[SPOILERS] Which was the original intent for Monkey Island 2's finale?

[demone]

I think the intent at the time was to simply have people talking and theorizing as much as possible, with the audience not even sure if anything they experienced was real (this much was more or less confirmed in the commentary for the special edition of MI2). Ron did confirm that the Secret the entire time was that Guybrush was in an amusement park, but his vision shifted as the first game took full fruition and how he would officially reveal it became a work-in-progress you could say. 

 

I think in some ways, Ron wanted an ending that harkened back to that original concept/secret without really addressing or answering it head-on either, that's what the third game would be about, and we essentially got exactly that in Return. There was no master plan necessarily, just an ending to get people talking while also layering in much stronger implications about the nature of the Secret. As others have said, how Ron and Dave were able to resolve it in Return is nothing short of amazing and a huge testament to how talented those guys truly are in their craft as designers and storytellers. In all my years of imagining how they would resolve that ending, I never considered the final scenario we got; it was satisfying, emotional and heartfelt, and tied everything up rather nicely while still leaving room for some speculation. The resolution to the ending was always the bigger mystery for me personally rather than the Secret itself and I couldn't be happier with the payoff. It was well worth the decades of waiting and I never thought that would be possible.

 

In retrospect, I think that ending was Guybrush realizing that he was in an amusement park - his world of fun and danger to shield himself and mind from the true dangers and feelings of his reality of being abandoned by his parents. By Return, he has accepted it, embraced it, and ultimately started a family; it was now our turn to understand it through one more epic adventure through a son bonding with his father.

 

Edited November 6, 2023 by demone

[Thrik]

It rarely seems to come up in these sorts of discussions, but as I understand it Ron has a bit of a penchant for ‘it was all a dream’ and ‘what you think you see isn’t what is really happening’ sorts of stories, and has ended multiple games in this way.

 

It doesn’t really change the discussion about Monkey Island specifically, but I think it’s useful context understanding that Ron enjoys stories like this where things are set up one way and then revealed to be something else.

 

Ron and friends were only about 20 when they made these games. Christ, I could barely wipe my arse at that age. I’m guessing Ron experienced a story of this nature during the preceding years — quite an impressionable age — and it’s bled into his storymaking ever since.

 

In a similar way, here we all are into pirates and loving theme parks, and there’s a good chance Monkey Island is responsible for a bit of that. 😄

[LuigiHann]

Also worth noting that this sort of "The End... Or Is It?" twist would already have been a recognizable pulp adventure cliche when they were making the game. Combined with the "it was all a dream" twist before that and the full "Empire Strikes Back" gag that led up to it, there's a degree of overt silliness to the ending that people tend to set aside when trying to determine the true underlying reality of the story. But in a sense, the overt silliness is the underlying reality of it all.

Edited November 6, 2023 by LuigiHann

[Aro-tron]

I think it's great that this has been a fan conversation that's been going on since literally as long as I've been able to use the Internet as a pre-teen. Surely all that could possibly have been said and speculated has been said ... and yet we've all come back to add our two cents one more time

 

The portal to Hell is clearly THE intended secret in Gilbert's "Mutiny on Monkey Island" pitch document. That document is really just three pages, and mostly sets up a). the treasure of Monkey Island as a mcguffin and b). the twist that there is no treasure, it's really a portal to hell that turns pirates into an undead army. That seems to be the pitch that Gilbert started with, and everything else built from there.

 

However, I think during the design process, this original 'secret' began to feel less important as the characters, jokes and puzzles became compelling in their own right. The structure of "treasure hunt as a mcguffin that leads to a third act twist" ended up being a narrative hook to hang all the fun stuff on, rather than being the main conceit of the game. Heck, in the finished game, the 'secret' is dramatically undercut by the reveal of LeChuck's ghost ship on a river of lava under Monkey Island at the end of the first act. When you finally get to Monkey Island, Guybrush is almost nonchalant about the 'hot breezes of hell' ... I think this twist was no longer a big deal to the developers, and they may have even forgotten that it was supposed to be THE secret of Monkey Island.

 

However, as a kid, the stuff about Hell in the first game spooked me SO much. I remember laying awake at night after that first cut scene with LeChuck and Bob and feeling that I had witnessed something unholy and deeply wrong. I only returned to it because my parents were ahead of me in the game and said it wasn't too scary. And there's enough silly stuff undercutting the horror of the original 'secret' that it was palpable to keep playing.

 

The second game I mostly played on my own, and I did NOT understand a lot of the subtext. Since the secret of the first game had been so horrifying to me, I remember being almost giddy with dread at the prospect of experiencing whatever Big Whoop was. I vividly remember pixel-hunting over the smashed treasure chest to find ... an "e-ticket"? I was too young to have understood this cultural reference, and it totally befuddled me. I had to get grown-ups to explain what it was, and still felt totally confused. I understood the self-depreciating meta humor of "never pay more than twenty bucks for a computer game", but this was all too oblique for me as a twelve-year old.

