Return to Monkey Island: Impressive 3D fan art about the scumm bar

That even convinces the old grumbler Ron Gilbert: 3D artist Marina Pais has on hers Portfolio page by Artstation Insights into a Monkey Island project granted.

Tribute to the famous scumm bar

She tweeted that she’s finally finished her 3D scumm bar fan art, which she’s been working on since Return to Monkey Island was announced in early April. With this, the artist wanted to celebrate the return of Guybrush. Now she will “miss visiting the scumm bar in my free time”. She learned a lot creating the artwork because she was able to work in areas that otherwise don’t get as much attention from her.

As an example, she cites sculpting to create the navigator’s head or the lighting, which encompasses a large scene and therefore required a lot of trial and error. “Glad to be able to give something back to a game I love so much.” Monkey Island inventor Ron Gilbert sees it that way too, because he grabs the tweet from Pais and shows his respect for the work. He finds the gag built into the 3D scene with the spelling mistake “perfect”.

Speaking of the scumm bar: Of course, insiders know that SCUMM is also the name of the game engine of the first Monkey Island games. SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion and was first developed for the game of the same name in 1987. The scumm bar appeared in The Secret of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island. The renaming to Lua-Bar coincided with the transition to the GrimE engine, which uses the Lua scripting language.

Recently, Return to Monkey Island developer Ron Gilbert showed that he hasn’t lost his sense of humor entirely. He recently quipped that the game “just passed the milestone of 10,000 reported bugs.” Previously, he was a bit thin-skinned in relation to the criticism expressed. There was a lot to complain about, especially with the new graphics.