The folks behind ScummVM, the popular tool for making your old computer games playable on modern machines, have announced that a new game is now available for public testing.
Muppets Treasure Island is an Activision-developed title based on the 1996 children's film of the same name. It features a mixture of animated backgrounds and live-action actors (and muppets) and is played using a first-person point-and-click interface. Much like the original film, and the Robert Louis Stevenson novel it was based on, the plot of the game sees Jim Hawkins come into possession of a map leading to Captain Flint's treasure, before forming an uneasy alliance with the "one-legged man" Long John Silver (played here by Tim Curry).
It received some strong reviews from entertainment sites back in 1996, with Entertainment Weekly's Bob Strauss giving it an "A" and concluding:
"There are literally hundreds of point-and-click computer games for kids, but I can’t think of any that match the depth, ingenuity, and humor of Muppet Treasure Island."
According to ScummVM's announcement, it is the second game built using the multimedia game-creation tool mTropolis to be supported, following Rocket Science Games' 1996 title Obsidian (which was put into testing last August).
Currently, ScummVM supports the Windows CD-ROM release of Muppets Treasure Island (in English, Spanish, and Italian), as well as the English Macintosh CD-ROM. In order to play it, you'll need access to the files on these discs, as well ScummVM's daily development builds.