Happy Grinchmas!

Oceanhouse Media, a new mobile software developer comprised of a number of Presto Studios alumni, saw its newly released "Grinchmas" become an Apple featured game after it hit #1 in the kid's app category.

This follows the successful release of their other Dr. Seuss licensed app, the "GrinchCam".

The Journeyman Project 3 on Apple's Featured Games

Back in the 90's, Presto Studios was having very frank discussions about the viability of continuing to support the then-disappearing Mac platform — this was before Steve Jobs' return to Apple rescued the company from the brink of bankruptcy. Fortunately, Presto's last two adventure games, Myst 3: Exile and The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time were released for PowerMacs and later ported to Mac OS X. In a nice Thanksgiving surprise, the latter showed up on Apple's website for featured adventure games.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This loaf of cornbread would fit right in with turkey day. It's also perhaps the most elaborately hidden easter egg in The Journeyman Project 3. Here's a few hints: it appears in a remote location after successfully entering an alternate "unlocking" combination somewhere else in the same time zone. Regarding the combination, what creature would you most likely feed this to? This easter egg also triggers yet another easter egg as it can be used in place of another hard-to-get item to gain entry into a restricted area elsewhere in the game.

"Whack" An Egg

One player had found evidence of this easter egg in The Journeyman Project 3 by manually scanning through the source files on the DVD-ROM (which may be as sacrilegious to some adventure gamers as using one's hand to score a goal to soccer fans). However, triggering this specific hidden feature is not quite as simple as just pressing the "easter egg" key. Here is the hint: as Arthur compares this location to a carnival "whack-a-mole" game, what would be used to activate one in real life? (this may require a trip across time zones)

Arthur's "Naughty" Easter Egg

Our next hidden gem from The Journeyman Project 3 is an ad-lib by Arthur's voice actor Matt Weinhold that was considered a little too saucy for regular gameplay. This can be triggered with the "easter egg" key somewhere up in the destroyed El Dorado environment. Saving your game progress is recommended as there are specific "points of no return" in each of the destroyed environments.

Easter Eggs 101

Since most of the early birds who ordered The Journeyman Project 3 for Mac OS X should be receiving their DVDs by about now, we can share how a bunch of us on the dev team squandered the precious free time of our youth. By holding down the tilde key (near the top-left corner of your keyboard with the funny squiggle, usually located right below the escape key) on Macs, or the "e" key on Windows, you can unlock one of at least 17 once-known easter eggs in the game. By "once-known", that means we had once kept good track of them so that we could let the QA department know about it in case any of them might trigger an unexpected bug. However, it's been over ten years, so we'll dig up hints for these as best as we can for your gameplay pleasure.

This first one is fairly well-known: hold down the "easter egg" key (noted above) while clicking on Agent 3's empty JumpSuit when it first appears in the destroyed Atlantis environment. The result is a warning against leaving potentially embarrassing Halloween pics lying around imaginative co-workers.

Music fit for Time Travel?

We've gotten enough requests for some type of official re-release of The Journeyman Project music soundtracks, that we've started a couple of polls below.