The Video Game History Foundation
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2023
5:38:11 · 71K views · Dec 1, 2020
A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.
Pointed to as a rare look at the real SCUMM code of a classic adventure game.
3 comments from Hacker News
Funny, I literally just watched a VGHF video of Frank Cifaldi talking to Ron Gilbert about the making of Monkey Island where Frank made SCUMM script changes and recompiled MI live on stream (sic!) [0]. I had no idea the VGHF even existed until 4 hours ago. I have been thinking a lot about (video game) preservation over the years and I'm excited to see there are people working on this with such dedication. With that being said, I'm not hugely thrilled about the interface shown in this clip, I think there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to accessing and presenting the actual data and metadata, but given this seems to be WIP I'm sure things will improve (and maybe it's better when you actually use it yourself). [0]: this video
Just to be pedantic, ScummVM is a re-implementation of the original SCUMM, which totally was an instance of this approach. There is a (crazy long) Youtube video [1] where they take a peek at the SCUMM code for the first Monkey Island, and hack it almost on the fly. Pretty good for a 1990 game. Of course, Infocom's Z-machine may be an even earlier example. [1] this video (the relevant bit starts at around 3:09:30)
The closest we ever got was in a recent stream with Ron Gilbert himself (from [LINK] ). Jump to 4:29:23. If only there wasn't a cutscene :-) this video