He mentions this factoid hours earlier, when another pirate asks him if he has any special talents, and you are left to wonder if that is just a funny throwaway line. I understand why Limited Games chose this scene for a beautiful Shadow Box as one of the items in their 30th Anniversary Collector's Edition.įirst, Guybrush Threepwood can hold his breath for ten minutes, which is funny and allows this scene to reenforce one of the recurring jokes in the series. This may be my favorite scene in the whole game, and maybe in adventure games ever, because it encapsulates everything that makes the game clever. Pictured above, there is a moment in The Secret of Monkey Island where you are thrown into the water, weighed down by an idol. I'll give just two of my favorite examples.
THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND SPECIAL EDITION SCUMM BAR SERIES
I believe the Monkey Island series excels in reaching both the height of, and variety of, humor more than any other video games ever made.Īs funny as Monkey Island is in general, it is also notable for being one of the first video games ever to excel at poking fun at video games themselves and for often breaking the fourth wall in doing so. More than anything though, the humor is highly varied and designed to consistently surprise until the end credits. This includes word play, sight gags, industry in-jokes, references to other LucasArts games, references to popular culture, references to history, running gags that it develops within itself, running gags from past Monkey Island games, actual funny jokes, interesting conversational lines that you don't have to explore but can if you want to, and much more. Every Monkey Island game makes a decision, from moment one of gameplay, that it will do anything and everything to make you laugh and that doing so is its primary purpose for existence. I still laugh reading this list, and used to always especially laugh as a kid at Red Dye No 2, and the fact that it included SCUMM, which was Ron Gilbert's interface engine. Finally, you ask them what grog contains and they read off the list you see above on the pictured t-shirt. They are completely obsessed with their favorite drink, grog. You go to a bar early in The Secret of Monkey Island and are talking to some pirate leaders. Monkey Island affected change in all seven of these areas. Seventh, character dialogue and interactions were highly limited. Sixth, there was often sparse music, and certainly not a rich and relatively persistent score. Fifth, most adventure games were fairly earnest and serious, not characterized by much humor. Fourth, the games were often scored, only allowing you to beat the game with perfect marks if you found all objectives and secrets. Third, you could sometimes get stuck in the game based on a decision, also having to restart or go to a save file. Second, there were often moments in the game where you could make a mistake and you would die, forcing you to restart or restore a save file. You can imagine the frustrations of such a system, as you might type forest instead of tree, or grass instead of ground, and not achieve an intended result. First, to play, you had to manually enter verbal commands into a parser, such as "look at tree".
Take a look at King's Quest IV above, a leading adventure game of the time. A notable part of Monkey Island's core DNA, as mentioned above, is it was designed to contrast significantly with other mainstream adventure games.
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