Leaderboard

Anyway back on topic, my favorite Monkey Island games, in order: * On any given week Monkey Island 1 and 2 bounce between being my favorite. Secret is just so clean, the bar it set is so high, it came out of the gate as such a singular experience that it was able to define a template that five other games could follow and be judged on whether they “feel right” based on those amazing first choices. Its mood, across the whole game but especially on Melee and beneath Monkey islands, is still some of the most potent and pervasive in the series, and Guybrush as he’s written in Secret still may be the perfect balance of naïveté and snark, earnest and detached, as a passthrough for players desires, and somehow as his own person. … … Monkey Island 2 is still, to me, one of the most beautiful looking and sounding games out there. Monkey 2 is just the distillation of “evocative” and “intriguing” to me. When I first played it, walking around Woodtick, I wanted to fall into the screen and live there. The game seems built with every pixel to ooze mystery, to invite you to wonder what’s behind every corner you can’t see, what’s hidden in the cracks of its world. I love that the story is about peeling back layer after layer of a huge pirate mystery that seems way bigger than you. * Return has quickly flown up the list to third place for me. I’m not as purely in love with Return as I am with Monkey Island 1 and 2, but it’s given me more to think about than any other Monkey Island game (and more than most games I’ve played). It’s not a game whose world I want to tumble into the way I did with 2, but I felt an almost manic need to drive through the game and learn what it was about, and when I reached the ending for the first time I realized that I’d been on the same sweaty journey as Guybrush. It felt awesome. Return is less about disappearing into the cracks of its fictional world like 1 and 2 are, but it’s replaced that with a game that is full of nooks and crannies to explore, all of which reinforce and ruminate on the central themes, whether it’s the contents of the scrapbook that bookends the game, the different endings, the frame stories within frame stories, or, of course, the world and puzzles and plot of the game too. I don’t think I’ll ever have the same pure love for Return that I have for 1 and 2 no matter how much time passes, because it always wants to keep me a little more at arms length than the rest of the series. But, it’s the first game since 2 to both keep me on the edge of my seat the whole time, wondering what’s going to happen next, what kind of a story I’m even playing, and also to give me questions to chew on for weeks and months after finishing it, and for those reasons it’ll probably always stay this high up. * Curse, for me, has never crackled with the same weird immeasurable energy as 1 and 2 - it just doesn't seem interested in the idea that there is some unspeakable creepy underbelly beneath the story like those games did - and that’s something I struggled with for a long time because that feeling was what defined Monkey Island to me, but I think with time I’ve gotten over my own hangups and really appreciate Curse on its own terms. As a comedy pirate story filled with swells of adventure, intrigue, melancholy, it delivers; in my opinion it’s one of the best adventure games ever made. It’s just really damn crisp, a game that feels like it matches the intention of its team in the execution of it. It’s obviously beautiful, made by a team at the top of their game who clearly was having a good time making it. The music is still unmatched in the series imo, especially on the production front. It has a huge cast of memorable characters you really want to spend more time with. Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck feel more flattened to me as characters in Curse, another knock against it from me personally, and while I think it sets an unfortunate trend in the series, I can’t fault Curse for it entirely: Curse is aiming to be Monkey Island by way of Disney cartoon, and the way they “flatten” the characters could just as easily be seen as “heightening” them in terms of making them feel like they fit in, or even pop, in their new animated setting. Not quite what I’m after personally, but so it goes. (Also the voice casting rules. Earl Boen as LeChuck will forever be a beautiful and inspired gift Curse gave us.) * Escape is harder for me to square on all fronts. I love that for some people out there this is their favorite Monkey Island game, but it’s not for me. The art, engine, writing, mood all seem kind of at odds with each other, like many different people all had ideas for how a new Monkey Island game might work, and they all got thrown into a room together and started working, but never ended up on the same page. It has gags I love and still remember, some puzzles I think of fondly, themes and plot points that I think are pretty inspired and clever, lots of great animation and music, but at least for me as a player, the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts. Guybrush, LeChuck, and Elaine slip into even more one-note versions of who they are, almost parodies of their characters from the earlier games, which I wish I could find fun and laugh at the way the game itself sometimes does, but it mostly made me sad. And it’s got some real bummer moments that for me will never work (the giant anime robot duel at the end especially). * At times, even though I worked on it, Tales is at the bottom of my own list. When I first heard we might be licensing the series from Lucas to make the fifth game, my first response was “no, we shouldn’t do it,” because I knew the budget we’d be operating at was tiny compared to the original games. When I heard it would be a WiiWare game my heart sank because I knew each chapter had to fit in a 40 mb footprint, which means the whole season would only get 200 megs of storage — less than half of just one of the two CDs that Curse got a decade earlier. And I still feel that crunch whenever I go back and replay: The dialog prompts that result in the same voice line said regardless of what you choose, the repeated and reused pirate models, the soundtrack buried under bad midi. I was worried we’d make a Monkey Island so cheap it would be an embarrassment and I often still feel that way. I can’t speak as definitively of my more positive feelings because they’re about our own creative choices as a team, but we tried to tell a rollicking pirate adventure that went places the previous games never did, we tried to infuse things with an air of mystery that built up over the season, we tried to start the process of pushing Guybrush, LeChuck, and Elaine back to the people we knew from the earlier games, and we tried to at least acknowledge the weird edges and undercurrent of the story even if we didn’t feel like it was our job or place to fully dive into them. I don’t think we fully succeeded at any of those things, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for going as far as saying we didn’t achieve any of them. Sometimes I think of a moment from Tales, or an aspiration we had for it, or a memory from making it, and I’m filled with enough happiness and pride that it shoots way up this list! With time I’ve settled on mostly being proud of Tales - I think what the team achieved with the budgetary, platform, and managerial constraints we were handed is still impressive, and our love for and thoughtfulness around the world of Monkey Island shines through. But I completely get if that isn’t enough. If it doesn’t work for you for the same reasons I have misgivings, or for some completely different combination of reasons, that’s just how it is! I love that with this series basically no two people have the same list with the same reasons. My favorites are the weird total outliers that have, for example, Escape at the top or a total dunk on one of the earlier games down at the bottom just because it’s such a break in the trend, but even within more conventional orderings there are always hopefully some fun details and reasonings.

