Dave Grossman On Tales Of Monkey Island

19 Nov 2009 at 14:52:09 by Tim McDonald

Guybrush is back for the first time in almost ten years, and with Tales of Monkey Island rapidly approaching its conclusion, Tim McDonald sat down with Telltale design director and Monkey Island alumnus Dave Grossman to talk about how the series has gone and where it's going.

First of all, huge congratulations, really. The series has gone from strength to strength. I think each episode's been better than the last, so very well done.

Thanks!

How did all of this come about? You've presumably got good relations with LucasArts from past work with them, but how did you convince them to actually give you the Monkey Island license in the first place?

I think it was less a question of us convincing them than it was of them sort of being ready to be convinced. They did get a new president in between – we'd been talking to them, on and off, as long as we'd been a company. Dan [Connors], particularly, has been quite interested in doing more Monkey games, and I think what really happened was Darrell Rodriguez, LucasArts' CEO – he has been vocally supporting of the old adventure game licenses there, and they did the Special Edition, and so all of a sudden they had some plans that really fit in with what we wanted to do. And it was pretty easy after that point.

It's been ten years since the last game. How has it been getting back to it?

Sometimes it's good to take a little break, I think. We've sort of had the opportunity to think about the strengths of the series, what makes the humour work and what makes the characters work, and what kind of things sort of happen at a deeper level. One of the things I note about it is that although Monkey is really funny on the surface, the underlying stories are usually kind of series, and so on it was good to have a little time to sort of pause and reflect on that. Take another fly at it, and make it available to a new audience. That's the hard part.

How was it trying to get it set up for a new audience? You've got a lot of old characters, old plotlines and so on that all of the old fans want to see again, but the new audience wouldn't be so familiar with them. How's that been?

There's a bit of a balancing act with that, obviously. You want to include enough of that stuff that the people who've been following the series all along sort of feel like that's been worth something, like they're inside of something, but you also don't want to make that important enough that new people coming to the series feel confused. So, again, it's kind of... focus on the strengths and not on the lore, I guess?

Do you think you've succeeded?

I do! I hear from people who are picking it up for the first time. There's a whole new generation of people playing these things now. Obviously, the best thing is they play it and they get interested, they pick up on the fact that there are threads being referred to that are from the past games, and then they go and they get those and they play them as well.

Was the audience part of your decision to put Tales of Monkey Island on the Wii rather than the 360? Did you think the Wii audience would respond better to Tales of Monkey Island?

It seemed like a good place for it. It's kind of playful, and whimsical, in a way that... I think you see that kind of thing on Wii more a little bit more than on other platforms, somehow.

Has it been scary actually going back to Monkey Island again, and trying to relive the past successes?

For me it was, yeah. Very scary. I don't think everyone would say the same – for a lot of people it's just exciting to revisit it. For me, though, it was partly because it had been ten years since the last game, and people have had that ten years to build up whatever expectations they were going to build up about what a new game would be like, and of course, not all of those expectations are going to be the same as each. No matter what you do, if it's different than the old thing, people will be unhappy about that, and if it's the same as the old thing, people will feel like you haven't gone anywhere. So yeah, I had a little trepidation about that, but actually I think we've struck a really good balance and made something good, and people are responding to it. So I'm less scared now. With one episode to go.

I imagine it must've felt a bit like walking a tightrope between the old and the new.

Yeah, a little bit.

Do you think Monkey Island in particular, then, works as an episodic series? The previous Telltale games have all been episodic, pretty much, and previous Monkey Island games were all divided into chapters. Did that impact the development in any way, shape, or form?

I do think it works particularly well for something like Monkey Island. We're only just now taking advantage of the real strengths of the form, and that's partly because it took awhile to gain the trust of the audience that we weren't going to just sort of abandon things in the middle, or take forever to come out with episodes, as has happened sometimes in the past with episodic development. And so, for that reason, some of our earlier series... the episodes are much more separate from each other, so that each one is kind of an individual little piece that you play. But really, where the strength comes in is when you do kind of string them together in a mini-series way, sort of like a saga, and there's lots of stuff for you to think about in the intervening time between the episodes, and you really are sort of engaging the audience in one story over the course of about half a year, real time. When you do that, it has the effect of making the thing feel really very epic, which is exactly what you want when you want for something like Monkey Island where it's a great big pirate adventure, and you want it to feel kind of like “Oh my gosh, there's more and there's more and there's more!”

How has that impacted sales? The fact that each episode ends on a cliffhanger and follows on from the last one means that it's a lot harder to jump into the middle of a series than it was with previous Telltale titles. Have you seen any difficulty with the sales towards the middle of the series?

No, people tend to not jump into the middle anyway. If they become aware of the series in the middle – a thing that we do often is we'll take one of the episodes of a series and make it free, as a promo, and that's usually when people see it and go “Wow, this is really cool,” and then they'll go back to the beginning and buy the whole series, and play from beginning to end.

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