This seems like a good litmus test to quietly see if someone has ever used MSDOS -- tell the story with the "guy.brush" version, and see if the listener furrows their eyebrows and says, "Wait, I thought extensions could only be 3 characters?"
As others have already written: when I read "Deluxe Paint", I automatically assumed that the artwork was done on an Amiga, because when you think Deluxe Paint, you think Amiga (I wasn't even aware that there was a PC version until now, or maybe I learned it at some point in the past and then forgot it again). And with that assumption, having no limitations on filenames or extensions actually made perfect sense.
And BTW, that ".lbm" extension should actually be ".ilbm" (interleaved bitmap), same as ".jpg" should actually be ".jpeg". The MS-DOS limitations live on long after MS-DOS is no more...
While all my friends used pc paintbrush, I had DP2e on the PC. It felt very limiting when I was on one of their computers. I have nearly zero artistic talent, but could still turn out some passable stuff thanks to things like the perspective tools. I hadn't heard the .brush version before and just assumed it was guybrush.bbm
Too late to edit my comment now, but obviously if you were going to use that test, you have to make sure to make it clear (without being too obvious) that you were talking about the MS-DOS version.
Given that the story evolved around DPaint, most people knowledgeable of the era will probably assume that the artwork was done on an Amiga, where no such restriction existed. At least that was my idea of this story the whole time.
But... even if the artwork was being done on an Amiga, the game was being built on a PC. How are you getting your Amiga dPaint files over to the PC? Certainly not on an amiga formatted floppy. It’s got to go into a FAT file system before Ron Gilbert gets hold of it, so it’s not going to have a .brush extension.
They would know Monkey Island used VGA and 256 colors - not possible to do the artwork on Amiga.
Deluxe Paint was awesome. Brushes, stencils, spare, grids, multibrush / symmetry. It was really fast to whip up something, yet possible to pixel tweak as well.
Wolfenstein and Doom art was also done with Deluxe Paint as well IIRC.
A DP "brush" made for a character would have many fewer colors since most of the scarce color palette would be reserved for the scene art (the Amiga modes were also paletted). The character art would have been started at an early stage.
It certainly was possible on the Amiga, although I'm not sure if dpaint could do it at the time of making Monkey Island 1. At least later versions supported HAM modes and of course when AGA arrived it did 256 colors too.
Another reason why the Amiga to PC workflow wouldn't have worked: Aspect ratio.
The Amiga's standard 320-wide resolution was 320 x 200, while VGA used 320 x 240. These were both typically scanned to fill a 4:3 screen, meaning the Amiga's resolution had slightly tall pixels (DeluxePaint actually had an option to compensate for this when using round brushes and the circle tool, called "square pixels"). So artwork transferred from an Amiga to a PC would look slightly squished.
The resolution was interesting since it was different for NTSC and PAL: NTSC had 320 x 200 while PAL had 320 x 256. In practice games varied[1] whether they were full screen or had black bars in PAL.
As much as I am an old Amiga fan, that's not correct. The 4096 colors were the whole palette (3 bits per color -> 2^12 = 4096 colors), but you could only use 32 of those colours without limitations. And then there were the "special modes" (EHB with 64 colors, where the second set of 32 were the first set with half brightness, and HAM, where you could theoretically see all 4096 colors at once, but only with careful optimization of the base 16 colors). Plus you could use the "Copper" (coprocessor) to set a new palette for each scanline. Some games used all of these tricks (and more) to achieve some very impressive results, but I don't think cross-platform titles like Monkey Island really invested that much effort into Amiga-specific optimizations...
It was (as the article says), but I think it is very much known as the graphics editor for Amiga. I would imagine that more people will remember it as an Amiga tool than as a PC tool.
That's fair. I wonder how many dev houses at the time had amigas just for the art (as some companies do macs now), or if they kept uniform hardware and used the DOS version.
It didn't cross my mind and I used MSDOS based systems for nearly a decade. It did spark my brain about the 8 characters long limitation for getting a non-shortened name though.
