A Reddit thread has reported the sudden removal from Steam of a number of Disney-owned games, including the LucasArts catalog titles Afterlife, Armed & Dangerous and Lucidity. The reason is unknown, though being Disney and all optimistic interpretations are hard to come by.
Looks like there’s another YouTube channel you’re going to have to start following for feature-length conversations with people who matter around here.
That would be Ron's Computer Videos, and if you were unaware of his work until today, we share in your failure, and as such have a lot of catching up to do. Check out all the Mojo-pertinent interviews that have been conducted just over the last several months:
Beyond all that, we should point out the interview with Richard Moss, the documentarian (among about fifteen other occupations) who will be bringing you the SCUMM documentary Passport to Adventure.
In what we can hope is a sign of things to come, Ron has started updating his Grumpy Gamer blog with a renewed frequency. I mean, all respect to social media, but old-fashioned as blogging might be, some of us prefer to read actual content. That’s just what we are – old and fashionable. One more than the other. Anyway!
With his latest post, “Making New IP,” we get some hints of what we might see – and not see – from Ron in the future.
I have spoken to publishers and they have been willing to fund Thimbleweed Park 2, but they get rich and I get very little and have to do most of the work.
I am done with that.
From now on I’m going to make the small games I want and have fun doing it.
I’ve been in the games industry for 40+ years. I think I’ve earned that.
Hard to argue against that. Now go read, and check out some interesting Humongous Entertainment tidbits in the comments.
I mean, why stop now? We’ve ICYMIed it with four of the other games, so might as well keep the streak going with The Curse of Monkey Island:
And, seeing it’s our first post of 2026, it only seems appropriate to toss in a related CMI easter egg – Domingo wishing us all a “happy new year!”
So, that’s it then: 2025, a rollercoaster of a year. And, not an entirely bad one at that: games from Ron Gilbert and Double Fine, with new stuff on the horizon, and so on and so forth. Some might call 2025 Surprisingly Acceptable.
With that, we wish you a happy new year, and we keep our fingers crossed that 2026 will bring with it fewer evils and more good games. At least one of those seems pretty plausible.
Despite ambitions of regularity, our Cooking with Spaff series proved to be a triumph of quality over quantity. But it’s simply too prestigious a brand to retire, so when our own Kroms decided to take up a restaurant recommendation he got from Dom at AdventureX, the board of directors recognized at once that it had a spinoff to greenlight.
The result is Dining Because of Dom: A Cooking with Spaff Amuse-Bouche. Though it involves neither cooking nor Spaff, it’s still set in the extended culinary Spaffverse and as such puts us on the hook for crippling licensing fees. But that’s our concern. Yours is reading all about Kroms’ adventures, which prove at least one Mojo spaffer staffer is capable of getting a date.
As Benny already mentioned on the forums (Footnote: Better than LinkedIn, but come on.), a documentary about SCUMM is being planned. Apply your "Look At" verb to the project's Bluesky for more:
The brain behind Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story is Richard Moss, known most recently for TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming. How seriously he's taking his latest subject depends wholly on whether he's logged an interview with Captain Mystery, but it will neither pick your pocket nor break your leg to sign up for the newsletter.
Back in March, it was reported that Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, the project leaders of The Curse of Monkey Island among innumerable credits, were collaborating once again on a new graphic adventure game.
Today, Ackley has offered the long-awaited first details…on his LinkedIn. I’m not one to judge, but I definitely do in this case.
Anywho, here’s his post and the game’s first screenshot.
Let me introduce you to the star of our new comedy Adventure Game - "Blackout on Oasis Station." Meet REMLY. He's the butler of the most brilliant scientist in the solar system, the designer of the crucial water mining station on Saturn's moon, Titan. When communication between Earth and Oasis Station is lost, the Solar System Space Directorate organizes a secret mission to discover the cause. But somehow...it's Remly who is sent to investigate. Working with me on this game are my old "Curse of Monkey Island" partner Larry Ahern and independent adventure game creator Jordi PuigdellĂvol.
Even before you consider the Remi-baiting protagonist name, you can tell there’s real potential here. Stick with Mojo as it keeps you up to date on all things Blackout on Oasis Station.
