Return to Monkey Island

[KestrelPi]

I think taken individually you could say these bits were just their sense of humour. But it's not just that. It's the particular way they employ anachronisms, the series of jokes which, taken individually seem like they're just goofy but taken together seem to add up to a bit more than that because they're all pulling in a certain direction. (the t shirts, the way the pirates say things like 'Have Fun on Melee Island', the way a bunch of stuff is trademarked, the reference to pirate lingo being 'how they talked back then', the way the melee island treasure is described on its sign, the references the voodoo lady makes to discovering things about yourself and your world that never seem to get addressed in the first game) 

 

Now, even if these and more had all been just random goofs they clearly later decided there was enough meat on those bones to turn it into a whole surprise ending for MI2, and I don't know... I don't care how goofy you think your pirate game is, I don't think that you choose to end it that way just as a gag. But in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter if the ending of MI2 was something they'd had an idea about early on in the design of MI, or whether it came late, or whether it emerged gradually from things that started out as jokes. The important thing is that there's enough in both games for it to FEEL like this is where things were going all along, enough that we can genuinely speculate on it.

[Zaxx]

I somehow still hope that RMI explores the idea that Hell is under Monkey Island simply because that would mean that PIrate Doom is canon.

[Marius]

3 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

The important thing is that there's enough in both games for it to FEEL like this is where things were going all along, enough that we can genuinely speculate on it.

Yes, well put! I often jump between looking at the mystery of Monkey Island through the narrative and the developer POV. The latter is where my head got stuck the most, where I try to rationalize my MI world view with the writer’s intention. Worst result is feeling dumb for believing a scene points at something bigger, when there are many parts of the first two games that were “”just”” stream of conscious goofy-ness.*

The more I do that the more fun it sucks out of speculation, as if I’m looking for confirmation to see Monkey Island in a certain way.

But that sucks, doesn’t it? What a killjoy voice in my head.

 

But don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to dismiss the developers angle at all. I love analyzing the most minor things in writers interviews to discover more about their intentions! 

A healthy balance of the 2 views is probably the best, I think. And is, to me, the main reason we talk about these games still today. I love it!

 

*Look, I know, painting LeChucks coat blue in the nightmare scene of Monkey 2 is a way to make him stand out from the super red background. But what if, what if, it was a choice to paint him as a mirror to Guybrush, who also wears a blue coat. He also turns into Guybrush seconds later! What does that mean? A hint of “We are bound to one another”? Them being brothers?? Could be! Or not! Whatever, I LOVE these speculations.  

[Lagomorph01]

6 hours ago, Niemandswasser said:

 

I've heard a lot of people say similar things about that line over the years, but honestly it's never struck me as anything but a joke about the characters in the game being played by "actors," a la the outtakes Pixar used to include in all their end-credits. The guy is overcommitting to his accent and Guybrush has to ask him what he just said, and he's ticked off because he doesn't want to have to do another take. I've always figured it was one of the "placeholder" jokes that Schafer and Grossman included to amuse themselves that wound up in the final game.

It’s actually great that we can’t really distinguish the humour from the lore, because they’re so intertwined!

It’s fascinating that we’re still talking about some ominous ‘secret’ 30 years later, and hanging on to dialogue that might’ve been a funny placeholder! It’s one of those alignment of the stars things that just makes it work and keeps it interesting!

 

And it’s what I LOVE about Monkey Island! 😁

[Lagomorph01]

1 hour ago, Marius said:

*Look, I know, painting LeChucks coat blue in the nightmare scene of Monkey 2 is a way to make him stand out from the super red background. But what if, what if, it was a choice to paint him as a mirror to Guybrush, who also wears a blue coat. He also turns into Guybrush seconds later! What does that mean? A hint of “We are bound to one another”? Them being brothers?? Could be! Or not! Whatever, I LOVE these speculations.  

This is exactly what I mean! That’s some next level David Lynch unraveling for something that might just be a solution to a technical problem! Love it!

