GA101 - The Secret of Monkey Island

From thecrankyhermit

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LucasFilm Games was originally founded in 1982 by George Lucas, as an attempt to branch the film studio into video games with the help of publishers such as Atari and Epyx. After their first adventure game, an adaptation of LucasFilm's movie Labyrinth, employees Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick were assigned to create an original game. Drawing thematic inspiration from horror B-movies, adventure game conventions and techniques from Sierra's King's Quest series, and basing the game world's layout on Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, they created Maniac Mansion, a horror-comedy adventure game, which LucasFilm self-published in 1987.

Maniac Mansion was the first game to use the famous SCUMM engine, which stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion," and would be used in-house to create adventure games for the next ten years. While most contemporary games were controlled with a text interface, and several entirely text-based, SCUMM introduced a point and click interface, which distilled all possible actions down to 12 different verbs, which could be clicked on to generate commands. In a text-based game, the player may have had to type "unlock door with silver key." SCUMM's equivalent command was to click the "unlock" verb, followed by clicking on the image of a locked door, and finally clicking on the silver key in the inventory. This eliminated the need for typing commands, or using the keyboard at all, which Ron Gilbert had felt was an awkward compromise in graphic adventure games.

The SCUMM engine allowed for other things as well. It allowed game designers to program the mansion's residents as characters, who have their own dialog, can wander the mansion on their own accord, will react to the player's actions, and even have scheduled events. SCUMM also pioneered cut-scenes - a term Ron Gilbert coined while creating the engine. At various points in the game, an event will occur which is important to the plot, and the game will suddenly interrupt the current scene, take away your control, and cut to the scene of said event, which advances the plot and/or provides you with important information. Afterwards, it cuts back to the scene where you were last playing, and gameplay resumes. This technique is the de facto method of delivering story content in the context of gameplay today, but at the time, any substantial non-interactive movie scenes in adventure games only occurred during the game's intro or ending, and the majority of games told their plots through the instruction manual.

LucasFilm continued to make SCUMM powered adventure games for the rest of the 80's.These were experimental years, as each game took an approach that was never really attempted before, with some aspects carried over to the next game and others discarded. These titles had a much greater scope than Maniac Mansion's 36-room house, and had a progressively more linear, more focused, and more forgiving design. Possibly the most notable innovation was the expanded dialog system of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Conversations could be initiated by yourself or another character, and would come to nodes where you could choose a conversation starter or response from a list, potentially taking the conversation down one of many possible paths and ultimate outcomes.

These experiments culminated in The Secret of Monkey Island, which was released in 1990, with Ron Gilbert returning as lead designer, cartoonist Steve Purcell (who had produced cover art for previous games) serving as lead artist, and newcomers Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman as writers. Featuring far more plot and dialog than previous games, meticulous design, a distinctly surreal artwork style, and a quirky, charming theme, The Secret of Monkey Island was the beginning of not just one of the best series of all time, but the beginning of LucasArt's stride. Throughout the 90's, LucasArts produced timeless adventure game after timeless adventure game, all consistently excellent to a standard that no developer in the history of gaming has been able to match. Monkey Island is where this streak of adventure game classics started.

Set in the 17th century Spanish Main, you play as Guybrush Threepwood, a pirate wannabe. Arriving at the shores of sparsely populated Mêlée Island, you embark on a quest to prove your worth as a buccaneer. You must master the arts of piracy, gather a ship and crew, set sail to the eponymous Monkey Island, and ultimately vanquish the feared pirate captain LeChuck. While the game bills itself as a pirate themed adventure in the style of countless action/adventure novels and films, it quickly becomes clear that this is one of the wittiest parodies ever seen in a game. Characters are colorful and lively, conversations are often hilarious, situations are absurd, and yet, the humor is subtle enough that the story is engaging, and the setting is rich and atmospheric.

The standard adventure game template is instantly recognizable today. You assume the role of a protagonist in a linear or semi-linear story. The story has a distinct setting, and the game world is carefully crafted to immerse you in the setting - the concept of "levels" that is ubiquitous to action games is arbitrary and irrelevant in adventure games. Gameplay and story are tightly integrated. The story is told gradually and throughout the game, delivered by dialog, cut-scenes, and often through subtler narrative devices as well. Gameplay is driven by exploration, dialog with other characters, collecting inventory items, and solving puzzles through these mechanics. The Secret of Monkey Island wasn't the first game to do any of these things, or even the first LucasArts title to try, but it may very well be the first game to do all of these things, and do them very well. The writing is consistently excellent, with dialog that is sharp and witty. Characters have distinct personalities that are expressed through not just dialog, but in their animations, facial expressions, and gestures. The setting is both familiar and unique, and contributes to the narrative with its detailed environments. Puzzles are challenging and often require lateral thinking, and yet blend well into the game's context and never feel arbitrary or too illogical. All of this is delivered in a structure that is linear enough that you will always know what your short-term objectives are, and yet open enough that you are rarely at risk of getting stuck on a single puzzle.