Lots of posts from people who don’t like the ending, some very nuanced but many going so far as to saying things like the developers are “spitting in the face of fans” with the games ending. The Reddit has plenty of positivity and nuance but it’s buried in the cracks. What seems to be happening there right now is any time someone doesn’t like the ending they go to the subreddit and make a new thread saying “my honest opinion” or “am I the only person who doesn’t like it?” and then the same crew rolls into the comments to repeat the same comments they leave in each of these threads about how they also don’t like it. There’s plenty of “if you’re an old school monkey island fan like me you agree with me” or “I’m speaking for all the real fans when I say this” going on, as a way to light a torch and wave it around their opinion to defend it against all comers. Reddit is where people go to make posts when they want to make sure they aren’t the only one feeling a certain way about something. Odds are good they’ll find others who agree with them, then band together with them, and that can set the tone for a subreddit for a while. But that doesn’t mean Reddit represents the majority opinion on that thing, even among die-hard fans. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it’s just the place people end up going to complain together, or celebrate together, or just puff each others similar opinions up. Sometimes when polarizing moments happen in a fan community, a subreddit can tip overwhelmingly one way or another in a way that feels almost random in which way it tips, especially if it’s not heavily moderated. A lot of the posts on the MI sub are negative, but when there’s a poll the answers skew a lot more positive, which indicates to me that there are plenty of people out there who enjoyed the game and aren’t participating in discussion there, which is very one note at the moment. Personally I don’t mind people sharing their “honest opinion” (other than the part where they feel the need to to call it “honest,” which implies anyone who feels differently from the author of the post is being dishonest or wearing blinders), you feel the way you feel about a creative work. That’s part of the fun! But it drives me up the wall when they try to smother someone else’s opinion, passively or aggressively, by claiming that only one opinion exists that speaks for “the fans” and it happens to be theirs. I think that is the behavior that eventually makes people leave the conversation and just lurk from the sidelines.

