This week, we had the opportunity to interview the former Telltale and current Skunkape developers Dan Connors and Jonathan Sgro about the recent Sam & Max remasters that they've been working on and, in the process, we couldn't help but ask the team about what's next for the studio now they have completed the trilogy.
This prompted an interesting conversation with the pair of developers, in which both men expressed a desire to work on more games in the Telltale engine, including Tales of Monkey Island, before sadly acknowledging that the ownership of the Telltale Games back catalog had undergone a bit of a change since they first signed the rights for Sam & Max four years ago.
The conversation initially came about as we were curious as to whether Skunkape would continue to operate as a studio primarily responsible for remastering titles in the future or if it would branch into original projects, to which Connors responded:
"Well, we've developed something that's really powerful, which is the ability to remaster games in the Telltale engine, and there's a lot of stuff there, but they all have tricky situations around them because it's not like four years ago.
"Now there's different ownership around a whole bunch of it, so we're trying to develop the right relationships there, because that's super interesting to us, and we're the right people to do it. I think the Sam & Max stuff has shown that. You know, aside from that, that's something we've got to figure out because everybody's too talented to not be working on something cool. So we just gotta figure out what it is."
When we told him that we'd seen people requesting they do the same for Tales of Monkey Island, he seemed particularly keen on the idea, telling us:
"Yeah like we would love that. That would be amazing."
He then went on to talk about the development of Tales of Monkey Island, acknowledging that there were some areas where Telltale may have had to rush things or abandon ideas due to time and that a remaster would allow them the opportunity to go back to the game and make it "sing":
"There are things in Tales that I think we might have rushed or concepts that we thought were gonna work, that we got to a certain point, and then kind of failed before we had fully executed them. And even on Sam and Max, there were a couple of those, and when we do this process, we can say, 'Those two or three last things that we wanted to do to make this sing, we can do now.' And I think that's one of the subtle things that makes these remasters so great."
Honestly, we'd jump at the chance to play a version of Tales with better lighting, performance, and various other tweaks on Switch or Steam, but we want to know your thoughts, so we've set up a quick poll below. Do you think Tales would benefit from a Sam & Max-style remaster? Let us know by voting!