazing testing department and everyone else who touched the game's creation. I was very fortunate to have an incredible team. I am always asked why I think it's been such an enduring and important game. It's hard for me to understand what Monkey Island means to people. I never would have believed it back then. It amazes me that people still play and love Monkey Island. The gold masters were made on the 2nd, so that what I'm calling The Secret of Monkey Island's birthday. It could have been late September or even October and happened without fanfare. It hard to know when it first appeared in stores. I don't remember if it was in the 1st or 2nd week of "lockdown". They have a 1.1 version due to Monkey Island being bumped from testing. I made these disk on Sept 2nd, 1990 so the gold masters were sent off within a few days of that. There was no version control back then, or even network storage, so archiving the source meant copying it to a set of floppy disks. Different world.Īfter the gold masters were made, I'd archive all the source code. So, we'd drive down to the airport and find a flight headed to London, go to the gate and ask a passenger if they would mind carry the floppy disks for us and someone would meet them at the gate.Ĭan you imagine doing that these days? You can't even get to the gate, let alone find a person that would take a strange package on a flight for you. The builds destined for Europe were going to be duplicated in Europe and we needed to get the gold master over there, and if anything slipped there wasn't enough time to mail them. When the release candidate passed testing, it would be sent off to manufacturing. Bugs found during this last week had to be crazy bad to fix. We required that each game had one full week of testing on the build that was going to be released. It's why we didn't take getting bumped from test lightly.ĭuring the 2nd week of "lockdown testing", if a bug was found we had to bump the release date. It could take several hours to make a new set of five testing disks. It was not uncommon for problems to creep up when I made the masters and have to start the whole process again. It was a time consuming and dangerous process. "Worth Fixing" consisted of a lot of factors, including how difficult it was to fix and if the fix would likely introduce more bugs.Īlso keep in mind that when I made a new build, I didn't just copy it to the network and let the testers at it, it had to be copied to four or five sets of floppy disk so it could be installed on each tester's machine. If any bug was found, there was a discussion with the team and management about if it was worth fixing. Lucasfilm's process for finalizing and shipping a game consisted of madly testing for several months while we fixed bugs, then 2 weeks before we were to send off the gold masters, the game would go into "lockdown testing". There was CompuServe and Prodigy, but those catered to a very small group of very highly technical people. There was no Internet for players to jump onto and talk about the game. Of course, when that happened, you rarely heard about it. It was a slow process of sending "gold master" floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped to stores and the first of the teaming masses to buy the game. Unlike today, you didn't push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month.
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