The Monkey Island series has a rich history and fan base, with the first adventure game appearing on PCs in 1990. Telltale has recently revived the series in the form of downloadable episodic adventures on WiiWare. We sat down with Mike Stemmle, who has been heavily involved with LucasArts adventure games and is the designer for Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 3: Lair of the Leviathan.

Nintendo World Report (NWR): Guybrush Threepwood has been around for a long time, and he’s more talkative than most video game characters of old. How do you write new material and interactions for this venerable character?

Mike Stemmle (MS): Very carefully. It’s actually fun. Most of the people, a good number of designers on this project have worked with the character before. Dave Grossman (designer of Tales of Monkey Island) obviously did the first two Monkey Island games, I was on Escape from Monkey Island, and we’ve have people who have worked on The Curse of Monkey Island. So, for a lot of us, it’s like coming back to an old friend, and it’s been pretty easy to slip into the voice. For the old-timers, the problem is actually tripping up on our own dialog. “Oh, did I write that joke before?” Several times, I’ve had to stop myself from rewriting old jokes. The other half of the group is basically younger fans, often veteran designers who are fans of the game. They’ve never written any Guybrush Threepwood dialog, so that keeps it fresh. So, we’re getting a really nice mix of takes on it. This third episode is mostly written and designed by guys who have never touched the script before, and I think it shows. There are actually some very fresh jokes in there, not like my retread jokes. That keeps it going.

NWR: Related to that, are there challenges with keeping the dialog consistent to previous games?

MS: Dave Grossman, Mark Darin, and I are overseeing the whole season. What happens is that every script for every episode, after the initial pass gets handed around to at least one of us and somebody else who’s not even involved with the Monkey Island game at all to check it for relative consistency of tone, making sure that it’s consistent with the overall plot of the season, making sure that it’s actually explaining the game properly, which can be a problem with all of these little parts. We like to strike a balance between a general consistency of tone and letting the writers have their own voice. It’s even trickier with this game, because this is the first game where we’re doing it as a real serialized story, told in five parts, whereas in the past, Telltale games have been pretty much five of six standalone episodes. For example, you go buy episode four and it has a beginning, middle, and end. The episodes in this season have beginnings, middles, and ends, but we’re definitely having a really strong through-line through the entire season. We do want to have a little more consistency of tone, but each episode has its own partial resolution as well.

NWR: How many episodes did you have finished when the first episode launched?

MS: One. We had one. We do these in a very staggered fashion. We had the design for episode two in the bag and the game was half-built. Right now, episode three is almost finished, and by the time it is finished, episode four will be half-built. That’s pretty much how it goes. Design-wise, we pretty much had a design for the whole season by the time we started the first episode. Naturally, as these things go, the last episode was the least-designed of all of them when we started the season, and it’s finally in primary editing now. The design of the fourth episode was pretty much done three or four weeks ago, and we’re actually involved in voice-recording for the fifth one now. We layer them out, and that’s why we have different guys designing each episode. For other projects in the past, for instance the Sam & Max Season, we’ve had the same designer or two designers and writers trying to run the whole season, and I think it kind of destroyed their brains. We’ve had to take nice, long sabbaticals afterward. The approach we’ve been doing on Strong Bad, Wallace and Grommit, and Monkey Island has worked a lot better for us; we’ve run it much more like a TV show. We have these nominal show-runners over the whole season to keep track of the whole season, but only actually direct two episodes staggered over the whole season. For example, we’ll have one and four, two and five, and we have a special guest designer do episode three, which is really nice because the third episode is the “hump episode,” with the flexibility to move new and different stuff out, hence being inside of a Giant Manatee in episode three of Monkey Island, for example.

Chris Schmidt (CS): Compared to other Telltale games such as Sam and Max or Strong Bad, those games are all very self-contained. Monkey Island is the first game that we’ve done that traverses the episodes, so you’ll be using the same items in your inventory to help you. In subsequent episodes, you’ll often remember events and places in previous episodes to help you in puzzles.