 

In hindsight, I think the original intention in MI2 was to reuse that same narrative structure of "treasure hunt mcguffin leads to third-act twist", but with the understanding that both the treasure AND the twist could both be kind of hazy since they weren't really the main point of the games. The things that vexed me most as a kid are, in hindsight really just obviously lampshading that the plot is arbitrary. The deliberate pointlessness of Big Whoop is almost obnoxiously obvious, but because the first game had such a strong central twist I refused to believe that it was meaningless. My hunch is that the 'e-ticket' was an in-joke reference to how the design team regarded the ending sequence before it was written: the big finale that we'll dream up later. Gilbert has said that he didn't know how it would end until basically the last minute.

 

I think the truth is that Hell was the secret of MI1, and the secret of MI2 was that they started making it before they had an intended ending. Ron managed to come up with a twist that simultaneously built on and undercut the dread I felt from having experienced the 'true', hellish secret of MI1. It also managed to make the jokey unreality of the first game feel retroactively creepy, like the Grog machine and the circus were also somehow portals to a nightmare. None of the other games has recaptured that feeling for me (although I think the Rise of the Pirate God chapter of Tales came closest).

 

There is no 'original intent' for the ending of MI2, because they started the game without a clear ending, or intended twist. I suspect the theme park stuff started to seep into the first game during the design process, but it had just been a background element that got pulled to the foreground when a twist was needed. I think Ron Gilbert is happy with the improvised, ambiguous ending that the game shipped with, and after all these years, I am happy with it too.

[DimDunckel]

I understand some of you don't think the "secret" has been the same in Ron's mind all along development of the first two games. I instead tend to think that the "original secret" as described on the RtMI plaque and by Ron himself on his interview has been a constant, abeit never on the foreground, of both SoMI and MI2... except of course in the ending of MI2 where it came full frontal. The anachronisms in both games, the underground tunnels in MI2, the "E-ticket"... all point to that. But it's also true that enough ambiguity is left to allow for different interpretations 🙂 

[ThunderPeel2001]

23 hours ago, Aro-tron said:

There is no 'original intent' for the ending of MI2, because they started the game without a clear ending, or intended twist. I suspect the theme park stuff started to seep into the first game during the design process, but it had just been a background element that got pulled to the foreground when a twist was needed. I think Ron Gilbert is happy with the improvised, ambiguous ending that the game shipped with, and after all these years, I am happy with it too.

 

Precisely. The "intention" of the ending is the ending we got: Including all its ambiguities.

 

Gilbert has made clear that the original idea of for the first game was that Guybrush was going to discover he was in a theme park as the story progressed... but that he abandoned that idea early on. He brought back a different version of the same idea for the ending of MI2 because they didn't have an ending. What we got was what was "intended"... And then REMI took it further, adding Boybrush to the mix.

[Joe monsters]

Here is what I think, based on recent interviews…

 

Ron had this theme park twist idea early on, but it didn't make it into the game, and we ended up with a more 'normal' pirate story, though some remnants of the twist stuck around.

 

While finishing up MI2, Ron didn’t know how to end it. He remembered the weird theme park idea and used it in while leaving it ambiguous, not entirely sure himself what it meant.

 

After leaving Lucasarts, Ron thought of ways to resolve the cliffhanger, with one option being "Guybrush is actually in hell," as he mentioned on his blog. So, the whole lost child in a theme park thing wasn't true anymore; it became more about "Guybrush is in hell."

 

When Ron (and Dave!) finally got back to Monkey Island, they were older and realized the hell idea might not be the best. They decided to circle back to the original theme park idea, keeping what fans loved over the years – the normal pirate story, humor, and ambiguity.

 

Now, players get to choose what it all means. That's what makes the most sense to me.

Edited November 16, 2023 by Joe monsters

[ThunderPeel2001]

On 11/16/2023 at 5:44 AM, Joe monsters said:

Here is what I think, based on recent interviews…

 

Ron had this theme park twist idea early on, but it didn't make it into the game, and we ended up with a more 'normal' pirate story, though some remnants of the twist stuck around.

 

While finishing up MI2, Ron didn’t know how to end it. He remembered the weird theme park idea and used it in while leaving it ambiguous, not entirely sure himself what it meant.

 

After leaving Lucasarts, Ron thought of ways to resolve the cliffhanger, with one option being "Guybrush is actually in hell," as he mentioned on his blog. So, the whole lost child in a theme park thing wasn't true anymore; it became more about "Guybrush is in hell."

 

When Ron (and Dave!) finally got back to Monkey Island, they were older and realized the hell idea might not be the best. They decided to circle back to the original theme park idea, keeping what fans loved over the years – the normal pirate story, humor, and ambiguity.

 

Now, players get to choose what it all means. That's what makes the most sense to me.

 

Exactly 👍

Edited November 20, 2023 by ThunderPeel2001