NinjaChimp

Reading this led me to hypothesising what the original intent would have been in 1991, and how the envisioned 3rd game would have differed from Return. For one thing, the Guybrush & Boybrush father / son relationship and storytelling narrative seems unlikely as the developers letter suggests this is a reflection on their own experiences of fatherhood and reliving on past glory, something they would have been unlikely to come up with 30 years ago. I'd wager that the implication of Boybrush being a young version of Guybrush playing pirate games with Chuckie was the original intent. In this version, Chuckie may well have been Guybrush's brother and the two old people we see were indeed their parents. None of the events shown up until that point would have been anything other than the playtime fantasy of two boys in a pirate-themed amusement park. If this was the intent, I much prefer the retconned ending. We still see Guybrush happily married to Elaine, and they seem to be pirates of some sort. Maybe they did meet on Melee island, and Stan's amusement park was a faithful recreation of this based island on their stories. LeChuck could have been a real adversary of Guybrush, eventually giving up on Elaine after meeting a new romantic interest and giving birth to his son Chuckie. Even the Secret could have been real.. or it was just T-Shirt. Anything is now possibility, which is something the 'Guybrush is just a kid playing pirate games' interpretation wouldn't have achieved back in the 1990s. It was worth the wait to get it right in the end.