[ThunderPeel2001]

14 hours ago, Trapezzoid said:

I'm pretty sure the Secret of Monkey Island is the title of the game, which was chosen because it sounds like a classic pirate adventure. When characters ask about it, it's a bit of fourth wall breaking with the trademark symbol and all, like the characters themselves saw the title screen.

 

The developers were a bunch of irreverent dweeby programmers improvising jokes for eachother. Despite that, they stumbled upon a wonderfully evocative atmosphere, and managed to thread the needle into a sort of sarcastic mystique. 

 

This. A thousand times this.

 

Everyone has forgotten the context.

 

Back in 1990, most adventure games were Fantasy (with a capital F) and they took themselves seriously. VERY seriously.

 

They were mostly dour, dry and humourless. They were unable to laugh at themselves.

 

(They were also unforgiving. (Didn't pick up the red berry on the first screen? Tough luck, you needed that to beat the big bad in the final scene. Now you have to start over.) And often impenetrable: 'Oops, you used the wrong verb. You needed to "hurl" the axe, not "throw" it. Game over.')

 

The Secret of Monkey Island was a reaction to all of that. It's why it made such a dent in the videogame landscape. It was a glorious breath of fresh air! It was FUN. It was FUNNY. It didn't take itself too seriously. It was accessible and forgiving.

 

All the fourth wall busting jokes, the silly anachronisms, they were just a reaction to contemporary adventure games. The whole genre was ripe for someone popping its pomposity. Hell, the whole industry needed some humour injecting into it.

 

If you go back and read contemporary reviews, there was often comments about the lack of humour in video games. And even debates as to why that was. Monkey Island was an oddity: a genuinely funny video game.

 

But now we're examining it through the prism of today's video games: As if humour was everywhere. As if there was some master plan with the jokes they selected. As if they said, "let's change this joke to an anachronistic one to hint to the user that this is all a fantasy".  Everything they did was because it made the developers laugh. That was already rock and roll in itself.

 

Not one contemporary review made mention of the anachronisms because those sort of jokes are staples of broad comedy -- especially comedy set in historical times. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single comedy movie that was set in historical times that didn't feature at least one anachronistic joke. (And if you did, it would be the exception that proved the rule.)

 

Here's a list:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AnachronismStew/FilmsUsingRuleOfFunny

 

 

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[vandands]

10 hours ago, Zaxx said:

I somehow still hope that RMI explores the idea that Hell is under Monkey Island simply because that would mean that PIrate Doom is canon.

 

Oh man, I can already sense a root-beer shotgun against a horde of zombie pirates!

[Marius]

1 hour ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Everyone has forgotten the context.

I haven't forgotten the context. I know what you are saying, but what is the issue? Like, where is the harm in looking for/believing in "more than just funny joke"? I love doing exactly that, even if all the facts above point against it.

[KestrelPi]

Yes, I don't think everyone has forgotten the context at all. I was there. Sure, I was ten, but I was there, I remember what video games were like and I remember the exact moment I first saw Monkey Island and realised it was different to other things I'd seen.

 

But I actually think that it cheapens things somewhat to assert that just because they started out throwing things in just because they found them funny or weird or for no particular reason at all, that's how they continued thinking about it and that's the context in which we ought to think about it.

As someone who has made a couple of games, as I understand it the creative process often goes something like this: you start out by chucking some ideas out. After a while you start to notice how certain ideas within it relate to each other and strengthen each other and those ideas coalesce into larger ideas, which themselves create other ideas, and this process is what makes a piece of work cohere, feel like a piece of work rather than a loose jumble of ideas.

Sure, it might be rock and roll, but this happens in rock and roll too. Because for all they were just throwing out ideas, they were also playing by rules. There's an internal logic to the game that only gets broken in specific ways, and even the ways in which it breaks its own rules are kind of its own bit of internal logic. They might not have verbalised it or given it a name or consciously understood every bit of it, but Monkey Island has a specific sort of language it talks, and you can tell when it's it, and when it isn't it - just like you can tell when something is and isn't rock and roll.

