@mixnmojo Mark your calendars... I hear #Disney will release a new #LucasArts adventure game on Nov. 30. #adventuregames



(Really!) Click to expand...

@mixnmojo The #LucasArts adventure game in question from yesterday's tweet?



From what I hear... it's #TheDig, by #ProfBMoriarty. Click to expand...

According to this podcast interview, Brian Moriarty himself says that he managed to get his version of The DIG to a playable alpha stage before he left LucasArts.



My question is: does that build still exist somewhere.... and if so, might it yet see the light of day at some point? Click to expand...

Brian Moriarty ‏@ProfBMoriarty Apr 27

Finally got to Monument Valley. Eerie parallels to the unpublished version of a certain Lucas adventure ... Click to expand...

There is a rumour going around that Disney is working on remaking or finishing an alternate, so far unreleased version of The Dig, and is planning on releasing it on November 30th. This version was created by Brian Moriarty (famous for Loom and Fate of Atlantis) before moving on from the project later. The game that was eventually released was very different, and very much smaller in scale and ambition (made by a team led by Sean Clark). There is a lot of background information for this, so get ready:Some background info: the 90s adventure game The Dig (available on Steam) had a very troubled production. Based on an idea by Stephen Spielberg (but with very little actual guidance by him) the team at Lucasarts was under a lot of pressure to make a game worthy of having the Spielberg name on the box. What followed was a series of different teams trying to make sense of an increasingly messy product, and a lot of wildly varying versions were partly created and discarded along the way. The game that was eventually released was relatively straight-forward for an adventure game, and far less ambitious and strange as some of the earlier versions. Still, even though it was never as big as Monkey Island, Sam & Max or Day of the Tentacle, it has its own devoted fans to this day.Much more information on the troubled history of The Dig and some information about the alternate versions in this excellent Secret History from Mixnmojo: http://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-The-Dig/1 Now, the rumour. It comes from Mixnmojo, which as some of you may know was once (and might still be, although things have calmed down these days) the centre of the biggest Lucasarts fan community on the internet. A lot of its founding members were and are close with the people actually making those old adventure games back in the day, and some of them have moved on to working with those teams at Telltale Games and Double Fine (such as Jake Rodkin, who worked for titles such as Sam & Max, Monkey Island and Walking Dead at Telltale, does Idle Thumbs, and is working on Firewatch now) and Spaff, who is the community manager for Double Fine, among others.One of the biggest members of that community (who is pretty close to some of the oldtimers of the industry, including Moriarty) is ATMachine. People who are familiar with the Mixnmojo community know that he's thrustworthy, and has uncovered a lot of weird little secrets from Lucasarts past - like gathering never before released design documents, programming secrets or concept art and the like. Earlier, Mixnmojo retweeted these tweets from ATMachine.A couple of days ago ATMachine created this thread at the Lucasforums, over at Mixnmojo. The forums are pretty quiet these days (there aren't exactly a lot of Monkey Island games coming out anymore), but a lot of the veterans still hang out there.His post is too long to quote here, but he's talking about how he received some files from 'someone' (he won't say who, but remember that he's in contact with some people who used to work at Lucasarts) that gave a lot of information (previously unknown to the public) of one of the earlier versions of The Dig, specifically the version Brian Moriarty worked on. It's well worth reading. It seems very different, not just story wise but gameplay wise as well - unlike any other Lucas adventure (having much more team members you can order around (some of whom can harbour a grudge against you if you make them do things they don't want to), all of whom can die, you having the power to resurrect them or let them die, uploading their minds in robot-bodies and swapping those minds around - very weird stuff.)He later posted this as well:The timing of all this is very curious (only a couple of days later he tweeted about Disney actually releasing that version) and it wouldn't surprise me if Moriarty himself is actually the person who talked to him about all of this. He has shared information with him before for articles at Mixnmojo, and Moriarty has been talking more and more about remaking/doing possible sequels to Loom and his lost version of The Dig in recent months.I know most people here won't be familiar with ATMachine or Mixnmojo, but people on Gaf who are can vouch for them as well. ATM has always been big in the Adventure Gaming and Scumm community and tracking down forgotten secrets of that era, and he's not someone to make stuff like this up. On the one hand it would be weird for Disney to invest in anything new coming from the Dig (they have some other titles, such as Monkey 3, that are far more well-known and well-received than The Dig), but Moriarty has been pushing for something like that for a while now, and Disney has shown that they're more interested in doing stuff with the old licenses than people were expecting by allowing Sony and Double Fine to work on several remakes.It wouldn't surprise me if this is one of the secret Double Fine/Sony projects. They've said they've got several projects going on of which only Day of the Tentacle is confirmed, and they've said that they're 'probably' going to do more classic Lucas licenses besides that. Sony also confirmed that, as far as the Double Fine remakes sell well (and Grim Fandango did very well for them), they were willing to do all of them. And finally, when Brian Moriarty started talking about wanting to do more with Loom again a couple of months back, he said he would only do it with one of 3 studios: Telltale (who didn't comment on it, but who confirmed that they've left classic adventure licenses behind for now), Wadjet Eye (who were interested but said they could never negotiate a deal with Disney on their budget) and Double Fine, who did react very publicly and enthusiastically on Twitter. Also, eagle-eyed fans have noticed that one of the employees of Double Fine had Loom playing on his work computer in the last episode of the Double Fine documentary.That, combined with how Moriarty keeps bringing up his alternate version of the Dig in interviews, podcasts and talks recently makes me think something is indeed going on. Also, he's tweeting stuff like this now:The evidence (for now): flimsy, although the circumstances do feel rightThe person claiming it's true: thrustworthyThe chances of this happening: you decide