I appreciate the apology, but I just need to clarify: I'm not "speaking for fans", nor was I. You just misinterpreted what I wrote. Yes, I'm speaking for myself. That's precisely the point I was making. I'm glad you got it Just to clarify one final time. What I was saying is: It feels to me that Ahern and Jordan sat down and said: "What elements do fans of MI love? Let's make sure we get all of those into a game." For me, they succeeded (mostly). And for others (like Remi and many others) they didn't. Sorry to everyone for wording what I meant badly... how about we all try to assume the best from each-other from now on?

With all the stuff going on among fans since the announcement of Return, especially outside of here, I understand everyone's a bit more on edge, even here. I hope we manage to not let that get to us in the same divisive way as can be seen on e.g. Twitter or Ron's blog. I'm so thankful for everyone here doing their best to course correct and clarify whenever a situation shows signs of escalation, rather than leaning fully into the conflict and going scorched earth. We're all in the same boat after all, even if it looks different for everyone. Monkey Island is a magical boat that can take a crew to multiple places at once, unlike LeShip where everybody has to agree on a single destination. 😁

So... I need you to imagine a fully decked out Sea Monkey II, with all the skulls. Imagine it crewed by swans. The swams are the guild of weavers. Bobbin, Cygna, Atropos, Lachesis, and Clothos. They sail the ship and shape the world around them by conking the skulls for music notes. These swans on their tiny skull-music boat can do whatever they want. Untwist hurricanes, rend enemy warships, open chests to Secrets... anything. Swan weavers on the Sea Monkey II.

This is probably a question for Mark, Mike, and Dave more than me but I’ll try my best. I think at the time of Tales, the question of “should Guybrush and Elaine be married” was in the air (as it will probably always be), but there were a few big wrinkles in that that had to be met head on. The first wrinkle was I guess colder, one of canon and IP: no matter what one thought about it, they are married, because that’s what happened in Curse of Monkey Island. That’s a game we were making a sequel to, so it had to be the case. (That said, maybe there was some friction to play with there?) The second wrinkle in the situation, one a little more fun to deal with, comes from the character point of view: If they’re married, if Elaine said yes to the proposal and the marriage, what does that mean? Elaine is a smart and capable and rational person, in fact she’s one of the most perceptive and intuitive characters in the game’s universe, and she sees something in Guybrush that makes her agree to marry him. What does that relationship look like? What does she see in him that makes it work? And on the other hand, how does Guybrush feel about it? How does being married to elaine collide with his sometimes self-sabotaging combination of pride and insecurity? Will he brag about it on one hand while constantly worry that he lucked out and will some day be unmasked as undeserving of this person he loves but isn’t sure he deserves? I think the whole Morgan storyline is maybe a touch melodramatic and soap opera-y in how it was deployed, but it existed in part to test all of Guybrush’s fears on this axis and put him through the wringer over it. I think Return handled a lot of these themes in a more grown up and less melodramatic way than Tales, but that is also kind of thematically appropriate given it’s a story of younger people who are less sure of themselves and what they want in life. (Thanks Return for making some of Tales’ thrashing around seem deliberate!) Again just my take, but I don’t think it was ever considered that Guybrush and Elaine wouldn’t end up together at the end of Tales; the game was meant to make them feel the seams stretching on the bond of their relationship so it’d be tighter and more appreciated for what it is by the end. I think this read is correct. Thank you for clarifying. As an example of this disconnect, the original Curse design document called it “an apology for the end of Monkey 2” in a kidding-not-kidding kind of way. If you’re a fan for whom Monkey 2’s ending needs no apology (or for whom the tone and ideas that game’s ending were grappling with were one of the big draws to the series for you) a sequel whose initial seed of thought was a need to “apologize” for it, is probably not going to resonate with you as much as it does for other fans who don’t share that same specific interest in the series.

Yep, I get you. I'm feeling something similar. I'm not eager for a sequel, per se, but I'd like to just go back to what we had before: A hyper-realised pirate world with voodoo, crazy islands and zombie pirates in it. Basically I'd rather be in the world of On Stranger Tides than sat on a park bench feeling old. (I can do that all by myself already.)

