By Brad Cook

Little did designer Ron Gilbert know that a funny adventure game released in 1990 would become a seminal work demanding the release of a Special Edition. He was simply searching for something new when he drew on his enjoyment of Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean Ride and the 1988 pirate fantasy novel On Stranger Tides. The former provided ambience, while the latter supplied the game’s take on voodoo and magic.

“Pirates were horrible people you’d never want to meet in real life, let alone play a game about,” Gilbert acknowledges. That thought led him to temper his initial sources with a healthy dash of lighter influences. He continues: “Monty Python is a great influence on my humor in general and a lot of people have commented that the humor of Monkey Island feels like it. I also grew up watching shows like SCTV and the original Saturday Night Live and listening to Steve Martin stand-up records.”

Who Wants to be a Pirate?

That style of humor’s bread-and-butter is the everyman who finds himself in situations full of funhouse mirror caricatures. In The Secret of Monkey Island, that protagonist is hapless Guybrush Threepwood. “I wanted him to know nothing about the world he was entering because the player wouldn’t either,” Gilbert explains. “I always hated games that cast the player in the role of some professional, like a policeman, and then punish them because they don’t know police procedure.”

He adds: “I wanted Guybrush to be as lost as the player was, so they would learn together. From that came the opening line of the game: ‘Hi, I’m Guybrush Threepwood and I want to be a pirate.’ That laid out the entire game in one sentence.”

As you revisit Guybrush’s adventures — insult swordfighting! the Men of Low Moral Fiber! a quest to save the beautiful Governor Elaine Marley from the clutches of the undead pirate LeChuck! — you’ll experience his tale in new ways, thanks to updated, hand-painted art in widescreen resolution, a re-recorded and remastered musical score, and new voice recordings that replace the previously-unspoken dialogue. If you ever feel nostalgic, you can flip between the new and old versions on the fly, even in the middle of the action.

“I wasn’t involved in the Special Edition,” Gilbert says, “but they did show it to me toward the end of production and I was very impressed with the care they had taken with it.”

Seeking the Bottlenecks

The LucasArts team also streamlined the game’s interface — enabling you to summon the command menu when needed, rather than having it take up a large chunk of screen space — and introduced a three-level hint system that points the way to go with a large yellow arrow on its highest setting. If you’re new to adventure games, you may appreciate a nudge in the right direction while pondering a puzzle.

Asked for his puzzle design philosophy, Gilbert responds: “I usually start with the problem and work backwards into the solution. I also create these huge charts that fill up whole walls and show how every puzzle interconnects. That way I can see how the whole thing flows, where the bottlenecks are, and how many choices the player has at any one time.”

He adds: “As for the difficulty of any one puzzle, I don’t know how to decide if it’s too hard or too easy. There have been many times when I have created a puzzle only to later find out it’s too easy and add a new layer, or that it’s too hard and remove one. It’s a very fluid process.”

Of Doom and Rubber Chickens

Looking back on his time at LucasArts and the classic adventure games he helped create, Gilbert says that initial burst of activity in the genre began to fade in the 90s because of the rise of the first-person shooter, led by 1993’s breakthrough title, Doom. “When that game came out, it was amazing and it grabbed a huge new audience that dwarfed that of adventure games,” Gilbert recalls, “so publishers turned their attention to where the money was.

“But now that the market is expanding and everyone, even the President of the United States, plays videogames, we can now have a wider selection of games that find an audience. Not everyone wants to play first-person shooters.”

The Monkey Island audience certainly hasn’t abandoned their love of the genre or their favorite series, continuing to talk about it on message boards and document every bit of minutiae at such web sites as Monkey Island Wiki, The World of Monkey Island, The Monkey Island SCUMM Bar, and Tales of Monkey Island. A few even put on a stage version of The Secret of Monkey Island.

Gilbert remembers his favorite experience with fans: “A couple years ago, I was going to Europe for a quick vacation and thought I’d mention it on my blog and see if any fans wanted to get together and chat about adventure games and Monkey Island. I honestly figured five people would show up.

“It ended up being a huge party and we took over a pub in London. It was a ton of fun. People brought odd things for me to sign, like rubber chickens. I had similar experiences in Amsterdam and Paris. Monkey Island fans are the greatest.”

Down By the Seaside. Guybrush and Elaine share a moment. More or less.

A Tale of Two Secrets. Oooh, the pictures are all gussied-up now!

What Voodoo Do You Do? Guybrush meets someone who will reappear in exciting future adventures.

A Motley Crew. Carla, Meathook, and Otis set sail with Guybrush.

If you liked this game, check out:

• A Vampyre Story
• The Abbey
• Ankh: Battle of the Gods
• Jack Keane
• Pirates of the Caribbean Online
• Sid Meier’s Pirates!
• Tales of Monkey Island

System Requirements:

• Mac OS X version 10.5
• 1.8GHz Intel processor (2GHz recommended)
• 512MB RAM (2GB recommended)
• 128MB video RAM (256MB recommended; Intel integrated graphics chipsets not recommended)
• 2GB hard disk space