As a periodic PC player, I’ve always gravitated with great reverence toward the point-and-click adventure genre but felt that I’d missed the proverbial bus on them. Adventures from the likes of LucasArts and Sierra seized the hearts and desktops of fans and held them dearly from the late 80s through the entire 90s—no series more so than Monkey Island. This October marks the 35th anniversary of the 16-colour PC DOS CGA release of the series’ maiden voyage, The Secret of Monkey Island. To celebrate, I finally sat down to play through the 2009 rerelease, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, sticking primarily with the classic 256-colour aesthetic. It’s with great relief and confidence that I say this didn’t feel like video game homework. In fact, The Secret of Monkey Island is still smooth, fun, and more sharply written than almost any game written in the three and a half decades since.
In retrospect, The Secret of Monkey Island comes from a veritable adventure-gaming dream team of writers and designers at LucasArts: Rob Gilbert, creator of Maniac Mansion (1987) and its SCUMM engine (here again used); Dave Grossman, who would go on to write and design Day of the Tentacle (1993) and many TellTale Games in the late 2000s; and Tim Schafer, who headed Grim Fandango (1998) and later founded Double Fine Productions. Not only do they truly capture lightning in a bottle with The Secret of Monkey Island, but that lightning strikes again and again (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors) with subsequent LucasArts games in the 90s.
The design team has said The Secret of Monkey Island takes inspiration from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, though many story beats felt analogous to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Young protagonist Guybrush Threepwood wants to be a mighty pirate, and so he sets out on a series of trials across Mêlée IslandTM to prove himself. While honing the arts of thievery, sword fighting, and treasure huntery, Guybrush becomes enamored with the Governor of Mêlée IslandTM, Elaine Marley, who is spirited away by the wicked ghost pirate Captain LeChuck. Guybrush must acquire a (used but like-new!) ship and then crew that ship to pursue LeChuck to the mysterious Monkey IslandTM.
Danger is ever-present in such forms as piranha poodles and surprisingly health-conscious cannibals, though the way Guybrush goes about surmounting each obstacle is always lighthearted and subversive of what even adventure gamers might expect. To get into the Monkey Island mindset, it helps to think along the lines of Bugs Bunny and other cartoon characters. There’s logic to be found, but it’s silly, on-the-nose logic. Most impressive is the variety of puzzles. There’s a fair share of “verb + inventory” puzzles as you pick up everything from grog mugs to a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. My favourite puzzles, though, were through the dialogue, including haggling down the price of your ship, coercing friends and foes (“Pretty please with sugar on top?”), and the iconic insult sword-fighting scenes. Let me stress that this was one of the funniest games I’ve ever played, with silly yet charming humour falling somewhere between Airplane! and The Princess Bride.
One of the things I liked most about The Secret of Monkey Island, aside from finally getting in on the countless in-jokes and quotable lines, was how it winks at the golden era of adventure gaming around it. There are jokes and references to past titles (the SCUMM Bar or talk of selling “fine leather jackets” in reference to Indiana Jones) and then-contemporary titles (the “Ask me about LOOM” pirate), all while dialogue and puzzle solutions poke fun at the genre’s tropes. Now, I look forward to seeing how the gags established here continue in the sequels.
The Special Edition contains two versions of the game, instantly swappable with the push of a button. The “classic” version is the 1992 DOS VGA version, and the new version features hand-drawn graphics, full voice acting, a remastered soundtrack, and a handy hint system. I preferred playing the classic version for its evergreen pixel aesthetics, though I bounced between the two styles to see how the new areas looked and to quickload/relisten to the voice acting on certain scenes. The old music holds up well in places and is effective compositionally, though those old synthy trumpets are rather farty. The new sound design is richer and full of more ambience (and less dead silence) than the original, but the new UI is updated with console players in mind, and strangely hides the verb and item bar. I liked the new cartoony character designs in certain scenes, though during gameplay, characters look wooden and dead-eyed. I should have liked the ability to mix the old visuals with the new sound, or some combo thereof.
While playing in the classic version of The Secret of Monkey Island, you still have access to the progressive hint system (sans the big yellow arrow in the new version), and try as I might to avoid hints, there were places where I broke down and begged for clues. Strangely, putting a pot on my head was one of the things I solved intuitively with little pause for thinking, though I’m not sure I like what that says about me.
It’s worth noting that many scenes benefit from the old UI, like the rare instances requiring quick clicks (namely, transporting acidic grog and launching yourself with a cannon), and the off-screen fight with Sheriff Fester Shinetop, in which you read the ridiculous items Guybrush uses and adds to his inventory. At a five to seven hour runtime, the game’s well worth playing in both styles.
Among my few complaints are the RNG nature of collecting insults and their respective comebacks for the sword fighting—the uncreative pirates kept hitting me with the classic “You fight like a dairy farmer!” line—and the way some interactive elements in the environment were hard to see, such as that accursed hatch on the ship deck. Thankfully, switching freely between graphic styles helps mitigate this issue.
Knowing the reputation a lot of point-and-click adventures have for obtuse puzzles, I was a little worried going into The Secret of Monkey Island. However, new players of any age need not worry: this is not only one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time, but it’s also player-friendly and holds up in nearly every regard. Above all, its wry yet good-natured sense of humour thoroughly charmed me for the entire adventure. Like watching a great comedy, I see myself returning to Monkey IslandTM here and through the sequels.