What a great write-up and thanks for your honest (😜) opinion on Tales despite working on it. I remember how excited I was about it, and it really picked up around episode 3. I still remember fondly the LeSinge escape room, the manatee, the "technical limitation" jokes (Guybrush tossing items into Anemone's fountain to avoid animating a giving animation 😂), Morgan LeFlay was an amazing character and I'd have loved her to return in Return. I also remember how, due to how I perceived Elaine and Guybrush's marriage, I was rooting for Guybrush to split with Elaine and get with Morgan in the end. Was such an outcome ever considered in the writing room or was I just reading too much into it? I believe I really need to replay Tales and maybe distanced from the times back then, it might surprise me. It was after all my favorite Telltale game. Thanks for trying so hard in the face of the limitations @Jake

I haven't ventured to MI Reddit or Twitter lately, and now I'm afraid to. I'm afraid if I check I will go down a rabbithole of negative fan emotions. Can anyone briefly sum up the discourse for me? I remember when Curse came out, and it coincided with an explosion of fan activity online since it was the days when anyone could start a fan site. There were so many of them! My memories of Curse are really entangled with the experiences of checking sites like The SCUMM Bar and other early Mojo affiliates every day in the lead-up to its release, and then regularly for years afterward. I mean, just the fact that Curse had its own website was a big deal at the time - were there any earlier LucasArts games that had dedicated websites? For me, a big part of the Monkey Island was this transition from a world in which Monkey Island consisted of just two games, to a world in which it became a franchise. It was exciting and confusing, and a very fun time to be a fan. I still haven't finished playing Return, so I don't think I can do an updated ranking, but mine would be pretty non-controversial: -Revenge -Secret -Curse -Tales -Escape

I've loudly said negative things about this game, but when I consider everything I like about Return? When I think about what Return seems to be saying... how in that Cressup interview, Ron Gilbert says that Guybrush had to WALK AWAY from a final climax against LeChuck (a climax all the other games had), because if he fought LeChuck again it would just be Guybrush stuck in the same pattern, again and again, trapped for eternity? (I'm paraphrasing here, but I think the actual quote is along these lines. The theme in The Cave is very similar.) When I think about the ending moments of Guybrush turning out the lights - with Ron saying in that interview that they deliberately went with Guybrush turning out the lights instead of Stan - and then sitting on the bench quietly? It's kind of beautiful as an ending. EDIT: But yes, Ron himself has said repeatedly that there is definitely room for sequels, and he'd be surprised if there aren't any. That is part of the full picture.

We're all individuals with our own opinions. For myself, I do think the Curse designers produced the best thing they could have done, which left echoes in the fandom of the early '00s (how many of us remember Paco Vink's art?) and still holds with us today, in noticeable aspects such as Murray's character and the voice casting of Dominic and many others. Let me consciously make a point of not detracting from the other MI games, with this statement. (Plus the addendum that we as fans were far harder on MI4's twist that Herman was Grandpa Marley, than we were on MI3's twist that LeChuck was responsible for the deaths of Marley's crew, and that apparently he sailed to impress Elaine with the secret of Monkey Island at about the same time Captain Marley sailed for Big Whoop.)

To me, I feel like part of what made the years of speculation so fun was knowing that there *was* an answer somewhere that could be revealed one day. And now that it has, I feel a really nice sense of closure. And I’m glad the game still gives us more to speculate about. I’d argue that the game is *not* saying that it’s better not to know the secret; if it was, I don’t think they would have revealed it. I think it’s saying that that there’s fun in not knowing, but that, if you do want to know, you need to prepare yourself for the reality that it might not be very exciting- but that, nonetheless, it can feel good just to finally find out. Hence why Guybrush says “I’ll need to think about [whether it was worth it]”, not that it definitively was or wasn’t worth it.

