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Hey, I love your theory. It's an exciting read, and it gave me one thought. Going full interpretation mode, ignoring dev intentions for a second: So, Big Whoop has been found and "experienced" before, causing Captain Marley and crew to hide it. Now, what if them meddling with Big Whoop once caused it to "leak" a bit of reality bending power out into the world, causing the anachronisms in Monkey 1?

I know you say you don’t feel the same way anymore, but I actually agree with you here. I’d forgotten that feeling, but I think there IS something slightly less satisfying about playing through an extended flashback. (Although I’m not sure I even fully understand why.) Re: The MI2’s ending. Here’s my personal wish for how it could have been interpreted: Firstly, I have to say that I wish the voodoo power of Big Whoop had been a bigger part of the explanation. I love Curse, but making Big Whoop a literal theme park never felt right to me. My own personal pet explanation was that Guybrush accidentally unleashed the awesome voodoo power of Big Whoop when the chest broke: But it took a few minutes to fully permeate and twist reality. So the longer you’re playing the last section of MI2, the more Big Whoop is taking control. Accidentally unleashing Big Whoop near LeChuck had an unintended consequence: He was also pulled into this new disturbing voodoo reality. (This explains why LeChuck’s attempt to transport Guybrush into a dimension of pain doesn’t work — they’re both already in another dimension.) Big Whoop is, as the voodoo lady said, an incredible power. And it can be used to bend reality. But while everyone else treated that power with total respect. Possibly only carefully taking a fraction of it with each use. Guybrush accidentally unleashed the whole damn thing at once by clumsily smashing its container. All Guybrush wanted was to escape LeChuck. And maybe that subconsciously manifested in a desire to become a kid again: bring his parents back to life and feel safe. Except Guybrush being Guybrush, he fumbles the whole thing and takes LeChuck with him into this new twisted dimension and casts him as his brother. So my Monkey 3a would have involved both LeChuck and Guybrush trying to escape from (and undo) Big Whoop. LeChuck hating Guybrush even more for having forced him to endure this Big Whoop created reality. And Big Whoop’s reality would have kept getting weirder and nightmarish. (Think David Lynch.) It wouldn’t have just stayed in a theme park. It would have glitched and twisted. Maybe Guybrush’s parents would have become evil, trying to stop Guybrush and LeChuck escaping. And previously visited locations would appear randomly. And maybe Big Whoop world have kept slowly growing, sucking in everyone on Dinky, so that Elaine and then Herman would appear in that new world, too. Anyway, that’s my own personal interpretation/wish list: As soon as that chest broke, reality became perverted.

I think LeChuck's evolving forms allow best for a voice change (hell zombie form allows for things like decaying vocal chords). I'd like to throw Garry Chalk into the list of potential new VO's, his role as Willy T Wino in TP had a nice timbre to it and I'd like to hear his pirate voice. In more direct regards to Ron's tweet: I too would hope it's Jojo but we haven't heard anything about the voodoo lady or LeChuck (beyond that they couldn't get Boen to return and had his blessing to recast) so they are definitely in the running. We know Alexandra Boyd is back so Elaine is going to be there at least is some fashion. The fact that they mentioned recasting and didn't just straight up say that lechuck wouldn't be returning leads me to think we will see him in some form as well. It doesn't rule out retiring the role completely however and bringing in a bigger villain of some sort (El Carlo sounds fun 😉 ). Now the Voodoo lady... It would be odd without her considering her recurring roles in every title so far but... what if she wasn't originally supposed to be that but sort of like an Obi Wan for the first 2 and GB is on his own for the 3rd or something like that. Perhaps the Tales twist hit the nail a little to close to the head so Ron is avoiding that. I will admit however that this is all stretching to find an excuse which itself lends toward her not being the one not returning. I mean it has to be Jojo... right?

On my first playthrough of MI2 I did die in LeChuck’s fortress and that cutaway was one of the biggest laughs in the game for 11 year old me. I’d completely forgotten it was a frame story by then. I think as a kid it was the first time I’d ever seen that particular format of joke play out. (Honestly playing MI2 was the first time I’d seen a BUNCH of types of joke play out. It was pretty seminal in my education about what comedy was and how it worked. It was also seminal in my understanding that creative works I liked were made by actual people - I think it was the first thing that really spoke to me that I could also super clearly feel the writers inside the game talking to me. Anyway these games are good and I like talking about them!)

Yeah, you can hook the Quest up to your PC to use it like any other headset. Works both wired via USB or per WiFi streaming. Both Oculus PC and SteamVR work fine.

+10 points for making his hair brown.

While I appreciate the points you’re making, I think ultimately the answer to this is ‘no’. Like other controversial endings open to deep interpretation such as that of The Sopranos, there may forever be opposing views and a lack of clarification. Nobody should feel like they can’t interpret it or describe it however they want. Not on this forum of all forums, anyway.

I just don’t think Monkey Island 2’s reputation needs defending, especially not on this board.

