Maupiti Island

Français

Investigating a 1991 detective game, from the inside.

Maupiti Island is a detective adventure by Lankhor, starring Jérôme Lange, known for its talking characters. A storm drives Lange to a small Indian Ocean island where a young woman has vanished, and he has about a day and a half to find out why.

This site rebuilds the game from its PC files: the story its authors hid in the data, how to win, and how every part of it works.

Everything below reveals the plot. If you want to solve the mystery yourself, play first.

The story and its characters

Read the reconstruction

What really happened before the game starts, who everyone is and what they want, and who killed Juste. Each claim is labelled by how solid it is.

Solution walkthrough

Read the walkthrough

The shortest winning route, the médaillon, the water puzzle, a detective's playthrough that finds the evidence for each of the 19 quiz answers, and everything that can kill you.

Technical appendix

Open the appendix

All the findings, with their evidence:

• The two programs: How maup.exe and MAUPITI1.EXE share the work, start up and talk through INT 0FEh.
• Game logic: Commands, time, conversations, what decides each sentence, sympathy, the ending.
• File formats, scenes and palettes: Archives, the image format, how a scene is layered, the exact VGA palette system.
• The compression codec: Adaptive Huffman and LZ77.
• Video: Pages, the sprite sheet, blitters, adapter code.
• Text and fonts: Glyph coding, 5-bit strings, text banks, proportional fonts.
• Speech: The famous voice: data, driver rules, playback, and a text-to-speech tool.
• Naming: Names across the IDA and Binary Ninja databases.
• Refuted claims: What was believed and then disproved.
• Open questions: What is still unknown.
• Gallery: every scene, portrait, document and icon, and the voices. Hear Juste, or the game's first stored line.

How this was done

The findings come from disassembling maup.exe and MAUPITI1.EXE, and from running their routines in an emulator to compare with the rewritten tools. The image decoder and the speech decoder match the game's own code; four scenes match in-game screenshots. The end of the walkthrough, from the well to the final text, and the piano have been played in the game; what's still unknown is listed under open questions.

Maupiti Island is © Lankhor. The pictures, text and voices here are extracted from the game.