You probably already read Ron's post about On Stranger Tides, but it's still a good read. https://grumpygamer.com/on_stranger_tides Maybe it's naive of me. But between this and the Mutiny document, I like to think that there's a tiny fragment... a tiny spark... a tiniest little piece of The Secret of Monkey Island's pirate world that was conceived as being just as real as Maniac Mansion, just as real as Indy 3, just as real as On Stranger Tides. Not that Ron is lying or misremembering the original Secret, but that there were proto-ideas in play that weren't related to children in amusement parks, ideas that were authentically related to a straight-up pirate adventure comedy... both from Ron and also from Dave and Tim. And that speck of reality is in the DNA of the Monkey Island story, whether consciously or subconsciously from the designers. Then I get to tilt my head back and laugh at the power I've given to the "real" worlds of Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones, and On Stranger Tides.

Once upon a time, I would have been able to rank these games confidently, but as I’ve gotten older, I find it harder to do so. I’m sure there’s a whole book that can be written about the reasoning behind that, so I’ll skip right to how the “ranking” works in my mind, right now. Tier 1 Chronologically: The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Return to Monkey Island Having gone through Return a handful of times now, it increasingly is becoming hard to separate the three. Return certainly rides on a different narrative structure -- and doesn’t have the advantage of thirty years of lovin' -- but the three fit together perfectly for me. I’ve said enough about the two first games over the past twenty-plus years around these parts, and will have plenty to say about Return after I’ve digested it further. If I was to rank them, in all likelihood it would look like this: 1. LeChuck’s Revenge 2. The Secret of Monkey Island 3. Return to Monkey Island Tier 2 Tales of Monkey Island It has its issues and inconsistencies (as generally is the case with TTG’s episodic nature), but the tone of the game is the closest to the non-Gilbert-lead Monkey Islands. In that sense, with Tier 1 taken into consideration, Tales is the logical #4. I guess I'm a Gilbert/Grossman-head at heart. 4. Tales of Monkey Island Tier 3 Chronologically: Curse of Monkey Island, Escape from Monkey Island This one is tougher. Escape is deeply inconsistent -- no need to get into those details -- but the dialogue is fresh and funny (albeit sometimes awkwardly so). All very Stemmle-y. Curse is consistent throughout, in that it feels like it has zero ambitions being anything but cute in story and dialogue. It’s funny at times, but it never leaves me feeling... anything... after playing it. Escape at least has a pinch of satire. Thus: 5. Escape from Monkey Island 6. Curse of Monkey Island

FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONED THIS. I love this game and I got used to it after a while but man this game feels so much less responsive than literally any other point and click adventure, purely because each click only registers *after* you let go of the mouse button, and you can’t hold it down to keep moving in a direction. It’s a good thing the controller controls are surprisingly fantastic. I don’t see how anyone could speedrun this game with mouse and keyboard with how much smoother the controller works; did you know you can free roam and run on the map screens with a controller, rather than being stuck to the path? It takes like less than half the time to traverse. I generally would agree with the rest of your critiques (although for me they didn’t bring the experience down much), but this is the one thing that I definitely never felt while playing the game. I replayed MI2 right before this one, and wow that game’s solutions are so ridiculous that I couldn’t get through it without hints. This one on the other hand, I felt like all the solutions were pretty reasonable, and the puzzles well designed, if not particularly complex. I managed to not use the hint book at all on my hard mode play through. I’ve heard some even say that the game was too easy compared to previous games. That said, I respect your opinions about it; I know how much puzzles feeling annoying can bring down the experience.

The way i see it is that it's a good cap off to the series no matter what, but there's plenty of room for other stories happening at different times. Revisiting what Dave said about it in interviews, it was something like "At some point it's going to be hard to put numbers on these games and in a way it might not be important" which was really to me the biggest clue that the game was going to do something structurally interesting like this. I think it can be the 'end' of the Monkey Island series, and it makes a lot of sense to be that as it provides the necessary emotional closure for ... what the value of stories told in this world is. But it can be that and also not The Last Game In The Monkey Island Series To Be Made

I understand that it’s not the same thing, because multiple games haven’t even touched upon the secret. I do think, being what it was, the secret retroactively was a goose with golden eggs. Without knowing it, it gives room for all these adventures, while knowing it makes it an “it was all a dream” sort of desillusion. Either way you look at it, it’s gone now, every new game will be reduced to “Guybrush is making up another story”, and every old game will also bear this mark. The way I look at it at this moment, the secret was worth much more as a secret than it is now. Somehow the treasure of Big Whoop, a pirate curse, the Pox and even the Ultimate Insult to me are more interesting than a guy on a bench being an unreliable narrator.