It might be worth a passing mention that it’s been five years since we published our novella-sized memoir (Footnote: Which should be taken less as a sign that we’re going anywhere and more that we recognized our cognition was flagging.) as laundered through a retrospective of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, dead and buried these last twenty-one-and-a-half years.
It’s a detailed account of the prelude, life, untimely demise, and perceived legacy of the game as remembered by its team and the rabble that was anticipating it from the other side of the parapet, filtered through a gently mocking God’s-eye perspective of the whole melodrama. As a fitfully competent work of dork scholarship, it received courteous marks from Freelance Police project leader Mike Stemmle and scaled such journalist heights as to be recognized as standing among our best work -- which is to say that Cooking with Spaff #2 and Gabez’s Christmas contest still tower well above it.
You may find there’s more reason to revisit the The Unabridged History of Sam & Max 2 than arbitrary observance of an anniversary: As we threatened at the time, the feature has not been left sealed inside the partially lit cave of 2020. We have quietly sprinkled little additions over the years to incorporate the occasional dribble of information that came out of subsequent interviews and accidental discoveries. For as our sources expand, so does Our Knowledge™.
Speaking of sources: One sad thing to highlight is that with the Adventure Gamers forums wiped from existence by ruthless gambling interests (y’know, that old canard), a great many of our citations now stand as broken links. A certain number of these forum threads were already Archive.org snapshots, but others were direct links to the site’s hosted archive and are thus toasted. There may be measures we can take to improve that situation, though a cursory read of the labor laws indicates that even as disenfranchised a class as Mojo interns cannot legally be subjected to them. As all options are considered, you will in the meantime just have to take it for granted that we’re not making some of this stuff up, even though history has shown we’re not above it.
And as always, you must compulsively worship the Bill Eaken poster, available additionally in textless form. May the whir of plotter printers worldwide announce that lucky walls are being prepped for the benediction of this masterpiece. I mean, you know at the very least Laserschwert went there.
Her latest batch comes from AdventureX, where she managed to get some absurdly talented people into a series of quick interviews: Dominic Armato, Sir Charles Cecil, Dave Gilbert, and Jon Ingold.
Having inadvertently made it to AdventureX this year, I can also confirm that they were all lovely, enthusiastic, intelligent people, and that includes Cressup, who's somehow more charismatic in-person than on-camera. I don't quite know how; if any of their CVs were mine, I'd be a flipping diva.
Jim Ward—voice actor, not former LucasArts CEO—passed away on 10 December 2025 following health complications, including Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66.
For many, Ward’s most recognisable contributions to games come from the beloved Ratchet & Clank series. Mixnmojo readers may also know him from Star Wars: Episode I Racer, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, Escape from Monkey Island, and, of course, his unforgettable turn as Hector LeMans in Grim Fandango.
She loves me, she loves me not...
You can watch him perform some of his Grim Fandango lines here, alongside other members of the cast:
Jim Ward leaves behind a remarkable legacy of performances across games, film, and television that have brought immense joy to many, myself included.
Our thoughts and condolences go out to his loved ones.
The Alzheimer’s Association is a highly impactful charity that makes meaningful use of every contribution. You can donate on their website.
The Escape from Monkey Island 25th anniversary celebration continues, this time with yet another ICYMI article.
What’s covered? Actual covers, for one thing. And the Giant Monkey Head/Giant Monkey Robot, a topic so spicy it almost tore Mojo apart (even this morning). A vintage Shara Miller makes its reappearance. Plus, our trailer. Go read!
Of all games to go noir, Keeper might seem like one of the more unlikely candidates, but here we are. Keeper has, with its latest update, gone noir.
Additionally, the game now supports ultrawide monitors, and there is also a high-contrast mode. Man. Double Fine, they really do treat you doubly fine.
Things that are meant to happen have a way of happening quickly. After Cateia Games announced last week that they’d taken Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler! under their wing with a mind to improve the game, we thought a brief chat with them was in order, to get a better sense of what that might look like. In an unexpected surprise, Bill Tiller himself took the time to join in.
