This is a collection of all the background art for every game adventure LucasArts made from 1987 to 2000.
Maniac Mansion | September 1987
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders | August 1988
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | December 1989
Loom | January 1990
The Secret of Monkey Island | September 1990
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge | December 1991
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis | July 1992
Day of the Tentacle | July 1993
Sam & Max Hit the Road | November 1993
Full Throttle | May 1995
The Dig | December 1995
The Curse of Monkey Island | November 1997
Grim Fandango | October 1998
Escape from Monkey Island | November 2000
For this collection I decided to only include artwork for platforms it was originally created for - so this doesn't include the Apple II version of Maniac Mansion (which reused the art done for C64), nor the Amiga or Atari ST versions of Secret of Monkey Island (which were adapted from the art done for the DOS VGA and EGA versions, respectively).
From Monkey Island 2 onward, every game's art was authored for a single platform.
As with the choice of which versions of the artwork to include, several things in this collection required judgment calls on my part. The raw art resources in the game data are often not easily presentable; they may have rectangular blank spots where animated elements are pasted in by the game at runtime, they may swap out palette colors, they may have several different states depending on puzzles the player might solve in each room or objects they may or may not have picked up. There is no consistent logic one can really apply to all these different decisions. I basically always tried to pick the permutations that best showcase the artwork, and in the event of a toss-up I just tried to pick the version that I found most visually interesting.
With the exception of the final two games, Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island, all the images offered here are in their original color depth: 16 or 256 colors, palettized or "indexed" color, in the PNG format. Most of the original art was authored in Deluxe Paint II's LBM format, but it should be straightforward to convert it here from PNG into other formats if you need.
All art from Maniac Mansion (EGA) thru The Dig were authored at 320x200 resolution, a "non-square pixels" aspect ratio. If you want to view aspect-corrected versions of this art on your modern display, try rescaling it in your image editing program of choice. Simply scaling a 320x200 image to 320x240 will produce obvious artifacts, so try upscaling by a factor of 3 or 4 (eg a 320x200 image becomes 1280x960) with "nearest neighbor" sampling (ie no interpolation) to minimize this side effect.
Aspect ratio correction is a big topic, though, with several different approaches to getting the best result. [TODO link] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/no-ms-dos-games-weren-t-widescreen-tips-on-correcting-aspect-ratio
Background art credits for each version of each game.
Maniac Mansion:
C64 version: Gary Winnick
NES USA version: Harrison Fong
NES JP version: Hiroyo Odachi
NES backgrounds sourced partly from https://vgmaps.com - thanks Jon Leung and TerraEsperz
Zak McKracken:
C64 version: Martin Cameron
EGA version: Mark J. Ferrari, Basilio Amaro, Martin Cameron, Gary Winnick
FM Towns version: James McLeod, James Alexander Dollar, Martin Cameron
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
Martin Cameron, James Alexander Dollar, Mike Ebert, James McLeod, Steve Purcell
Loom:
James Alexander Dollar, Mark J. Ferrari, Avril Harrison, Ken Macklin, Steve Purcell, Gary Winnick, Anson Jew, Michael McLaughlin
VGA enhancements: Mike Ebert, Brent E. Anderson
Secret of Monkey Island:
Steve Purcell, Mark J. Ferrari, Mike Ebert
Monkey Island 2:
Peter Chan, James Alexander Dollar, Steve Purcell, Sean Turner
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis:
William L. Eaken, James Alexander Dollar, Mike Ebert, Avril Harrison
Day of the Tentacle:
Larry Ahern, Kyle Balda, Peter Chan, Jesse Clark, Lela Dowling, Sean Turner, Ron K. Lussier
Sam & Max Hit the Road:
Larry Ahern, Peter Chan, Jesse Clark, Lela Dowling, Michael Levine, Paul Mica, Collette Michaud, Steve Purcell
Full Throttle:
Peter Chan, Brian Rich
The Dig:
William V. Tiller, Adam Schnitzer, William L. Eaken
Curse of Monkey Island:
William V. Tiller, Maria Bowen, Kathy Hsieh
Grim Fandango:
Ralph M. Gerth IV, Gaurav Mathur, John McLaughlin, Adam Schnitzer, Paul Topolos, Paul Zinnes
Escape from Monkey Island:
Kim Lyons, Bernard Eral, Shayne Herrera, Kathy Hsieh, Paul Pierce, Edward Del Rio, Jacob Stephens, Kristen Russell
Composing the final images was done with the GNU Image Manipulation Program. https://www.gimp.org Tools I used to extract the artwork for this archive: ScummVM https://www.scummvm.org (https://wiki.scummvm.org also proved an invaluable reference) NUTCracker https://github.com/BLooperZ/nutcracker LucasRipper https://web.archive.org/web/20150126000955/http://www.phreque.com/tobybear/lucasripper.zip found via this old thread: https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=13947 Scumm Revisited v2 + v3 http://jsg.id.au/scumm/scummrev Grimedi https://github.com/jlaw90/Grimja EMI Background Viewer https://quickandeasysoftware.net/software/emi-background-viewer scummrp https://github.com/dwatteau/scummtr scumm-image-encoder http://www.jestarjokin.net/apps/scummimg https://bitbucket.org/jestar_jokin/scumm-image-encoder