Monkey Island pushed the adventure envelope, with characters who addressed the player through the monitor: LucasArts wanted to break the fourth wall and scrap the dead ends found in previous adventures. As Guybrush wanders around Mêlée Island, there are in-jokes galore (the name Threepwood is lifted from a PG Wodehouse story.
Monkey Island’s enduring originality shines through even on the title screen, soundtracked by Michael Land’s digital calypso. Then there was island governor Elaine Marley, a formidable swordfighter and unlikely damsel who had been kidnapped by back-from-the-dead ghost pirate LeChuck. Players took control of Guybrush Threepwood as he tried to prove himself a seadog, rubbing shoulders with some of the most bloodthirsty – and self-aware – buccaneers ever conjured in code: Smirk, a cigar-chewing fencing instructor, and Meathooks, a brawler with metal claws for hands. So Monkey Island took players to the 17th-century Caribbean instead, the place and time of Treasure Island. Ron Gilbert, co-designer on Monkey Island and various other adventure games of the era, disliked the fantasy themes that titles like Loom (1990) were relying on, and wrote as much in a 1989 article Why Adventure Games Suck.
THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND SOFTWARE
After my 50th wrong marker buoy on Cambridge Software House’s Mary Rose had me contemplating hurling the floppy disks away from me like a pair of swimming floats, I’d learn that there was a new type of adventure game on the horizon: LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island, which turns 30 this month.
These were the prototype point-and-click games, incorporating graphics into riddles and thinly disguised geography lessons. Educational titles such as Granny’s Garden and Flowers of Crystal were as compulsive as they were frustrating. A nyone who went to school during the Thatcher years will remember adventure games as something experienced on the class computer, typically a BBC Micro.
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