Thanks to the staffers at
World of Monkey Island, I stumbled across
an old TV program in the Internet Archive. It happens to contain rare video footage of several old LucasArts adventures in early, unreleased form.
Below are some of the differences I've noticed from the finalized releases.
Here, for instance, are two stills from the opening sequence of the VGA version of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It features a sparkling Lucasfilm Games logo, an effect seen in the original EGA release, but not present in the finished 256-color upgrade.
This animation was replaced by a pair of moving trains in the final VGA release, in an effort to incorporate content that was cut out of the 16-color version due to lack of disk space.
However, the sparkly Lucasfilm Games logo effect survives in the rolling demos on the FM-TOWNS releases of
Last Crusade,
Zak McKracken, and
Loom.
The main title. The copyright notice is for 1989, not 1990 as in the finished product. Plus, the copyright symbol is shown as
(c) rather than
©, and the last line is white by mistake.
Originally the VGA version was to use bold text over the characters' heads, as seen in
The Secret of Monkey Island and most other LucasArts games. This effect was ultimately discarded in favor of putting the text in the black border above the backgrounds, as in the EGA original.
The "LeChuck's Office" screen from
Monkey Island 2, in its original painted form, being touched up by an artist.
The early
Fate of Atlantis title screen, with a temporary copyright notice in a different font. Notice the year: FOA was released in 1992.
Placeholder dialogue was still in the script for Kerner's introduction scene.
In this version Kerner doesn't ask what took Indy so long to find the statue, so we don't get the mention of the Nazi's dubious alias "Mr. Smith."
Finally... *drumroll* ... a VGA port of the disk version of
Loom!
These two images from the game's intro have dialogue from the original floppy release, but the graphics match those of the later PC CD version. I guess company management thought the VGA floppy port wouldn't sell as well as a release with full voice acting.
