Gringo: Who are you?

Remi: I am Remi Olsen, and I currently take care of the daily running of The Monkey Island Scumm Bar. I'm 24, live in Spokane, Washington, and have a wife and an almost blind dog.

Gringo: For people who get outside often, what's Monkey Island?

Remi: Monkey Island is a vacation resort in England. It's "an isle of peace and tranquillity, a place of historical and contemporary beauty like no other". It looks like quite a nice hotel. Oh, it's also a series of four 'adventure' games, produced by the George Lucas owned company, LucasArts.

Gringo: Why a Monkey Island fan site?

Remi: Good question. Monkey Island isn't exactly on the top of my priority list in life, but it's still a fun hobby. We try to add sections which will give people a lot of information about the games, like our media section, and our interview section, both of which are probably the largest ones out there. We also recently added a large fan music page, which seems to be popular, and have a large fan art section.

I still think our site is aimed mainly at people who wants information about the games though, more than the ones which concentrate more about fan-fiction and what not. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of sites of course, but it's just not something I'd be interested in doing.

Gringo: How many hits does the site get?

Remi: There are multiple ways to measure that. The most common method is to count sessions, in which we get more than a thousand hits daily. I'm too lazy to look up the average. This is how most sites measure traffic, but in reality it isn't a great way of doing it - if somebody visits the site twice daily, a few hours apart and with a different host mask, that'll be counted as two hits (a little piece of snazzy trivia there).

We have a unique daily visitor counter set up also, and we can get anything from 600-1000 hits there, on average (broad range, I know). It's a lot more accurate to use this kind of counting, but some sites, especially those with large message boards, which don't get a lot of actual unique visitors, aren't big fans of it.

Gringo: What are the fruitiest responses you get from readers of the site?

Remi: Most of the responses we get are great, and we get a lot of cool feedback and fan submissions (art, music, and even programs). There are always exceptions though... We have this article section, which is sort of a free for all, have your say or whatever, and anyway...this guy (we think he's a guy), who calls himself Captain Mystery, posts some regular articles there. He's kinda like the Monkey Island community's answer to Rush Limbaugh, nothing anybody should take seriously, and I guess he's kind of a fruit himself. Most people just laugh at him, or give him the semi-regular cussing out in the comments section, which is all fair enough. Some people take it a bit far though, and one even wrote an article for another site which pretty much was an all out flaming of the Capt'n.

I found it kinda funny myself, but when we published Mystery's response to it (yes, we give people the opportunity to defend themselves) the author of the original piece didn't take it too lightly. For some reason he found it unacceptable that he would receive a reply to his article, and he ended up posting some irate messages on a message board, and yada yada yada. It all worked itself out in the end though, so hooray for diplomacy, but I still wish some people would just chill.

Gringo: What do you make of other Monkey Island fan sites?

Remi: Most of them are cool, especially sites like Legend of Monkey Island and Herman's Homepage for Monkey Island. They both have very nice content, and especially MILegend has some really original sections. They're not updated as much as they used to though, but I'm hoping they're just in a lull or something. It happens.

On the other side, we have a few sites take themselves a bit too seriously, especially seeing that their content isn't that earth shattering great to start of with. For general LucasArts news, I like Mojo, and Adventure Gamers is great for adventure games.

Gringo: Approximately what percentage of people who visit your site are losers?

Remi: A very low percentage probably, although sometime they can be pretty loud, like Captain Mystery and the people who hate him. The normal people have a tendency to drown them out though.

Gringo: Do you have much contact with LucasArts (makers of the game)?

Remi: Not a whole lot. I've e-mailed back and forth a few times with one of the programmers of Curse of Monkey Island (the third game), but it's the guy who owns TSB who usually does most of the communicating with current and former LucasArts employees. I dunno... I guess stalking the developers, and then running around telling the world about it is just a bit creepy. We don't want to hassle them excessively.

Gringo: What's the typical week in the game's 'community' like?

Remi: I believe there are two community types. For type #1, which is the majority, I believe it'd look something like this:

1. Check out the various Monkey Island and LucasArts sites.
2. Post some comments.
3. Do some lose chatting on #monkey-island or on the various message boards.
4. Go on with life.

Then we have type #2:

1. Check out the various Monkey Island and LucasArts sites
2. Bitch about Full Throttle 2. "He's 3d! This game will suck! LucasArts just gets worse and worse!"
3. Bitch about Sam & Max 2. "We have no plot or screenshots, but this game will suck! LucasArts just gets worse and worse!"
4. Bitch about Monkey Island 3 and 4 being horrible since Ron Gilbert didn't make them. "The heathens! They just make the sequels to make money of the highly lucrative adventure games market! LucasArts just gets worse and worse!"
5. Jump on #monkey-island or on the various message boards. Create huge discussions about whether the moon landing was fake or not.
6. Repeat.

Thank god for type #1...

Gringo: You're supporting the Gringo for Senate campaign! Why?

Remi: I figured that he probably would do a better job than any non-fictional person in New Jersey. Hopefully the trend of fictional Senate candidates will spread to states like Idaho and Texas!

Gringo: Has anyone been in touch with you about it, wondering what it is?

Remi: No. I don't know if anybody has even clicked the link.

Gringo: George Bush: Idiot or idiot?

Remi: idiot. But his son is worse.

Gringo: Who's the best reviewer on LTM? What's the best review?

Remi: Gringo! He fucking rules. 'The Five Greatest Movies...Ever! is his best article, especially #2 on that list. I also liked the Jim Piddock interview.

Gringo: And who fucking sucks? Why?

Remi: What the hell is the deal with the guy who makes those One Panel Comics? They fucking suck, and my guess is that the author does too.

Gringo: The earth is round! MARK MY WORDS!

Remi: This is a discussion topic that would take hours to resolve in #monkey-island. Mark my words.

Gringo: Isn't LTM the best site ever?

Remi: It's the second best site I have ever seen! Ho ho ho!