So I think when people enthusiastically talk about things like the secret, and clues, and deep lore, they're not necessarily talking about stuff that was written in a design doc or carved in stone or whatever. They're just suggesting that by the end of MI2, the creators at least SEEMED to have a notion of what all these nuggets had coalesced into, and speculating on the explanation that best fits what's there.



 

[TimeGentleman]

There are two separate things being talked about here: the concept of "the secret of Monkey Island^TM " and the layers of reality in the two games.

 

I think, like I said before, that the soMI^TM as discussed in the first game (and used as its title) was a generic adventure concept that covered the island's magical concealment and the monkey head portal etc.

It feels to me like in that first game the post-modern stuff was purely for humour, but that in the second game they decided to roll it into the story. The Voodoo Lady says: "Big Whoop isn't just a treasure. It contains the secret to another world. Find that world and you'll be able to escape LeChuck forever." And then of course there's the fairground ending. Exactly how literally Gilbert et al intended this all to be taken is left fairly ambiguous, but they certainly intertwined it into the fabric of the story to some extent.

To me, the fact that they created Big Whoop and connected it to the reality-bending, rather than returning to the location of Monkey Island and tying it all into that, supports the idea that the soMI^TM isn't that important and the continued questioning about it is a running joke.

But you know what? The whole thing is intentionally ambiguous, and while we can all have our own theories about how important any given aspect is or what it means, there's no way to be sure unless Ron & Dave lay it all out for us in ReMI. Personally, I don't think they will - I suspect they'll answer a couple of things and ask five more!

Edited May 5, 2022 by TimeGentleman

[ThunderPeel2001]

3 hours ago, Marius said:

I haven't forgotten the context. I know what you are saying, but what is the issue? Like, where is the harm in looking for/believing in "more than just funny joke"? I love doing exactly that, even if all the facts above point against it.

 

Sure. But what's wrong with pointing outs the facts against it?

[Thrik]

5 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Not one contemporary review made mention of the anachronisms because those sort of jokes are staples of broad comedy -- especially comedy set in historical times. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single comedy movie that was set in historical times that didn't feature at least one anachronistic joke. (And if you did, it would be the exception that proved the rule.)

This is a striking assertion. Are you basing this on your memory from 30 years ago or do you know a good resource for such contemporary reviews? Specifically, I mean. I don’t fancy trawling through massive magazine archives.

 

I ask the question earnestly because I think I’d enjoy reading what people at the time thought of these games. I certainly enjoyed the Atari magazine scans we recently unearthed.

[Jake]

I also think, as has been said before, what was fooling around in Monkey Island 1 (fooling around with jokes, but also with being creepy and evocative for no real purpose other than it felt right) got codified into the text of 2 in a way that retroactively tints how those moments play in 1. That too was surely a deliberate choice by the team who made 2.
 

Walking out of the elevator from the underground tunnels into Melee Island is a deliberate act of recontextualization that isn’t just one guy cracking another guy up. And it’s not something that would be written about in a review of Monkey Island 1. 
 

I don’t think anyone is arguing that there is any grand and perfect plan - it’s clear these games are built on top of each other, with each choice being an intuitive response to the choice that came before, done at the time in real time (the first two games came together in under two years!).
 

Like much of Monkey Island discussion, I think everyone is right here. There probably is no true right or wrong, at least within the band of conversation that’s been happening in this specific thread, which is by and large a really good one. 

[TimeGentleman]

10 minutes ago, Thrik said:

I think I’d enjoy reading what people at the time thought of these games. I certainly enjoyed the Atari magazine scans we recently unearthed.

 

Not sure if you've seen this already, but this is a good site: http://amr.abime.net/amr_search.php?search=The+Secret+of+Monkey+Island&mag_id=0&action=Find

[ThunderPeel2001]

1 hour ago, Thrik said:

This is a striking assertion. Are you basing this on your memory from 30 years ago or do you know a good resource for such contemporary reviews? Specifically, I mean. I don’t fancy trawling through massive magazine archives.