MS: And along those lines too, we’ve got a character, for instance, who has a relationship with his wife that goes through some interesting gymnastics throughout the course of the season, and in the third episode his relationship with his new pirate/hunter/nemesis turns into a booming friendship as they’re forced to work with each other to get out of the manatee and then takes some other bizarre, unexpected twists, all of which lead to our fourth episode coming out a month later, which… well I can’t mention what happens next. It’s very cool how the parts come together.

NWR: Given that you develop in a staggered fashion, do you try to implement customer feedback?

MS: Oh, definitely. That’s the nice thing, even with our insanely rapid development cycle, even within that, we have time to react. We had time to react with the first episode about certain ways the dialog was being presented and those ideas got incorporated into the second episode. Sometimes even jokes from fans posting on the message boards somehow slip into my head, and we’ve got a contest winner from British Columbia (we had a contest after the first episode shipped) whose joke will be showing up in the fourth episode. Comments about the interface… our tools are nice and versatile enough that we can tweak the interface and little bits about the interface throughout the season to give them a better feel. So yes, for sure we do implement feedback.

NWR: How do you overcome the limitations of WiiWare to fit each episode?

MS: It’s very interesting to me; I’m not sure if I would use the word "limitations." It’s sometimes very liberating to have a box to work inside, because it forces you to be creative. Back in the day, when we were working on the huge SCUMM adventure games, especially once we got them on CD-ROM, we would venture out and make the games larger and more sprawled out than had before, and often times, the drama would suffer because we would, for example say, “I really like this puzzle over here. Let’s really throw a lot of resources at it.” With the space requirements of WiiWare, it pretty much puts us in a situation where we say, “Ah, this is important, this is important, this is important, one and two and three.” We’ll have big finishes, figure out how we’re going to make those work, and all the slightly less important stuff, we’ll say, “Okay, we’re doing work-arounds here. We’ve got to make this interesting, but focus, people.” So, occasionally you might hear people griping about the limitations, they’re really oddly liberating. You have to deal with it in chunks.

NWR: Have there been any technical challenges trying to convert the PC game to WiiWare?

MS: As far as I know, since I am not a programmer, a lot of the challenges we hit last season when we were doing the Strong Bad game involved just getting the engine into WiiWare in the first place. We got through a lot of those early. Obviously, Monkey Island is a bit more graphically-challenging, but in every iteration of the engine we make, we make the graphics engine more powerful. Frankly, I’m amazed in how good we can make this game look on WiiWare. There are always texture issues and all those little technical things in trying to get our nice-looking textures crammed down. We have great programmers; a very small, talented programming team that does a lot of very good work with our engine.

CS: We’re definitely pushing it to the limit in regards to technical limitations.

NWR: Now for some questions that are a little more about Telltale in general. In terms of gameplay, control, and puzzles, how do you think Telltale games have evolved since you began making the episodic adventure games?

MS: Well, I’ve only been here a year and a half, but with puzzle design we’ve started trying to push our boundaries with what we can do. We went into this weird extreme in Strong Bad where it’s like, “We’ve got to have arcade mini-games in every episode!” And frankly that really killed us because we had to build these one-off mini-games in every episode. We got a little smarter, and we’re trying to pick our little showcase moments in every episode. Now we go, “We could do a little different puzzle here that people really like and not just have the running around and collecting stuff going on.” We’ve got things like the face-off thing in this episode. I know in the fifth episode we’ve got some things lined up that I hope make it in. In the fourth episode I’ve got a couple of things the programmers are going to kill me over to implement that are going to be very nice. I think we’ve gotten smarter about picking our battles, and our change is the interface. As far as the interface goes, we’re constantly looking to do things that are appropriate to the license. We went pretty much scattered point-and-click in Strong Bad. With Monkey Island, we’re getting to the point where we think, “Man, the whole clicking, especially on a console, just to move around is not optimal.” This whole new steering thing, which I was a little leery of at first because I’m really old-school, but as soon as I started steering around, I was like “Okay, this is pretty easy. This is pretty cool.” And it actually makes steering a little more fun. And it allows us to actually do three or four new types of puzzles that are pretty simple, but you haven’t seen us do in games before. Things that require you to be in more proximity to things or being positioned in a certain area that causes things to happen. We’ll be seeing more of those puzzles as time goes on. I think it’s just a question of getting smarter and smarter.