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The draw to adventure games has always been about exploring a world. A distinctive setting is therefore vital to any adventure game, and Monkey Island broke ground with its world of cutthroats and bushwhackers. Drawing influence from a variety of sources ranging from Treasure Island to Disneyland (and perhaps a bit of Sid Meier's Pirates!), Monkey Island fully realizes its genre, and pokes fun at its cliches while embracing them. Mêlée Island is eternally dusk, lit only by candles and moonlight, covered with thick forests, and the few settlements are dirty and run down. Its pirate denizens are a rabble of foul smelling, grog swilling, unwashed brutes, with outlandish, colorful garb, battle scars, eye patches, and awesome hats. The uncharted Monkey Island, devoid of any pretense of civilization, is bright, colorful, and with a variety of tropical terrains ranging from dense vegetation to a volcanic mountain. Lending plenty of flavor to the setting is the soundtrack, which is made up of whimsical, Carribean-styled themes, and is one of the most recognizable soundtracks in PC gaming history.

But the other draw to adventure games is their in-game narrative - the story, the writing, the dialogue, and often intangible details embedded in the setting. This aspect was not always the focus of the genre, and during the formative years it was often a neglected aspect. Adventure games at around the time of Maniac Mansion had started shifting from open-world treasure hunts to puzzle-driven narratives, and LucasArt's earlier games went with that flow - they went from the occasional cut-scene in Maniac Mansion to being practically one continuous cut-scene in Loom. But with Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman all contributing to the writing of Monkey Island, its quality surpassed everything that came before it. All speaking characters, from bumbling hero Guybrush Threepwood to the vegetarian cannibals, are fleshed out, developed, and have several pages worth of incredibly witty and clever dialog. The SCUMM engine provides dialog trees - now a common feature in games of several genres - which provides a surprising amount of replay value as dialog lines can vary depending on your current or earlier choices of words. Occasional anachronisms, such as Stan the "used ship salesman" and pop culture nods satirize pirate genre conventions, while fourth wall-breaking gags such as the famous mansion burglary, Guybrush addressing the player, and the infamous (and possibly endangered, thanks to re-releases) stump joke satirize conventions of gaming itself. But behind the endless jokes is an entertaining adventure story with buried treasure, sword duels, sea voyages, voodoo, and a cursed ghost ship of nefarious pirates, and it's a testament to the talents of the writers that it works both as an adventure and as a vehicle for humor.

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But of course, Monkey Island is also famous for another innovation that would become a LucasArts staple, and a common feature of the genre - gameplay without the possibility of death or unwinnable situations. Adventure games of the era were deadly affairs and would frequently kill your character for making mistakes, or even seemingly randomly. An even worse scenario was the possibility of rendering the game impossible to complete, but without explicitly telling you. A common occurrence would be failing to collect a vital inventory item, and then progressing into the game past the point where it is possible to go back and retrieve said item, which would result in a dead-end when you reached the puzzle that the inventory item was needed to solve. Sierra is particularly notorious for having both of these in their adventure games, though perhaps unfairly - during their "deadly" era, all of their contemporaries were also punishing by design (some much more so), including LucasArts. The possibility of death or failure was, at the time, an expected part of adventure games, and players typically kept multiple save slots as a contingency for such events.

LucasArt's first game to buck the trend of unforgiving gameplay was Loom, but it did this at the expense of gameplay. Loom had no inventory, and therefore no possibility of forgetting inventory items, and also remains LucasArt's most linear game of all time, ensuring a tightly controlled playthrough with no possibility of skipping vital parts. The Secret of Monkey Island brought back inventory puzzles and semi-open gameplay, but everything is carefully designed so that you can't die or otherwise screw up the game (save for an Easter egg and a dead-end situation you could only reach on purpose). To achieve this, the designers had to look at the standard walkthrough, and then think of every possible deviation from that walkthrough, and ensure that no possible deviation could ever result in a dead-end. For instance, on Mêlée Island, you will collect a rubber chicken which is needed to reach Monkey Island. But by the time you need it for this purpose, you are on a ship miles from Mêlée, and there is no possibility of returning. So to prevent the possibility of needing the rubber chicken and not having it, the designers made it a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, and added an obstacle to a vital location in Mêlée that you can't reach without using a pulley. As a result, it is impossible to leave Mêlée without collecting the rubber chicken first, and you can't get stuck at sea without it.