 

I ask the question earnestly because I think I’d enjoy reading what people at the time thought of these games. I certainly enjoyed the Atari magazine scans we recently unearthed.

 

Yep! I was literally reading contemporary reviews last night, so it's all very fresh in my mind. It was, just as you say, extremely interesting! I'll pull out some of the quotes I read while I can still remember them.

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[Thrik]

46 minutes ago, TimeGentleman said:

 

Not sure if you've seen this already, but this is a good site: http://amr.abime.net/amr_search.php?search=The+Secret+of+Monkey+Island&mag_id=0&action=Find

This is superb. I’ll save these for the iPad later!

[KestrelPi]

Yeah, I definitely would say that a lot of the ideas in MI2 sort of gave additional context to and built on the things that MI1 started.

 

But my main take away from that is that MI1 did start them. I don't think (and I don't think anyone is saying) that I was imagining the seeds of that being there all along, it's just that while they were making MI1 they weren't necessarily sure about what those seeds would grow into.

 

But then there's the bits that give me pause, like: When the Voodoo Lady says in MI1 "Not of LeChuck... of yourself and what you will find. What you will find out about yourself and your world. It will terrify you."

 

Why did they include this line? Sure, it's creepy, and mysterious as Monkey Island is sometimes wont to be, but it sounds more like a line from MI2 than MI1. Nobody else ever really says anything else like this in the first game and it never comes up again, and doesn't seem to get addressed in any way. And it's not a comic line, it's played totally straight.

 

So why is it there? Was it from some leftover plot point that got dropped and they forgot to get rid of the line? Was it hinting at some direction they already wanted to take the story in in 2? Was it there for no apparent reason?

 

Well, I can't say for sure, but I like to believe it's there for a reason, and that they were already thinking about the layers of reality in Monkey Island long before MI2 -- but that they perhaps hadn't settled on what direction to take it at that point.

As for whether or not this has anything to do with the secret, I'm not so sure they're seperate questions. They might be, but I seem to remember back in the 90s when they were a bit more talkative and nobody knew never to say anything on the internet we heard from at least one person involved that the secret is a real thing and it was in some way related to the various anachronisms seen in the game. I wish I could find a source on that... I guess I just didn't expect to be discussing it in a forum 25 years later.

 

 

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by KestrelPi

[ThunderPeel2001]

1 hour ago, TimeGentleman said:

Not sure if you've seen this already, but this is a good site: http://amr.abime.net/amr_search.php?search=The+Secret+of+Monkey+Island&mag_id=0&action=Find

 

Ah yes, that's what I was reading (actually this: http://amr.abime.net/review_8 and this: http://amr.abime.net/review_694 -- but it basically points to the same thing).

 

A couple of other things I learned: Amiga Power's reviews were so much better than other magazine's. And wow. Some of the dreck that passed as a review in certain magazines... I don't think I noticed as much when I was 12.

 

And um, when I started writing this I had in my mind a small piece that literally lamented why games weren't funny, and now I can't find it after all. Dang.

 

[ThunderPeel2001]

12 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

So why is it there? Was it from some leftover plot point that got dropped and they forgot to get rid of the line? Was it hinting at some direction they already wanted to take the story in in 2? Was it there for no apparent reason?

 

Well, I can't say for sure, but I like to believe it's there for a reason, and that they were already thinking about the layers of reality in Monkey Island long before MI2 -- but that they perhaps hadn't settled on what direction to take it at that point.

 

I personally think the Voodoo Lady was just playing the role of ominous mystic in the first MI. I didn't take her premonitions to mean anything more than a writer trying to hype up the reader (in a half jokey way -- "You will see things best left unseen", etc.).