I think Elaine’s “spell” remark could just as easily be a kid still playing the game when everyone else went home. I don’t think it’s that, but I’m not a fan of requests to cut off a line of interpretation because you don’t like it.

Ha, cool. Yeah, I had a feeling MI2's ending was the result of writing himself into a corner and coming up with a left turn that doesn't exactly fit, but still works pretty great. I think the most enraging part about it is that it's ambiguous and a cliffhanger. If MI2 outright said that it was all a fantasy, that would be a hell of an ending, but it'd sort of kill the sequel potential. It's that unresolved feeling that drives the hate mail. I wonder what the deeper secret of MI1 he alluded to was, then. Maybe it was going to have the Thimbleweed ending.

The hanged man in MI1 is actually Herman's friend that he sailed to Monkey Island with (the one that wrote the Captain's Log). Dread's friend was the navigator head that the cannibals give Guybrush, since Dread mentions that he and his "navigator" were taken prisoner by cannibals, only Dread escaped, and he kept one of his navigators' eyeballs as a good luck charm. (There is a continuity error in that the navigator head has two eyes in MI1, so it's possible that connection between the navigator head/Dread's friend may have been a late addition in MI2's development.)

I was looking through Peter Chan's concept art on MI2 and thought it be fun to combine Chan's character art and background art. Imagine if Double Fine got to do the remakes. They were always very visually faithful with the remakes with the DOTT they used Chan's original concept art as a basis. so maybe they would have used Chan's concept art as influence on a mi2 remake. Although i guess they may have got Ron involved and maybe the remakes would look more like Return. Who knows?

Probably to chase LeChuck? The screenshot caption states it's LeChuck's ghost ship getting prepared to set sail, and I presume it's headed to the river of lava under Monkey Island? I wouldn't be surprised if you had to hide within the ship for the journey.

Easy guess is Jojo. Less likely, but other possible option is Voodoo Lady (since all of the other characters have had their voice actors/castings teased and confirmed by the team. Here's a theory. Maybe Ron was referring specifically to LeChuck's zombie form. And he'll be something else in this one? His "Chuckie" form might actually be a good starting point for him since we know he has "lightning eyes" powers already. Who knows what he could become later...

... Sigh. I don't know why we need to treat this like it's some sort of controversial thing to say. Look, I'm not saying it to say that they're unreliable (at least no more so than average) or don't know what they're talking about. I'm just stating the very uncontroversial fact that we can't take every statement someone says about something they made 30 years ago as gospel. I would say this about literally anyone, including myself. If that's how Ron remembers it, great! I can believe it. But not like...uncritically. We've already seen what feel like slightly contradictory accounts from people who were there at the time (see Noah's comments on the plan for Monkey Island 3). Heck, it's been a while since I listened but I seem to recall they didn't even agree on everything in the commentary in MI2SE! It's not rude to suggest there could be more to the story - it's just... acknowleding that human memory is extremely bad at this sort of thing, and last time I checked, they are all still human.

One I reccomend (totally non self-promotionally despite me being a Mod there) is the Lucasarts Adventure Fans Discord (I'm sure Mike doesn't mind me leaving a permanent invite here on mojo, anybody interested are welcome and a lot of us are already there)

There is a Mojo one! But people very rarely talk on it. It surprises me a little, because I feel like Discord is the natural evolution of everything that little DALnet community was. So I created this new one SORT of as a joke. But also, if people like it enough, I'm not against making more of a modern version of what we did back then on DALnet.

Haha. There is a pretty popular LucasArts Discord that a bunch of people on here use. There’s even a Mojo one somewhere I think. I like to keep to the BBS.

Yeah the Quest has a link cable (though any fast and to-spec USB C cable will do) and can run SteamVR games or any other ad hoc VR apps (like if you’re doing game dev in Unity or Unreal). I don’t know if it has official wifi support but there is a cheap program called Virtual Desktop you can buy from the Quest App Store that lets you run your PC inside your headset, but that also emulates the Quest as a virtual device in SteamVR and will let it stream from your PC. You need good wifi but it works very well.

Has Guybrush been confirmed?

Which is why the fact that you can die in LeChuck's fortress only for the death scene to be followed by Elaine voicing her disbelief is genius.

I would heartily recommend anyone who enjoys speculation surrounding Big Whoop to take a look at the cut LeChuck/Largo dialogue that while cut, is still present in the game files. If you have a copy of MI2 in ScummVM to hand, open the console via Ctrl+Alt+D and run "script 102 start" to see it for yourself.

Check out the Amiga thread. It doesn’t appear to be the case that it was an especially late addition. If anything it looks like they were trying to figure out how to do scene fades with the Amiga hardware.

That's right. In fact, from what Ron has said on the issue, what we'll be getting from the other games is just certain ideas and aspects acknowledged and adopted. Ideas that Ron likes. Everything else will be ignored if it gets in the way of the story he wants to tell.

