Hey folks. Some of you know me from my books, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, Shareware Heroes, and A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football [Soccer] Video Games, or from my freelancing days or my recent TerrorBytes documentary series with CREATORVC.
I thought a bunch of people here would be interested in my new project, a documentary film called Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story. It’ll be a behind-the-scenes deep dive and retrospective look at the SCUMM engine and all the SCUMM games — think Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig, Maniac Mansion, Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and so on. We’ll have interviews with 20+ genre luminaries, mostly drawn from LucasArts and Humongous alumni, of which we’ve already announced five (Ron Gilbert, Mark Ferrari, Tami Borowick, David Fox, Aric Wilmunder), and it’ll go game-by-game with segues into topic discussions like SCUMM University, SCUMM ports and conversions, cultural legacy, and so on.
The catch is that I need to show the film is commercially viable before I get approval from the powers that be to take it into crowdfunding and production, and for that we’re asking people to sign up to the waitlist/newsletter thing at scummdoc.com to show there’s real demand for it to get made. (You can also follow the Bluesky account I’m running for the project, but the waitlist is the main metric being looked at right now.)
But I’m also super interested in hearing what everyone here would like to see in such a documentary. What moments from the games and general topics would you love for us to cover in the film, assuming it goes ahead?
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