Give me a break dude. It’s because of what I said: you don’t speak for me. I only had a problem with the one word I called out. There’s a lot of “speaking for the fans” going on in the Monkey Island community right now and it’s… never accurate. Just say “I” or cite specifics. It’s a big fan community with a bunch of different opinions. When you say in fact, your opinion is that of some vague majority, it comes across as an attempt to give your own tastes an outsize amount of power in the conversation. Sorry for getting spicy about it but it’s a pattern I have no tolerance left for at this point.

It's fair that you feel that way (I'm still processing myself -- maybe Bill Tiller was right, and this answer sucks, or maybe I don't mind... I can't tell yet), but the David Lynch analogy is a red herring. Lynch was, of course, talking about resolving the murder of Laura Palmer. That mystery drove the whole show. It was why everyone tuned in. (Just like with LOST... and the mystery of the island.) Lynch didn't want to resolve the murder... it was an unexpectedly strong MacGuffin: the audience really responded to to it, and it made the show a cultural phenomenon. The mystery was the proverbial goose laying the golden eggs. Frost and ABC were afraid the audience would lose interest if it wasn't resolved. (I remember Frost saying he felt, "Cooper will slowly becomes the world's worst detective if he can't solve this thing", or something like that... although he later felt they'd made a mistake.) By comparison, the "Secret" of Monkey Island was not what drove the whole series. Probably most people (myself included) felt the "secret" was nothing more than a cool title and/or the fact that LeChuck had found a portal to hell under it. So NOT revealing the secret wasn't exactly keeping the series alive... However, despite this, I agree with you that the reveal has changed something about the series as a whole. I wonder what Tim Schafer thinks. If Tiller is right, he was part of the contingent who didn't want the secret revealed at the end of the first game... and he's been conspicuously quiet considering a bunch of people he's close to worked on ReMI.

I believe they confirmed they're random in the Steam forums. Also the skip button is weird on the PC version, too. It seems you can't press any other button before you press it, otherwise you can't skip anything. Or maybe if you press it too quickly the game gets grumpy. (I had to sit through the credits on the PC version, too.) There seems to be rhythm to it... wait a few seconds without pressing anything and then press ESC (or Switch equivalent) and it works. Anything else and you get the red symbol

Hello, I'd just like to inform you that I have uploaded the maps, and some other interesting visual content, from Return to Monkey Island, to my archive. Even some pre-release/concept maps are present, in nice resolution. Enjoy!

Not sure I saw this posted, but if you pick up the skulls after the quake…

Wear ‘em how you like y’all

Just going through boxes as I'm unpacking. Thought I would show off some items as I go. Here are some sealed LucasFilm Games for my (eventual) LucasFilm/Games mural. Rescue on Fractalus! and Koronis Rift. Original sticker on each state $30 dollars each at RadioShack. I went with these Epyx box releases as I loved the overall and universal design of these boxes vs the other styles of these game releases. I have all four of these original releases from LucasFilm games in these Epyx style boxes. Not sure just yet which of the many moving boxes the other two are; The Eidolon and Ballblazer.

I remember buying them alongside tons of other stuff when EVERYTHING in the TTG store was 90% off and worldwide shipping was free when they had to clear their warehouse. In hindsight I should have bought so much more.

Oh really ... that's interesting. Did they offer them as a set of 6 or was it possible to buy also single ones?

Streamlined to a more animation-friendly level of detail, I could totally see MI1 and 2 in that POTC concept-art style without sacrificing the tone of either game.

That painting of the pirate reading the insult book reminds me of the concept art for the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. It’s honestly very in line with Monkey 1 and 2, and 3 - you can see how all those games pulled from this same source material in different ways. Cartooney and fun mixed with scary and weird, inviting but creepy all at once. lots more of it here: https://www.themeparkreview.com/parks/photo.php?pageid=235&linkid=6881&pageno=2

God 👕 I beat #Mojole #210 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💛💛💚💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/