The fine folks at Game Forum Germany have been trying to get me to speak there for the past three years, but something has always come up and prevented me from attending, but this year I vowed to go.  This year was going to be different.

I've only been to Germany once before and most of that three days was spent at a hotel attached to the Munich airport doing PR for Total Annihilation.  Our hosts did take us into town for dinner one night where we ate at an Italian restaurant.  I feel a proper trip to Germany is due and I expect to see lederhosen and lots of them.

I was told I could talk about anything I wanted, which always presents itself as a dilemma.  The easy thing to talk about is Monkey Island.  Everyone loves to hear about Monkey Island.  The next easiest thing would be to talk about DeathSpank since it's shiny and new and I get a lot of email asking me about the game, but in the end I decided to give a talk about the making of Maniac Mansion.

Maniac Mansion is a game that is close to 25 years old and started the whole point-and-click adventure genera in addition to coining the term 'cut-scene' used throughout the civilized world.  Maniac Mansion is a game filed with dead ends, backwards puzzles and no-win situations.  Maniac Mansion is a flawed game, but that's what makes it so interesting.  Gary and I had no idea what we were doing when we started making Maniac Mansion; we didn't even know it was going to be an adventure game.

Despite all it's problems, it's a game that is loved by countless gamers and it holds a very special place in my heart.  All the lessons learned from making Maniac Mansion can be seen in the design for Monkey Island.  Without one, there would not be the other.

During my research for the talk, I came across an amazing amount of fan art for Maniac Mansion including the wonderful Lego Minifigs seen above.

I'm incredibly excited to be giving this talk and finally seeing Germany and getting a window seat on the way there and back.  I'm going to keep the window shade open the whole fight.  If I can't sleep on a plane, no one else is going to either.

While cleaning out my bookcase a few weeks ago, I ran across a large and mysterious black three ring binder that contained a brittle and water stained printout of the entire Monkey Island 2 bug report.  I have no idea why I had it or why I kept it.

Granted, it's not quite as impressive as Steve Purcell's Monkey Island concept art, but hey...quit your bitching.

Several hundred pages later...

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DeathSpank is finally coming to the [REDACTED] platform in Oct and [REDACTED] later in the year and you can pre-order them on Steam.

Now, I need to get back to putting the final touches on the pitch document for my new game: The [REDACTED].

I recently twittered "Corporate censorship kills creative innovation because some great ideas aren't seen as great until much later" but some people were confused, which isn't surprising given that I could have fully explained what I meant if I'd just used all 140 characters.

So to clarify, I'll do a full post but due to how I have MySQL set up, I'll need to keep to under two billion characters.  Hopefully that will be enough this time.

When I was talking about "Corporate Censorship", I wasn't talking about the relationship between a game developer and a publisher.  That's a unique relationship because one party (the publisher/employer) is paying the other party (the developer/employee) and I do think if you're funding something, you do have the right to exert some control over what is being made.  You are paying for it after all.  In a good and healthy publisher/developer relationship both parties respect what the other brings to the venture and they let the other do what they do best with minmal interference, but that's not what I was talking about.

Although my current frustration in this (soon to be explained) matter is directed at Apple, it can also be attributed to Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Comcast, AT&T or just about any other company that maintains some level of blanket creative control over a medium, whether it be the iPhone, the XBox, the PS3, a cable box or a printing press.

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According to Kotaku I've gone to work for Double Fine.  I don't even know where to begin with this completely unsubstantiated fact-less slanderous rumor... oh wait... my mistake... it's totally true.

We have a winner!!!

Thanks to everyone who entered.  I got about 4 times as many entries as I did for the last contest, so DeathSpank fever must be a full-on epidemic at this point with no cure in sight and expected to be reclassified as a pandemic by the CDC. I imagine that airports and train stations will be shut down to limit travel.  For this I apologize.

Some notable entires were: 6502, 1138, 625127ish, 42, pi, e, taco, plaid and of course several 1's and 1000000's and one 5,318,008.

The number I was thinking of was 334708.

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I've gotten a lot of email from people asking if I was involved in the upcoming DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue or not, so I figure I should clarify what I thought was obvious, but I guess not.  I touched on this a little in the Mix'n'Mojo Interview.

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