Troels Pleimert

JohnnyPhantom, a backer on Kickstarter, announced in the comments that he's planning a Space Quest Marathon in support of the SpaceVenture. It's going down here: http://da.twitch.tv/johnnyphantom Now there's something to tweet about. :) This post has been promoted to an article

Chris, excellent point. I actually had the good fortune to chat with Scott and Mark at the start of this project, and the subject of trademarks came up. The problem is, as you can probably guess, even though they don't technically own LEGAL RIGHTS to Roger Wilco, certain parties (something-vision, I forget) could easily cause a big stink if The Two Guys started making Roger Wilco games. Not getting on their bad side is also vitally important to the success of this venture.

Holy bajombers, that's some real dedication right there! Amazing, Johnathon.

Tawmis, you're much more organized than I'll ever be. I can't begin to tell you how many laptops, desktop computers, external hard drives, flash drives, USB sticks, internal hard drives and floppy disks I have mangled, broken, busted and irrevocably damaged beyond repair. Each time taking a huge chunk of valuable shit along with it. One external hard drive took away every photo I had ever taken since 1998. The last laptop that died on me took with it my half-finished project of replacing all the narrator lines in SQ2VGA. Stuff's not safe with me.

It doesn't say anything about The Two Guys on the page, and the audio file is 1 hour and 40 minutes. Is there somewhere I can fast forward to to hear it? :)

Check out this mohawked bicycle helmet my wife found. Found any real-life items that brought back Space Questy memories?

They might be holding off doing an AMA until there is more information to discuss. They just got the 1st Prototype Survey out there; stuff probably needs to gel.

Scott was also talking about why Germany didn't have an adventure game convention we Europeans could all go to. I'll reiterate that I would do a Space Quest panel for that in a heartbeat. I could bore everyone to DEATH. A virtual convention sounds like a lot of fun, too. Again, I'm thinking of the Hangout technology, but I promise not to harp on about it. I'm well aware there are others, probably a lot better, ways to do it -- I just don't know of them. :) How would such a virtual convention work? Apart from just being a big chat session, you could have individual Q&A sessions and a host of guest "speakers."

Aw, man, for a moment I thought you had done that for real. ;)

To be fair on that one, Paul Trowe of Replay has been a very vocal supporter on his Twitter (@ptrowe).

Someone on the Kickstarter comments said he was doing a playthrough soon. I'll keep you posted if he gets back to me.

I think a Q&A of SOME kind -- be it a Reddit AMA, or a chat room appearance, or whatever -- would be a positive step towards getting some interest brewing. I figure what we really need to breathe some life into the Kickstarter is to get some more concrete thoughts out of the Two Guys. If not screenshots or artwork, at least some thoughts about what the game is going to be like. Scott mentioned a parser/icon hybrid interface on Twitter, for instance. A Q&A session would be the perfect opportunity to let some of that info slip.

Amen to that, brother.

That's some uncomfortable Blair Witch camera work right there. Awesome. :D

Yeah, we'd probably have to have the "Parental Guidance" checkbox checked for that one. ;)

I like the idea of a bunch of us playing the games at the same time. Except we would have to agree to turn off the game sounds. ;)

Hangouts are a lot of fun. But you're right; maybe a playthrough of games would be better suited for something like twitch.tv. We could use Hangouts for other things; like a "talk show" thing where we could have special guests on for an hour or so. Only thinking out loud here. :) Hangouts are like video conference calls, except you can leave and rejoin as many times as you want (for as long as the Hangout remains open). People with webcams can use those. People who only have microphones can also join; they will just display their profile picture in the Hangout.

Yesterday, Daniel Stacey, Leonard and myself played King's Quest II VGA using Google Hangout. I just screenshared the game, and everyone in the hangout could follow along with what I was doing in the game. Maybe we could have a big Hangout where we play Space Quest games, or we all get together around one guy playing through all six of the games. Thoughts?

Me neither. It's clear as day, and it's been made even more clear in TWO updates. AND in the comments section. AND on the front page of the Kickstarter. The way I understood it, HTML5 would be used particularly when releasing the game for mobile platforms. Like most mobile games coming in the future. The big, stand-alone thing (which I think will be released on Steam) will be the grand smashing thing.

Great graphics, though -- you can't deny that. :P

Some fans (who all know who they are) are going above-and-beyond getting the word out about this particular Kickstarter. Yes, I'm being intentionally cryptic, and yes, you will see soon. You will all see! Aaah-ha-ha-ha ... (Ahem. That's not to say you should just lean back and let things run their course. Please, by all means, go tell someone. As in, right now! :) )

The "reluctant hero" aspect, definitely, is one of the key elements for me as well. Thank you for explaining that so clearly, Jess. :) That's what I meant when I said there were "similarities" between Roger Wilco and e.g. Tex Murphy, or Robert Foster (the protagonist in Beneath A Steel Sky). None of them asked for this hero nonsense, either, and frankly, they'd rather be without it and go back to sleep, if it was all the same to us. I think anyone who has had responsibilities they didn't want to live up to, or have been thrust into situations they didn't ask for (yes, life itself counts), can relate wholly to the Space Quest series.

The LSL guys did something really clever for their "last-mile push" against the goal: lowering prices for the top-dollar tiers. On the other hand, you don't want people to feel cheated or bummed out because they pledged "too soon." (And I still hate the word "pledge." Please let's find a better one. ;) ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2R12XxNnqw4 Thoughts? Hate? Orats-on-a-Stick?

Incinerations deserves to sweep next year's awards. If not, I'm buying a ski mask.

Holy-- er, shit, I've all run out of family-friendly expletives involving Batman and/or logjams. Spikey, quick thought: Don't all these tracks come out the other end as .WAV files? Upload those guys to BandCamp.com; they'll encode them into FLAC, MP3 and whatever lossless format you want, for your users to download. Fair warning: We've been secretly talking about adding a soundtrack section to the new SQN. We really, really (okay; I do) hope you're up for this, because your soundtracks are, pardon the expression, fucking amazing. One thought I wafted around was that we create a "SpaceQuest.net" profile with BandCamp.com and upload your special soundtracks as albums. That way, not only will people be able to stream individual tracks off the site -- AND we can embed the player in the SQN layout -- but they will also be able to download individual tracks or the whole album as a collated ZIP-file. SoundCloud is another option, but it doesn't quite provide the freedom I had in mind. I'm thinking, as you were on sierramusiccentral.com, about FULL FLEDGED SOUNDTRACK ALBUMS. Forgive me for being overly enthusiastic. But this stuff's just too good for me to listen to reason.