The Secret of Monkey Island is a 1990 point-and-click graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It takes place in a fictional version of the Caribbean during the age of piracy. The player assumes the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who dreams of becoming a pirate, and explores fictional islands while solving puzzles.
The game was conceived in 1988 by Lucasfilm employee Ron Gilbert, who designed it with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Gilbert's frustrations with contemporary adventure titles led him to make the player character's death almost impossible, which meant that gameplay focused on exploration. The atmosphere was based on that of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride. The Secret of Monkey Island was the fifth game built with the SCUMM engine, which was heavily modified to include a more user-friendly interface.
Critics praised The Secret of Monkey Island for its humor, audiovisuals, and gameplay. Several publications list it among the greatest video games of all time. The game spawned a number of sequels, collectively known as the Monkey Island series. Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman also led the development of the sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. LucasArts released a remake of the original in 2009, which was also well received by the gaming press.
Gameplay The Secret of Monkey Island is a 2D adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Via a point-and-click interface, the player guides protagonist Guybrush Threepwood through the game's world and interacts with the environment by selecting from twelve verb commands (nine in newer versions) such as "talk to" for communicating with characters and "pick up" for collecting items between commands and the world's objects in order to successfully solve puzzles and thus progress in the game. While conversing with other characters, the player may choose between topics for discussion that are listed in a dialog tree; the game is one of the first to incorporate such a system. The in-game action is frequently interrupted by cutscenes. Like other LucasArts adventure games, The Secret of Monkey Island features a design philosophy that makes the player character's death nearly impossible (Guybrush does drown if he stays underwater for more than ten minutes).
Plot
A youth named Guybrush Threepwood arrives on Mêlée Island, hoping to become a pirate. He seeks out the island's pirate leaders, who set him three trials: winning a sword duel against Carla, the island's resident swordmaster; finding a buried treasure; and stealing a valuable idol from the governor's mansion. These quests take Guybrush throughout the island, where he hears of stories of the ghost pirate LeChuck, who apparently died in an expedition to the mysterious Monkey Island, an act that was meant to win the love of the governor, Elaine Marley. Guybrush meets several characters of interest, including a local voodoo priestess, Stan the Used Boat Salesman, Carla the Sword Master, a prisoner named Otis, and Meathook, whose hands have been replaced by hooks.
Guybrush encounters Elaine and is smitten, and she soon reciprocates. However, as he completes the tasks set for him, the island is raided by LeChuck and his undead crew, who abduct Elaine and retreat to their secret hideout on Monkey Island. Guybrush buys a ship and hires Carla, Otis, and Meathook as crew before setting sail. On Monkey Island, Guybrush discovers a village of cannibals in a dispute with Herman Toothrot, a castaway marooned there. He settles their quarrel, then recovers a magical "voodoo root" from LeChuck's ship for the cannibals, who provide him with a seltzer bottle of "voodoo root elixir" that can destroy ghosts.
When Guybrush returns to LeChuck's ship with the elixir, he learns that LeChuck has returned to Mêlée Island to marry Elaine at the church. He promptly returns to Mêlée Island and gatecrashes the wedding, only to ruin Elaine's own plan for escape; in the process he loses the elixir. Now confronted with a furious LeChuck, Guybrush is savagely beaten by the ghost pirate in a fight ranging across the island. At the ship emporium, Guybrush finds a bottle of root beer. Substituting it for the lost elixir, he sprays LeChuck, destroying him. Guybrush and Elaine enjoy a romantic moment, watching fireworks caused by LeChuck exploding.
Development Origin and writing Ron Gilbert conceived the idea of a pirate adventure game in 1988, after completing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. He first wrote story ideas about pirates while spending the weekend at a friend's house. Gilbert experimented with introductory paragraphs to find a satisfactory idea. His initial story featured unnamed villains that would eventually become LeChuck and Elaine; Guybrush was absent at this point. He pitched it to Lucasfilm Games's staff as a series of short stories. Gilbert's idea was warmly received, but production was postponed because Lucasfilm Games assigned its designers, including Gilbert, to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. Development of The Last Crusade was finished in 1989, which allowed Gilbert to begin production of The Secret of Monkey Island, then known internally under the working title Mutiny on Monkey Island.
Gilbert soon realised that it would be difficult to design the game by himself; he decided to join forces with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, both of whom he hired for Lucasfilm. The game's insult sword fighting mechanics were influenced by swashbuckling movies starring Errol Flynn, which Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman often watched for inspiration. They noticed that pirates in those films often taunted their opponents instead of attacking them, which gave the designers the idea to base the game's duels on insults rather than combat. Writer Orson Scott Card helped them write the insults during a visit to Lucasfilm's headquarters at Skywalker Ranch. Many of Gilbert's original gameplay ideas were abandoned during the production process, although he stated that "most of that stuff was left out for a reason".
