Lauded for a game design philosophy that focused primarily on player comfort and enjoyment, Secret stood out from its adventure game contemporaries (as well as its main rival, Sierra On-Line’s Kings Quest franchise) for incorporating a no death (or, at least, making death a rare outcome), no dead-end policy. But I digress – the best place to start, as always, is at the beginning.ĭirected and designed by Ron Gilbert (along with Tim Schafer and David Grossman), the first game in the Monkey Island series, The Secret of Monkey Island, was a ground-breaking adventure game title. Most games would kill to be as good as the worst Monkey Island game. I will claim from the outset that every Monkey Island game is worth experiencing, even the titles that have long since been labelled by hardcore fans as black sheep, or poor in quality.
It is a journey that takes you through over thirty years of licensing issues, poor sales, phantom reboots and speculation, all of which resulted in a grand total of five separate games. To explore Monkey Island in an in-depth manner is, in many ways, to explore the very history of point-and-click adventure games as a genre – their rise and fall, their place within the medium and the qualities that separated the good from the bad. These games really do span generations, each one taking the same set of characters and reintroducing them in new shapes and forms but, interestingly, always within an interconnected, linear narrative. I have no doubt that there are those even younger than myself (I am 27 now, hardly a spring chicken) that, through consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Wii, were introduced to the franchise via Escape from Monkey Island and Tales of Monkey Island, experiencing the series as late as 2009.
Perhaps you’re more like me, receiving your first taste of Guybrush Threepwood’s slapstick antics in 1997’s Curse of Monkey Island. Maybe you’re an original gangster, having experienced the first game in the series all the way back in 1990 and its sequel the following year in 1991? Or you could be one of those strange few who chose to not play any of the subsequent titles purely because the original creator, Ron Gilbert, decided to leave LucasArts in 1992. Having been around for a whopping 31 years, Monkey Island is going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
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