Read the full Q&A here and count yourself among the informed. You can follow the game's Steam page - or just read Mixnmojo - to stay that way as the updates appear.
Conflicting rumors, passed down through generations, spoke of a lost scene in Monkey Island 2 that spelled out the fate of Wally after Guybrush went and blew up LeChuck’s Fortress with both of them inside. Today, responding to a clamor that only his ears could pick up on, Jason “helpfully” brings together all of the evidence and comes to something he’s eager to fob off as a conclusion.
Look, we hate to encourage this kind of thing, but he went ahead and made the article, so you might as well read it.
If you run in the kind of circles that a Mojo reader is wont, you might have been made aware of the 2025 edition of the AdventureX convention, which took place in London about two weeks ago.
It particularly bears mentioning due to the appearance of Guybrush Threepwood voice actor, culinary artisan, and your close personal friend Dominic Armato as a featured speaker. Through the magic of cyberspace, you can enjoy his 45-minute presentation as if you were really there. And not being brought up by jackals, you know perfectly well that when Dom has something to say, that’s like a papal bull.
Other souls of interest were walking the floor during those two days, including some of the A Vampyre Story: A Bat’s Tale fellows and even beloved Mojo staffer Kroms. I assured him I wouldn’t do anything as indelicate as publicly oblige him to write up the event, but let’s face it: It’s the least he owes you.
You would have been well within your rights to feel secure that you’d heard the last of Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler!, the bite-sized adventure game (and an Autumn Moon production all but officially) that Bill Tiller conceived as a sort of consolation prize during the days when all things A Vampyre Story were held up by legal and financial woes. It additionally served as a maiden voyage for his newly-converted-to-Unity engine.
Though technically a spin-off of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, it was a self-contained little game that did what it set out to do (Footnote: Though the stated – and even partially designed – hope of further episodes was regrettably not justified by the sales.), collected an approving Mojo review, and bowed out.
However, forumer Threepwood4life observed that the game’s Steam page has twitched a sign of life today with the following missive:
Hi Everyone,
We're excited to share some news: Duke Grabowski has a new home! The game has been handed over to Cateia Games, and we're thrilled to have been chosen for such an honor.
Cateia Games is a game development studio based in Croatia, Europe. We've been making games since 2003 and are passionate point-and-click adventure fans. One of our most well-known adventure game is Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World.
We've taken over Duke Grabowski because we want to improve it and ensure it reaches as many adventure fans as possible. We have big plans for the game in 2026, which will unfold through a series of updates.
The first update will upgrade the game to the latest version of the Unity engine, which will bring back MacOS support, as well as better visuals and support for higher resolutions. The game's source artwork was actually created in higher resolution than what's currently available on Steam, and we plan to incorporate that in one of the upcoming updates.
If you've followed our work before, you'll know we take pride in maintaining all our games indefinitely, which now extends to Duke Grabowski. Meaning that from now on, in addition to new features, we will also fix any reported issues and update the game (even small ones like typos).
It will take some time for us to get fully acquainted with the game's source code, so you can expect the first update in Q1 / 2026.
In the meantime, feel free to share any suggestions for features you'd like to see, or report any issues you've encountered while playing. We will also be going over every forum post and every review to collect as much feedback as possible.
We're looking forward to interacting with all of you and making the best possible version of Duke Grabowski !
So, okay, the game changed publisher hands and is getting an update. Not the most earth-shattering announcement in the world, and a far cry from any suggestion that the game’s continuation is back on the table, but it’s nevertheless news about Duke Grabowski, and who the heck saw that in the tea leaves?
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Escape from Monkey Island, an occasion we have celebrated more fervently by newsletter than via the front page, because being innovators is not about deferring to what's obvious.
Your patron saint of longform LEC interviews, Daniel Albu, isn’t exactly sitting this out either. Daniel had already interviewed Chris Miles (the game’s art director, as you may recall) just this summer, but they join forces again for a playthrough of the game. Two hours gets them up to the Lucre Island lawyers, but that provides plenty of memory-jostling opportunities for Chris. Enjoy:
