[Accordion Music] The adventure game has long positioned itself as the genre that treats games as a storytelling medium in the same way the novel treats prose, and film, television, and theater treat performance. And many adventure games from the classic era feature the things we have come to expect of a good story; intricate plots, compelling characters, and pretty good dialogue. But, often, some of the higher-level things we expect from a narrative are missing. Things like character development or solid pacing. And I couldn't point to many classic adventure games that have something even so basic... as a theme. But The Secret of Monkey Island™, which I'd argue is the most influential graphic adventure game ever made, has a theme. In fact, it has two. And each one is neatly encapsulated by a single line of pretty good dialogue. Here's the first. Early in the game, protagonist Guybrush Threepwood has to get these petals fed to these dogs, because reasons. And he can do this by just rubbing the flowers on a hunk of meat but he can also stew the meat in a pot of soup and add the flowers to the broth, and if that's the route you choose to take when he drops a petal into the water, he says 'It's not a bay leaf, but every cook makes substitutions.' Here's the second theme. Another early puzzle is Guybrush having his path blocked by a bridge troll. He can't get to the other end of the island without giving the troll what he wants but the troll isn't interested in money. When asked, he says he wants 'something that will attract attention but have no real importance.' The solution is to give him a red herring. These are the twin themes of
The Secret of Monkey Island™, the guiding principles behind not just
its story, but much of its design. Together they form the game's philosophy, because, yeah, it has one of those too. A good example of the first
would be basically all of part two; essentially one long puzzle chain that is literally Guybrush as a cook making substitutions. He needs to cast a spell following a recipe for which he has none of the ingredients. Need monkey blood? Use some wine. Need brimstone? Use gunpowder. Need a pressed human skull?
Why not use the Jolly Roger? And despite all of this obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit, the spell works. Apparently the gods who govern
this universe aren't picky. Now savvy viewers are maybe saying Ian, this is a genre famous for thinking a deflating duck floating around a clamp on a string is an effective way to pick something up off the ground. Jerry-rigged solutions are what adventure game puzzles are. But... most adventure games treat this as a gimme. Part and parcel with playing an adventure game. They don't bother to justify it thematically. Guybrush himself is a jerry-rigged solution. It's laid out early in the game, when he declares, that he wants to be a pirate. At first, the pirate leaders dismiss him, but then they remember that the fabled ghost pirate LeChuck is terrorizing the Caribbean, and all the other pirates are too scared to go out on the water. No pirates means no swag and no swag means no grog. And we're getting dangerously low on grog. That's the only reason they take Guybrush on Because they're making do In this world, a pot will serve as a helmet, root beer will serve as a magic potion, and a baby-faced cabin boy with no skills will serve as a pirate. Anything in a pinch. With his good manners, perfect English, and utter inability to lead a crew, Guybrush resembles the other pirates in the game a lot less than he resembles an early 90s computer nerd: a young guy who wants to act like a pirate. Presumably, you bought the game because you want the same thing. Guybrush is a terrible candidate for being a pirate but by some rounding error in fate's ledger he gets to be one. The wish fulfillment is that you're getting away with something. The second theme is the idea of things central to the game having little to no intrinsic value. And this one runs deep. One of the better gags in part three is this red herring about a banana picker. Shipwrecked castaway Herman Toothrot mentions, that he lent it to the cannibals. [Music] And there's this ongoing puzzle, where you have to collect a bunch of bananas, sometimes with very roundabout methods. [EXPLOSION] So, yeah, a banana picker would be useful. When you meet the cannibals, they imprison you for stealing their bananas, and inside the jail is the banana picker. But it's too big to fit through your little escap-y hole, so you have to leave it behind. And by the time you can come back through the front door and take it with you, you've already solved the puzzle, where you needed bananas. And, get this: The cannibals don't even want it. The only reason they have it is because they lent Herman the key to the monkey head Idol and they won't give him his banana picker until he gives them the key. And Herman doesn't want the key, he's just keeping it until he gets his banana picker. So this frickin banana picker has no value to anyone in the game. It's all just the principle of the thing, And that's... the entire plot of The Secret of Monkey Island™. What are Guybrushes three trials to prove himself as a pirate? Find the treasure of Mêlée Island, defeat the sword master in combat, and steal the idol of many hands from the governor's mansion. The treasure is a tourist attraction, the sword master fights, until she gets bored of him, and the idol of many hands, when procured, is likened to a fabulous doorstop. Nobody actually wants it, It's just a thing that's hard to steal. And Guybrush's entire quest is equally pointless. He arrives on Monkey Island to rescue the governor just in time for her to be taken back to the island he started on. Which means he would have done just as well sitting on the church steps the whole time picking lint out of his belly button. He does defeat LeChuck, but only after bungling Elaine's better plan to do the same. So, the only thing he actually accomplishes in the entire game is solving a problem he himself created two minutes earlier. The plot of The Secret of Monkey Island™ is something that attracts attention, but has no real importance. It is a series of improvised solutions to meaningless problems. It's all right there in the title. We never learn the secret of Monkey Island. There almost certainly isn't one. And if you want to get technical about it, the pirate leaders say to become a pirate Guybrush has to complete three trials and bring them proof of his success. The way the game is designed, the kidnapping plot always begins right after you finished the third, at which point all the Pirates disappear. Which means... he never shows them proof that he completed all three. Guybrush... never... actually... becomes a pirate. But that's the point. Guybrush doesn't want to be a sword fighter, treasure hunter, or thief. He opens the game saying he wants to be a pirate. Sword fighting, thievery, and/or treasure huntery are only valuable as a means to an end: Performing pirateness. The fact that Guybrush never finishes the trials is no more important than the trials themselves, is no more important than the damsel not being an actual damsel. Because the damsel in distress was only ever an excuse to go on an adventure. In this world, pirates dig up treasure not to make themselves rich, but because that's what pirates do. Who cares if all that's in the chest is a t-shirt? The journey has to be the destination because destinations don't matter. Nothing matters. Nothing is supposed to matter. Yeah, the game's philosophy is nihilism, but it's cheerful nihilism. [Accordion Music] When designing an adventure game, there are a couple types of player you'll have to contend with, One experiences the narrative in the way it's supposed to be experienced. If someone tells them to go to Algiers to meet with Omar Al-Jabbar, they're going to go to Algiers and meet with Omar Al-Jabbar. But then there's these other players, that I refer to as futzers. They'll make their way to Omar Al-Jabbar eventually, but they're gonna futz around along the way. Anything that smells like a puzzle, they're going to start solving it. So, they tend to get ahead of the story. By the time Omar Al-Jabbar tells them what to do, they've already done half of it, which weakens the story, Because, generally, this scene shouldn't come before this scene. Most adventure games are designed for normal players. Most adventure game players are futzers. This leads to problems. Here's how Monkey Island avoids them: The game begins with Guybrush saying he wants to be a pirate and being directed to speak with some pirates in the Scumm bar. So, he instantly has an immediate objective and a larger goal. A normal player will just head to the Scumm bar, while a futzer will interact with every hotspot along the way. So, between the cliffside and the bar, there's only one hotspot: A reelection poster for Governor Elaine Marley, a character who is not yet relevant, but soon will be. The next hot spot is the door of the bar. Now, a normal player might head straight to the back to talk to the pirate leaders, but a futzer will chat up everyone in the bar first. This guy tells you a bit about the island and the LeChuck situation, this guy tells you more about LeChuck, this guy is a gag who just tells you about Loom™, And then, there's... the dog. Who tells you about LeChuck. The next hot spot is the pirate leaders, If I haven't made it obvious, Guybrush has walked in a straight line left to right with no inventory, no puzzles, no branching paths, and nothing between him and his first objective that isn't immediately relevant or can't be experienced out of order. If he talks to the pirates first, he knows why the leaders are taking him on, If he talks to the leaders first, they hint at this LeChuck thing which the pirates can then fill in. Everything makes narrative sense, no matter how you play. You can contrast this with Monkey Island 2, where you get vague hints of what your larger goal might be while chatting people up around town, and only stumble on your first objective halfway across the island. By which time you've probably solved half the puzzles with no context, while you were searching for the plot It's a futser's paradise. Now, you know what else is neat? Once Guybrush is done talking to the pirate leaders, if he keeps following that line to the right, it ends at the door to the kitchen. The pirates in the front mention that the cook is inattentive and they all sneak into the kitchen from time to time, so I'm willing to bet that for the overwhelming majority of you who've played the game, sneaking into the kitchen was the first puzzle you solved. Guybrush can complete his three trials in any order. He steals the idol of many hands by breaking into the governor's mansion which he does by putting the guard dogs to sleep after giving them a sedative he finds in the forest which he feeds to them by spiking a hunk of meat which he finds... here in the kitchen. Guybrush finds the treasure of Mêlée Island by digging it up in a clearing which he reaches by following a strange map which he buys from a shady guy in town which he affords by getting paid to be shot out of a cannon for which he uses a pot as a helmet and he finds the pot... here in the kitchen. And Guybrush defeats the sword master by learning the art of insult sword fighting which he masters by fighting strangers on the road whom he challenges after getting trained by Captain Smirk who's house can only be accessed after paying the bridge troll whom Guybrush bribes with a red herring which he finds... here in the kitchen. Unless you're the type of player who waltzes past the Scumm bar because you refuse to be told what to do, in which case, no one can design for you, these are your first three bits of inventory. This is where the game opens up, where you are now free to go in any direction, and this tiny bit of suggested linearity at the beginning makes sure that all three paths you can follow become available to you at the same time. I hazard the reason the Secret of Monkey Island™ is so influential is that the design of part one is, in many ways, immaculate. Just look at how each of the three trials stresses a different part of the engine. The treasure hunt takes place in the picture window and in the player's mind. Stealing the idol is all about inventory and telling jokes with the sentence line. And sword fighting takes place entirely in the dialogue system, because how else would you gamify an Errol Flynn movie? "Since you prefer it this way, you muckrake!" "Faith, I'll be humoring ya!" There is a playfulness to this design, stemming from a time when each adventure games still had to write its own rules. As much as modern adventures have refined and improved on Monkey Island's template I'm always amazed when I think, that before this game, the template didn't exist. [Accordion Music] There is a quality to Guybrush in the Secret of Monkey Island™ that was never really recaptured in the sequels. Later games put Guybrush somewhere on the spectrum between smartass and dipshit, but in Monkey Island 1, Guybrush is actually the straight man. His deal is: he's clever without necessarily being intelligent. The brightest dim bulb in the Caribbean. Smart enough to realize that everyone he talks to is a wacko and everything they have him do is nonsense, but not quite smart enough to do anything about it. It may be the limits of EGA graphics and a small animation budget that Guybrush is Buster Keaton; utterly stone-faced no matter how ludicrous things around him get. By the sequel, the team had 256 colors and so they had Guybrush mugging for the camera, but here the world is a cartoon, and he knows it, but he keeps playing along, There's this great moment where he opens the monkey head idle by jamming an enormous q-tip in its ear where he looks at the camera like 'What the fuck am I doing?' It's this great Oliver Hardy moment. [Upbeat piano music] I wanted to be a pirate. I guess this is it. I can kind of respect what they did with Guybrush in the second game. They made him... a dick. Monkey Island 2 Guybrush is selfish, conceited, neither intelligent, nor clever. He's definitely not the straight man anymore, and Elaine hates him because fame turned him into a shitty boyfriend. He's on a quest for the biggest buried treasure known to piracy, not because he wants another adventure, but because he's the guy who blew up LeChuck. That's his reputation. And that was a while ago. And if he doesn't soon become the guy who found Big Whoop, he's going to stop being famous. The very idea of getting huge off your first adventure and feeling obligated to go on another one just to keep up appearances, even though keeping up those appearances kind of ruined your home life, I'd almost think that was a metaphor for doing a sequel to a hit game with a one year turnaround if not for the fact that Monkey Island was never that big of a hit. And no one asked Ron Gilbert to do a sequel. He apparently just started working on one. Still, none of the other games in the series try anything so bold, so I respect Monkey Island 2 for walking its own path. I just don't like it. Even when I was seven, the nihilism didn't feel cheerful. More like the game was thumbing its nose at the very idea of having ever cared about any of these people. And you know, I like Dominic Armato's interpretation of the character but Monkey Island 1 will always be the canonical Guybrush to me. The kid who's maybe a little too swept up in Pirates of the Caribbean. Now as long as we're talking about Guybrush, we do have to talk about Elaine. The team,that made Monkey Island 1 and 2 were the only ones who knew how to write Elaine. In Monkey Island 1, Elaine is a subversion of a trope: The kidnapped woman who secretly has the whole situation under control. In Monkey Island 2, she's not subverting anything, she's just a capable respected woman with a rich life outside of the main character. LeChuck is so fixated on revenge, he doesn't try to kidnap her and in the end... she rescues Guybrush. Or, more accurately, she almost rescues Guybrush. But what happens when Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman aren't on the team anymore? Monkey Island 3: damseled, rescued by Guybrush; immediately redamseled; rescued by Guybrush. Monkey Island 4: stripped of her governorship to be restored by Guybrush, then damseled to be... actually, at the last minute Guybrush helps her rescue herself so, that's something. Tales of Monkey Island: damseled as the curtain rises rescued by Guybrush, damseled again, rescued by Guybrush, triple-whammy damseled, rescued by Guybrush, but then says it was somehow all on purpose. This is what people don't get about Elaine, why you can't write her as a damsel. the essence of Elaine is that she's the only major character who isn't a pirate, and she's the best pirate. That's why Guybrush loves her. She's everything he wants to be. And she doesn't love him because he's the pirate who rescues her She loves him, because she doesn't want a pirate, and deep down, he isn't one. He's just a sweet boy who likes pirates. Now, obviously this is, to some degree, headcanon. But it's headcanon that makes more sense. than most of the sequels do. [Accordion Music] The Secret of Monkey Island™ is a game I've known backwards and forwards since I was six years old. I can't remember what it's like to play this game for the first time. I can't separate what's on the screen from how my pre-adolescent brain filled in the empty spaces, and I certainly can't tell you, whether or not it's good. Objectivity is overrated. What I've said in this video is the product of playing, thinking about, and loving this game for the last 28 years. I hope it has provided some insight, that objectivity wouldn't. And it could have been so much longer, you have no idea.
Excellent video, makes me want to play Monkey Island again!
Also props to the maker for jumping right in with no introduction.
Really good video. I've liked Monkey Island since I was a child but I've never really seen any of this kind of analysis like this on the series and never really thought about what makes them (imo) the best adventure games.
I just happened to have beaten Monkey Island Special Edition this past weekend...great video. I agree that all in all it's probably the most important/influential of all the point and click adventure games.
Was it the same writers on #2?