I realize this is a rhetorical question likely intended to be a joke, but the answer as with most historical things you can find on HN was technical trade-offs that made sense for the time: for a file system intended primarily for floppy disks (where the total available space was likely reported in KiBs at most), it made sense for the file system to be as space efficient as possible. Directory entries were allowed (exactly) 32 bytes only, and after necessary metadata (last modified date, status flags, where the contents are on disk [clusters], etc), 8+3 (11) bytes (~34% of the 32 bytes) was what was left for the name.
For those of you who are looking for some context, and have an hour to spare, Ahoy made a great documentary on YouTube about ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ that touches on this topic. [0]
The source material linked in this thread looks to be more authoritative than the video, and if I remember correctly the video even gets this detail of the story wrong, but sometimes it’s nice to know the story around the story.
The closest we ever got was in a recent stream with Ron Gilbert himself (from https://gamehistory.org/monkeyisland/). Jump to 4:29:23. If only there wasn't a cutscene :-)
The interviewer was making a joke by abruptly cutting to alternate versions of the Monkey Island 2 "interrupting" cut scenes and Ron was playing along with the joke by implying that their conversation continued during the interrupting cutscene by coming back out of the cutscene's with garbled mid-conversation, one of which was essentially "...and now you know the secret" as if it was given away during the cutscene. (It likely was not, as again, Ron and the interviewer eventually made it clear the gag was a gag. Even if it were, it didn't make it to the stream.)
The stream is Ron Gilbert being interviewed about various fun trivia for Monkey Island and its development. While they do that, they show four cutscenes (one per map piece for MI2) that didn't end up in the final product due to size limitations. Also during the stream he describes that those scenes originally popped up randomly during game play but they change it to only happen when you exit a room.
So they randomly played those cutscenes during the stream and the one I linked ends and the stream switches back to the interview with the interviewer saying: "... so that's pretty interesting that this would be the secret" :-)
Actually I think the secret is probably a total let down. The MI games are (potty) humour kids games (which nobody in my country due to lack of language skills realized, and it felt much more mature and cooler than it was intended)
Well it is all theme park style (not too surprising since it was inspired by the pirates of the caribbean ride). MI1 : map seller, MI2: parents picking up the kids, alleyway like the alleys in MI1
Just wanted to pop in and share a few fun facts about Deluxe Paint, Amiga and Monkey Island.
Electronic Arts originally made Deluxe Paint for the Amiga, along with the IFF (Interchange File Format) standard and ILBM (Interleaved Bitmap), an image format conforming to IFF.
They released the first version in 1985, for the Amiga 1000. The last version was version 5, in 1995, though I'm not sure how much EA was actually involved with that one.
The first Amiga version they released that could handle 256 colors came out in 1993, designed for the then new AGA graphics chipset. It became such a favorite that Psygnosis (after being bought by Sony) reportedly used Deluxe Paint on Amigas to create some of the graphics for Wipeout. I also know of other companies that used Amigas well into the early noughties for creating pixel graphics for mobile phones.
Avril Harrison is an artist whose "A.H." signature can been seen on many of the example pictures that were distributed along with Deluxe Paint, including her rendition of Botticelli's Venus and the iconic Tutankhamun gold mask[1].
LucasArts, however, seemed to be using PC:s exclusively. AFAIK, Monkey Island was ported to the Amiga by another company hired specifically for that task.
At the time when Monkey Island I and II were made the Amiga chipset didn't have support for 256 colors. The maximum was 32 colors, plus 32 darker shades of those colors, in a mode called EHB (Extra Half-brite). Monkey Island, just like most other Amiga games, was made to run in normal 32 color mode.
Avril Harrison later started working for LucasArts and it's claimed the original art depicting governor Elaine Marley[2] is based on her likeness.
I actually remember that I read that story and wondered in my head about the extension length.
But I had two possible ideas what could make the story work. One was that maybe they just hadn't used MS-DOS. There were plenty of computer systems out there and I had no knowledge what they used for programming the original MI or even which one was the original (it was available on different plattforms).
The second was that maybe the extension was something like .brs as an abbrevation for brush, but they pronounced it brush and eventually took the pronounciation as the name, not the literal filename.
I think the video I linked in this thread touches on that detail as well, though I don't remember specifically or have a time index for you. Give it a watch though.
Could be useful in a murder mystery or something.