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Well, it only hit me today listening to the song playing while reading Guybrush's journal, that it's the music from Secret, Part II: The Journey! And I just marveled at how well they did that. It's a recap of all of Guybrush's journeys up to this point, so what tune could be more fitting? Well played, Land. Well played.

Many hours later… I have finished my complete soundtrack for ReMI! For most of the pieces I worked the same way as before - only this time with the original files from the game. For the LeShip suite I used Jake's version, because it was already very good. The long suites are cut into single sub tracks, so you can jump between them. One after the other they should also be playable as a suite in a player without interruption/pause. For those who prefer to have the whole suite in one file, I've also put them in an extra files - as a "Suites" album. Strangely enough, I noticed a piece that I didn't find in the game. It is the 6th piece of the Monkey Island Suite (I called it "Unknown Area" for now). In the game I could only find 5 different pieces and not this onw... Maybe someone of you knows where it's from? Otherwise it could possibly be a cut version. If you like, you can download all the MP3s here (all in 320 kBit/s): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AE7dUTZGIyvSQ0fLFYmitdxBOKqQKhBd?usp=share_link Have fun!

I was like 8 and I didn't understand it so I was disappointed. I also might have forgotten about this completely because I didn't really "play" MI 1 and 2 back then. My dad had the games on his PC with a bunch of saves and I just loaded them non-linearly and played around. It took me years to complete these games and I had to use the UHS system for almost everything (printed out). It also didn't help that I paused every single line and translated it word for word into German with a dictionary (in book form). When I was older and I could read English fluently, it made more sense. And yet I loved these games even before that.

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.