 

However there was a rumour that the "child's fantasy" ending was planned for the first game, but Dave and Tim talked Ron out of it. And when they got to MI2 they didn't have an ending, so they just went with Ron's crazy idea. I don't know if that's true, but I'd sure love to ask Ron and Dave.

If it is, then maybe the Voodoo Lady's words actually were referring to that ending? 🤷‍♂️
 

Edited May 5, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[KestrelPi]

13 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

I think the Voodoo Lady just plays the role of ominous mystic in the first MI. I really don't take her premonitions to mean anything more than a writer trying to hype up the reader (in a half jokey way).

 

However there was a rumour that the "child's fantasy" ending WAS planned for the first game, but Dave and Tim talked Ron out of it. And when they got to MI2 they didn't have an ending, so they just went with Ron's crazy idea. I don't know if that's true, but I'd sure love to ask Ron and Dave to find out.

If it is, then maybe the Voodoo Lady's words actually were referring to that ending? 
 

It might be to do with that! It just feels... awfully specific to me, in that it seems to be referring to some specific mystery about guybrush and the world he's in. I mean sure, the voodoo lady says a bunch of mysterious stuff, but nearly all of it is either a specific prediction about what's going to happen ('The cannibals are helping you... or eating you'), stuff that's fairly vague and unhelpful ('you will learn things better left unlearned' and all that)... but then there's this line, the last thing she says to you, which is pretty directly saying to guybrush that there's some spooky secret he's going to learn about himself and his world. I don't care how haphazardly the story might have been put together, I just don't personally believe they put a line in like that as a stinger for literally no reason other than to sound mysterious. If that rumour you mentioned is true, that could explain it, yes.

I'd also SORTA like to ask Ron and Dave about this rumour too... but it's been 30 years and I bet THEY don't even properly remember, and I'm not sure it'd be easy to get reliable information about it now. Brains have a way of tidying this sort of thing up over and making the story of how things came about a bit neater than it actually was. It might be lost to time.

Edited May 5, 2022 by KestrelPi

[Toymafia1988]

This is super not important but a tradition i loved in the old lucasarts games were the little winks and easter eggs to other games. 

 

Do you think Ron will still include some retro easter eggs and references.

 

I know Ron said he wants to move the series forward but i still love a few references. 

 

Maybe a maniac mansion easter egg? 

 

Hell... maybe a thimbleweed park easter egg? 😁

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by Toymafia1988

[ThunderPeel2001]

20 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

I'd also SORTA like to ask Ron and Dave about this rumour too... but it's been 30 years and I bet THEY don't even properly remember, and I'm not sure it'd be easy to get reliable information about it now. Brains have a way of tidying this sort of thing up over and making the story of how things came about a bit neater than it actually was. It might be lost to time.

 

Ron and Dave have remarkable memories, if you ask me. They were setting the story straight on the "guybrush" DPaint filename not that long ago.

[KestrelPi]

1 minute ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

Ron and Dave have remarkable memories, if you ask me. They were setting the story straight on the "guybrush" DPaint filename not that long ago.

Sure, but there's a difference between remembering the file extension to a DPaint brush and remembering the details of exactly in what order and how a plot point that might have changed back and forth several times during production came together. I can barely remember the meandering conversations I had about the plots of my game ideas last month. But I remember the music files I made on the amiga were .mod

[Remi]

Look, I'm not gonna say I've found the answer to what the secret of Monkey Island is in the ReMI screenshots... But I'm pretty sure I have.

[roots]

I think it's reasonable/plausible to have a degree of doubt that the intention behind the anachronistic elements in MI1 was the same as it is in MI2, but I would also argue that there is enough contextualisation in both the Watsonian and Doylist perspectives around MI1 to say that there was definitely greater intent behind their inclusion than mere humour.

 

Given an original inspiration for the franchise was Disney's PotC ride, and considering the two games as a cohesive whole to my mind certainly suggests that there was minimally some high-level idea to weave these elements into the plot from the start, even if the "fine details" were to be filled in on the fly.