That's fair. My issue was really just the terminology being used, namely the "Child's Fantasy ending" vs a neutral "MI2 ending" so as not to reinforce the perception some have that it was definitively the former. Interesting point on the Amiga bug, I wasn't aware of that. It actually makes me wonder if Elaine's comment was something that was added later in development to try and reinforce the scene with LeChuck's eyes explicitly to try and avoid people interpreting the game as such. I think there is a lot of potential with the Underground Tunnels and their implications on the game's reality to enable Ron to tell the story he wants to tell in RMI while also staying compatible with the other games in the franchise, without necessarily having to fully endorse Curse's explanation either. Either that, or Ron will just take artistic liberties. Lastly, thank you for engaging me in good faith. It's nice to have a productive discussion rather than being gainsaid on every point.

I'd be very careful about taking that for granted 🙂 There's a billion ways you could keep things canon and still not embrace that explanation. Not saying any of the following are true, nor that I'd like any of them, but multiverse, alternate realities, simulation, dream, coma, portals, child fantasies are a ton of ways you could still not contradict every other game by simply saying "this has happened to some degree of reality".

I don’t believe anyone IS saying it’s the “definitive explanation”. I was merely referring to one of the popular interpretations (which was possibly exacerbated by what looks like a bug in the Amiga version where Elaine’s SPELL comment didn’t appear). It’s unquestionable that MI2’s ending was divisive and that a lot of people hated it. (It certainly took me many years to grow to like it, and Ron himself says he STILL gets emails from people saying how much they hated it.) Side note: In a weird way I don’t know why we’re even discussing different interpretations anymore: Ron has apparently wholeheartedly embraced Curse’s detailed explanation. He has said they’ve been “very careful” not to contradict anything, so basically Curse’s “theme park of the dammed” is now Roncanon. I also think that the heightened emotions about Return are partially fuelled by people desperately wanting a Roncanon explanation to MI2’s confusing ending. (Which Ron has repeatedly stated he didn’t have a plan for.) “The muse visits when the work begins.”

For what it's worth, I remember as a kid I was slightly disappointed by the fact that Guybrush is telling Elaine 90% of the story and just the last few minutes of the game have you as a player experience TOGETHER with Guybrush. To me, it was a little disappointing just because in MI1 you're adventuring in the same time as Guybrush, whereas in MI2 you're re-living an adventure he's already went through and has survived to tell (until the explosion on Dinky). Honestly, right now as a grown man I can't understand how I found that bit even remotely disappointing, but I understand that there's a subtle difference between impersonating someone who doesn't know what they're going through or whether they'll survive, and someone who's telling someone else what they went through (thus definitely survived to tell). Mind you it doesn't matter if as players we know that you can't die in MI (please don't remind me about the MI1 death, I know but it's clearly an easter egg), I just think that story-wise it makes a bit of a difference. This is just to say that fans can feel disappointed by the slightest things but it doesn't change anything about how fucking great MI2 is and will always be. As I said, as a grown man I don't even agree with what kid me thought, so it doesn't seem like a stretch to me to think that many that hated the MI2 ending have grown to love it.

So Big Whoop is like Silent Hll, got it.

The ending of MI2 specifically being unplanned at that point in time is not a statement on the role of the anachronistic elements in either game. While Ron does not have a plan for specific plot points ahead of time, the likelihood is he does have a vague notion of the direction of the plot and the elements he wishes to explore. Looking at TWP, he evidently has a passion for questioning the nature of reality in his games. As an addendum, can we please not call it the "child's fantasy ending". MI2 rather explicitly lampshades the notion through both Elaine's "SPELL" comment and LeChuck's 4th wall break. It's a common misconception that MI2's ending is just a fantasy, and it has arguably harmed people's enjoyment of the game over the years.

I actually once had the chance to ask Dave Grossman about this bit...and he couldn't remember who it referenced. What's especially frustrating is that everything about it seems to point to the navigator head except for the missing eye...while MI1 also features a character whose defining visual characteristic is that he has a glass eye.

Yeah, Dread's story always confused me. It was obviously a reference to the navigator's head... but then the description was off.

Well I stand corrected, thanks for pointing this out. I'll have to replay 1 and 2 soon, I didn't use to make these stupid mistakes in my heyday 😅

I just played that part yesterday and thought the same. Classic continuity error. But then I had a stupid, funny thought: Maybe the heads missing eye was simply replaced by one of the many eyes from his necklace.

I always thought that the reason why MI2 doesn't care about the secret is because - contrary to all the other games in the franchise - in MI2 the characters have clearly moved on. Guybrush became a pirate and is looking for other adventures (like growing a beard!), he's no longer with Elaine though he's still in love with her, Elaine governs a different island etc. Apart from the first game (because there everything was new) it's the only story where the characters aren't treated as they were frozen in time, they can change, have new backstories that are revealed etc. Big Whoop is the reason why the secret comes back into the story, the revelation that Dinky Island and Big Whoop are related to Monkey Island is kind of the thing that brings back that whole thing.

It’s compelling food for thought. I (very hurriedly) added a bit of colour to further the effect.