NWR: Did you ever try to negotiate with Nintendo to sell together in a bundle a whole season of, for example, The Tales of Monkey Island?

Jacob DiGennaro (JD): The way Nintendo’s system is designed, they don’t do bundles, so it’s required that we release them episodically and release on a maintained schedule. There’s no way within their network to link them together in a package like that, so that’s where we stand right now. We couldn’t sell the season as a package and then have the episodes come to you as they get released, so we have to do them in individual installments.

CS: It’s headed right down the course for Telltale in that we wanted to make everything episodic. That’s what we were founded on, and that’s what we’ll continue to do; one episode per month and that’s what we’re trying to stick to.

NWR: On WiiWare, you’ve gone from the young, hipster license of Strong Bad to the older, classic Monkey Island. Are you finding that the audiences are completely different and are they giving you different kinds of feedback?

MS: Well, that’s interesting. You see, Strong Bad’s audience, I’m not sure is young and hipster any more. I mean, it’s definitely a hipster audience.

CS: Like old, out of college guys like me.

MS: Yeah. With Strong Bad, it’s one of those things that when I first joined up, literally the first day I showed up (thank God I had seen a few Strong Bad cartoons before I came to Telltale), they really said, “Here, we need someone to write the script for this now. Go.” So that was an interesting learning curve. It took me a while to get the fact that Strong Bad has a lot more in common with a style of Looney Tunes than you would think. It’s not quite as mean and sarcastic and vile as you might think it is a first blush. It’s actually kind of got a weird gentleness to its comedy. So in some ways it’s almost anti-hipster. So there’s that. But as far as the feedback goes, it’s interesting. I think the old-school Monkey Island fans, and actually both fan groups feel a sense of propriety in the characters because they’ve been following these guys for years. They have generally a passion about who these people are, and I think the Monkey Island ones even more so with a sense of “This character would never do that!” Things like that, which is cool because we can go, “Okay, maybe we did dial this a little too far this way.” Both fan groups have huge wikis detailing all of the continuity, which makes it very easy for us. *laughs* Yeah, I’m not getting much of a sense of difference of flavor. Both groups are big game fans, both groups are big story fans, and it’s kind of like dealing with Star Wars fans.

NWR: One final kind of off-the-wall question. Would you have any kind of interest in making an episodic sequel to Zack and Wiki? And what did people at Telltale think of that game?

MS: I have no particular sense, actually, what people at Telltale think of that game. Right now, I’m currently scheduled to do the fourth episode of Sam and Max season three. It’s about time I actually got to do a Sam and Max game that actually ships. So that’s what I’m doing next. And then we’ve got a whole host of other things lined up after that. I’m not sure what’s coming up. It’s hard to say what’s ahead, besides all of the things we’ll be coming back to eventually. Perhaps the Chapmans (creators of Homestar Runner) will finally be free again, I hope someday. Things like that would be nice.

CS: I’d like to add that Tales of Monkey Island Episode Three is going to be released on PC on September 29th and the WiiWare version should be shipping pretty quickly after that. I don’t have an exact date.

NWR: All right. Thank you everybody for your time.

MS: You’re welcome.

JD: Definitely.

CS: It was nice talking with you.

Interview conducted and transcribed by Aaron Kaluszka. Thanks go to Mike Stemmle, Chris Schmidt, and Jacob DiGennaro for the invitation and insightful interview! Be sure to join the discussion in the NWR Forums!