This absence of death and dead-ends makes the game inviting to newcomers of the genre, and eliminates major potential frustration. It also encourages exploration and experimentation. You can wander the game's rich world without the risk of getting jumped and killed by bloodthirsty pirates, you can use the branching dialogue system without fear of saying the wrong thing, you can deliberately provoke the locals just to see how they react, and you can toss inventory items into a cauldron without worrying that you might need them later. This design philosophy became a LucasArts trademark - of the nine adventure games they would develop next, only one (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) had the possibility of ending the game with the player's death, and none had the possibility of dead-ends. This approach made the genre more accessible to casual gamers, and was massively influential to the genre - Sierra and other developers gradually made their games more forgiving, and eventually no-death gameplay became standard in the genre, and dead-ends, even ones resulting from obvious player mistakes (such as pressing a button labeled "DO NOT PRESS" which disintegrates your inventory items but doesn't end the game) were treated as unacceptable.

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The Secret of Monkey Island isn't perfect - of the four chapters, the first has the bulk of the good ideas, the second and fourth are very short, and the third feels padded at times. The next two games in the series would feature better writing, better artwork, better music, better humor, better puzzles, and better plot, as would other future games by LucasArts. But it is still one of the best games in its genre - all of the ideas and concepts of adventure games we expect today can be seen here in a mature and developed form. As the first adventure game to follow the now standard template, and as a really well designed and written game, with forgiving gameplay and puzzles that err on the easy side, and as a sign of even better things to come, The Secret of Monkey Island is the perfect introduction to the genre.

LucasArt's early years can be seen as a build-up to perfecting the adventure game formula. Gimmicks and experiments came and went, and with Monkey Island, everything clicked. It's this style that adventure games emulated throughout the 90's, and still do, to the extent that these games are being made. What's more is that elements of the genre are now present in many genres. At a time when narrative in games was rare, adventure games built a genre around the concept, and pioneered methods of delivering it. The term cut-scene, now ubiquitous to video games of all genres, was coined by Ron Gilbert when developing Maniac Mansion. The dialog trees, first seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and perfected in Monkey Island, are staples of RPGs, and can be found in many action games as well.

Yet, these innovations were more incremental than revolutionary, and almost all of them had been tried before. A visual point and click interface had been used before in ICOM's MacVenture series, but LucasArts successfully combined one with a animated scene with moving characters and interactive objects. Pac-Man had animations in between levels approximating cut-scenes, but it wasn't until Maniac Mansion that scenes would interrupt gameplay in a manner that seemed natural and that furthered the narrative. Ultima V even had dialog trees, but Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade expanded its keywords into fully written dialog, and combined it with a graphical interface that removed any need to guess what topics you could discuss with any given character. And when their innovations failed, their games still had high production values, compelling stories, and great humor, and remained enjoyable anyway.

Adventure games pioneered the concept of having a cohesive world to explore, where every pixel of every screen was drawn for artistic purposes, as opposed to action games which had a series of discrete "levels," with design constrained by game mechanics. All of these things left their mark on gaming, and LucasArt's games, with their incremental innovation, emphasis on accessibility, and excellent execution, are an ideal way to see where these ideas came from.

I recommend playing the CD-ROM DOS version. If you have the Special Edition, play it in "original" mode first. The new artwork is a mixed bag, and doesn't really convey the same atmosphere that the original had. The updated character design is atrocious too.

Beginner tips:

  • Move the mouse cursor over the scenery carefully to identify points of interest.
  • Talk to everyone. Look at everything. Every puzzle has a logical solution, but sometimes the logic depends on clues you can only reveal by being diligent about observation, and sometimes the clues are very subtle.
  • When you reach the Scumm Bar, do not leave until you have found a pot, a hunk of meat, and a fish.
  • The shopkeeper is the most important character in the first chapter. You need his help in solving all three trials, and once those are done, you need his help to acquire a ship.
  • Otis mentions he was arrested for picking "Caniche Endormi" flowers. This name is a clue.


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