Summer of Retro 3.0: A Simpler Time (sort of)
Look, nobody in their right mind would claim the early aughts were particularly great in general, but for the Monkey Island fandom, those were the salad days. Young and innocent, the future looked bright, and… well, it came to a booming halt as we all know.
But enough doom and gloom! Let’s take a dive into nostalgia and see what the world looked like then.
First, “The Revelation.” Up until the end of Return to Monkey Island, many refused to believe the ending of Monkey Island 2 was exactly what it presented itself as. Which, hey, whatever, but as early as 2002, #monkey-island member, Ralgath, summed up what it all – ending and secret – “meant”:
It has aged remarkably well and has been restored with higher-quality images.
Let’s toss in another article for good measure. In 2005, Gabez attended a Ron Gilbert meetup, which resulted in a feature called “Gilbofest ’05.” An excerpt:
But before I could get my bearings Rusalka – known to many of you as Yufster – started shouting across the pub at me. “Do you know where I got THIS?”, she screamed, waving a small teddy bear around. I said I didn’t know. “Do you KNOW!?” she repeated. I said I didn’t know again. I was already getting a headache and was beginning to regret coming. “I didn’t get it in IRELAND” she says, nodding her head from side to side like a jack in the box. “I got it free with my SOCKS. Do you wear SOCKS?” I muttered something about having bad feet and sat down in the corner of the room with my back to the window. I figured that if there was a fire then I could just smash my way to safety leaving the others to enjoy Richard Neville’s fate. Maybe they’d return to haunt the toilets.
Moving right along…
We’ve resurrected the giant Mrs. Brinestoop link section for those who really want to party like it’s 2002. More than two hundred links – all going straight to archive.org, so who knows how many will work. Read all the appropriate disclaimers in the new link section for more on that. Worst comes to worst, we at least got an archive of a bunch of weird site names.
Finally, thescummbar.com lives again! Longtime visitors may remember that a 2002 snafu led to us losing our domain name to a squatter. That is why you’re reading this on scummbar.com. Twenty-four years later, and we finally got it back – turns out the squatter’s outrageous asking price didn’t get any takers. By my calculations, they would have had to pay around $360 through the years, so I hope it was worth it. What a butt.