The game's plot, as described by Dave Grossman: "It's a story about this young man who comes to an island in search of his life's dream. He's pursuing his career goals and he discovers love in the process and winds up thinking that was actually more important than what he was doing to begin with. You're laughing, but there's actually something deeper going on as well". When work on the plot began, Gilbert discovered that Schafer's and Grossman's writing styles were too different to form a cohesive whole: Grossman's was "very kind of a dry, sarcastic humor" and Schafer's was "just a little more in your face". In reaction, Gilbert assigned them to different characters and story moments depending on what type of comedy was required. Grossman believed that this benefited the game's writing, as he and Schafer "were all funny in slightly different ways, and it worked well together". Schafer and Grossman wrote most of the dialogue while they were programming the game; as a result, much of it was improvised. Some of the dialogue was based on the designers' personal experiences, such as Guybrush's line "I had a feeling in hell there would be mushrooms", which came from Schafer's own hatred of fungi.
The game's world and characters were designed primarily by Gilbert. After having read Tim Powers' historical fantasy novel On Stranger Tides, he decided to add paranormal themes to the game's plot. He also cited Powers' book as an influence on the characters, particularly those of Guybrush and LeChuck. Inspiration for the game's ambiance came from Gilbert's favorite childhood amusement park ride, Pirates of the Caribbean.Ron Gilbert (July 7, 2013). Storytime with Ron Gilbert , PAX Australia. Retrieved March 21, 2015. Grossman said that Gilbert always wanted "to step off the ride" and "talk to the people who lived in that world". Near the final stages of the design work, Gilbert introduced several characters who were not directly related to the game's story. He considered this to be an important decision, as the player would need those seemingly minor characters in later parts of the game and would receive a chance to "really interact with them".
Creative and technical design
Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman's primary goal was to create a simpler and more accessible gameplay model than those presented in previous Lucasfilm titles. Gilbert had conceived the main designs and puzzles before production began, which resulted in the bulk of the designers' work to flesh out his ideas. He was frustrated by the adventure games that Sierra On-Line was releasing at the time, and later said that "you died any time you did anything wrong". Gilbert considered such gameplay as "a cheap way out for the designer". He had previously applied his design ideas to the 1987 graphic adventure title Maniac Mansion, but considered he committed a number of mistakes during development, such as dead-end situations that prevented the player from completing the game and poorly implemented triggers for cutscenes. Gilbert aimed to avoid such errors in The Secret of Monkey Island. The team decided to make it impossible for the player character to die, with one notable exception, which focused gameplay primarily on world exploration. The Sierra game-over screen was parodied, when Guybrush falls off a cliff only to be bounced back up by a "rubber tree". Guybrush can also be killed by drowning, though it is an Easter egg unlikely to be found without conscientious effort.
The Secret of Monkey Island was the fifth Lucasfilm Games project powered by the SCUMM engine, originally developed for Maniac Mansion. The company had gradually modified the engine since its creation. For Maniac Mansion, the developers hard coded verb commands in the SCUMM scripting language. These commands become more abstract in subsequent versions of the engine. The developers carried over the practice of referring to individual segments of the gameworld as "rooms", even though the areas in Monkey Island were outdoors. The game uses the same version of the engine used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, with minor changes. A dialogue tree was added, which facilitated conversation options and the sword-fighting puzzles. The developers removed the "What is" option (an input command that describes an on-screen object to the player) in favor of allowing the player to simply highlight the object with the mouse cursor. The game's improved interface became the standard for the company's later titles. The game also introduced logical verb shortcuts, which could be performed with the mouse; for example, clicking on a character defaults to the "talk" action, the most obvious action in the situation. SCUMM's visuals were updated for the game—the original EGA version had a 320x200 pixel resolution rendered in 16 colors. According to artist Steve Purcell, that became a major limitation for the art team; due to a low number of "ghastly" colors, they often chose bizarre tones for backgrounds. They chose black and white for Guybrush's outfit for the same reason. The VGA version of the game later corrected these issues by implementing 256-color support, which allowed for more advanced background and character art. Other platform releases removed the infamous "stump joke" from the game, which was a joke in the EGA version in which the player would examine a tree stump in the forest. Guybrush would exclaim that there is an opening to a system of catacombs and attempt to enter, but this would result in a message stating the player needed to insert disc 22, then 36, then 114 in order to continue. The joke resulted in numerous calls to the LucasArts hotline asking about missing discs. As a result, the joke was removed from later editions and is mentioned as a conversation option for the LucasArts Hint Hotline in the sequel.