bucket-o'-mudd Posted February 4, 2003 Share Posted February 4, 2003 Before I start this thread I would like to pay homage and give my acknowledgements to Jack the Black who originally started the idea. It was deleted in an unexplained freak accident So let's hope this one isn't deleted as well The question is What first got you interested in the Monkey Island series of games? When and where did it happen? I'll post my account of it when I have more time. Let's hope it stays up until then Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A_Denial Posted February 4, 2003 Share Posted February 4, 2003 Well, for me it was whilst sailing the long, treacherous sea to....... nah, actually, its not that. Well it all started, when i was younger. I live pretty near a river, and in this river were the coolest little islands!!! I named one of the islands ( the one shaped like a bell) 'Bell Island'. This was an alright island, had everything a young adventurer needed; trees, grass em..mud (particulary smelly mud!). However the island i really loved was the one i named ' Monkey Island ', i dunno why, maybe because i was destined to love the games in the future?, or maybe just because i have always loved monkeys? who knows. This was my favourite island!!! Anyway, eventually the whole "fun" aspect of ' Monkey Island' faded off, and it wasn't until I went to my uncle's house that i found lying on the floor ' The Secret Of Monkey Island '. Now i was too young to even comtemplate completing this game at the time, but i had a go. Then as i got older and into the more " intellectual " games, i got mt hands on the first 2 games, then eventually the 3rd, then the 4th more recently. Anyway, that is it, and i dont regret a thing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderPeel2001 Posted February 4, 2003 Share Posted February 4, 2003 I'd just got my Amiga 500 -- state of the art for time -- and I was SO pleased but I was looking for some good games. I started reading Amiga Power (because it was made by the makers of my previous fave computer mag Your Sinclair) and lo if they didn't give the most amazing review of Monkey Island in issue 2. I literally fell in love with the game there and then, it seemed to be EVERYTHING I wanted in a game... humor, wit, intelligence and... adventure! (I'd never played an adventure game before!) Unfortunately you needed a 512K memory upgrade to play Monkey Island and was several months before I finally got one (my birthday). Over those months I kept re-reading the review, wondering what it was actually like to play. I finally got to boot up Monkey Island (it was quite a moment) and was amazed to discover that for once I wasn't disapointed -- it was EXACTLY what I had expected... only BETTER! EVERY little thing blew me away... the creepy beginning where the LucasFilm Games logo appears... the subtle music that jumps to life when the MI logo appeared... every line dialogue *sigh* I nearly fell off my chair when I first read Elaine's Campaign Poster... genuine humor! Wow! Every time I played it I always listened to the entire theme tune and watched all the credits! Wow, I LOVED that game! I learnt everything about it, all the possible options you could say, all the ways you could solve a puzzle! I actually used a hint guide for part 1 (yes I admit it, but only when I was REALLY stuck) but the Amiga Power guide ended there and I wasn't sure if the game was going to continue after that... to my amazement I went on a boat and then onto Monkey Island itself and then finally kicked LeChuck's butt! Wow! If only I could appreciate games like that again... When I was younger they had the power to blow me away like that Anyhoo, as you can see, I was (still am) a hopeless Monkey Island geek (But I do do other things too - honest! ~ Johnny Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lemon Head Posted February 4, 2003 Share Posted February 4, 2003 rather shame-facedly, I must admit that i'd never so much as smelled monkey island until a read a preview of CMI in my games mag. it seemed to deem such huge praise that I waltzed off to the local boutique and bought a copy of the MI/MI2 white label bundle... I never looked back. Strangely enough, I was no stranger to Lucas Arts games before this occurance, I'd even played Zak which was at least 1000 years older, but somehow monkey island passed me by. However, since that time i've been making up for lost time by playing them over an over. I'm definately into at least 15 - 20 by now. How about everyone else? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scabb Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 I remember I was small, possibly 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years old (my memory rules, and school was out for the term. Because my mother and father had to work, me and my smaller brother were thrust into the caring yet sweaty palms of my Aunt Linda, who had two children of her own, and amazingly, both were my cousins. They had an Amiga, with lots and lots of copied games. We used to play a couple every day, and one day, we stumbled across a pirated version of "Monkey Island". From the name, I thought that this game would be stupid. I don't want to play as a monkey, throwing bananas and swinging from trees. The idea of that seemed boring. Still, the cart went in, and it was a game like I had never seen before. Seriously, I'd never seen a point-and-click adventure before, it was really quite new to me. Anyhow, we played that until my mother came to pick me up. We managed to get all the way to... well, we had to find the swordmaster. We accidentally found the treasure whilst exploring the forest, without the need for dancing instructions. Then it was home-time. The next day, we played Monkey Island 2, and didn't do half as well, not even realising that a voodoo doll was to be made. Then it was time to go back to school, and all my Monkey memories faded. Around a year or so later, I was in HMV, and the name of a game sounded familiar. I wrapped my mittens around the box, and pulled, with just enough force to help the box leave the shelf and be in a suitable position to look at. "The Secret of Monkey Island & Monkey Island 2: Lechucks Revenge - White Label Edition". Well, I don't remember how it got bought, or who bought it, and if it was my Mother, then how I managed to part her from her cash, but we got our receipt and took the game home, where it was promptly installed on our pentium 133. Add another five or sixe months to the timeline, and you get the completion date. After stopping, starting, and ringing the premium rate help-line once or twice (Pick up Dog?), I had finished it. There was a slip in the box containing "Other White Label Adventures", and slowly but surely, I scrimped and saved and bought all I could. One of them had the CMI demo inside it, and I was overjoyed to realise it would actually run on my PC. And on the CMI release date, I had my pennies ready, and I took it home (Ironically making a short stop at the barbers, grasping the instructions pamphlet while my hair was shredded). amd played it until my hands hurt. The End. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RicardoLuigi... Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 like i said the last time i posted on "this thread", i received it from my grandpa, not in '90, but later. i liked it so much that i asked and he sent me mi2. after that, he sent me cmi, then gave me emi as a christmas present. i didn't pay for any of them, i just got them. and i even played with walkthroughs and all of that; i am a cheater, i'll admit it. which means the games must be extremely good for me to like and enjoy them even while spoiling the fun of solving puzzles and while using walkthroughs! the only game i didn't use a walkthrough for was the first game, which i beat with my mom. i was 6 or 7 or something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Remi Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 Mine is pretty identical to ThunderPeel's actually, or at least the Amiga Power part is. I actually had a meg (oooooh) of memory, and had also played adventure games before. And I didn't use a walkthrough. Ok, so that might not be identical, but the Amiga Power part was. ¬ ¬ A good issue too, I was happy when we received scans of the MI review at TSB. Also they had an interview with Eric Whatshisface from the Bitmap Brothers which was cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderPeel2001 Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 Ah yes, Amiga Power... I still have nearly every issue tucked away somewhere too! And.. just to reiterate: I only used a walkthrough when I was stuck for Part One. Just had to clear that up (Although I may have looked up one hint for Part Three ) ~ Johnny Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yufster Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 Well I lived in wexford when I was about 6 or 7, and we used to go shopping once a week, so my daddy would dump us all off in 'The Fun House' which was indeed fun for a 6 year old. One week, a while after we got our 386 (oh the POWER), Daddy and Finn were looking through a PC Magazine, PC Gamer. They got two games that week, and I got to carry them home, but the only one I was looking at was THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND, because the guy on it looked quite cute and because there was so much stuff on the box, I was dying to see the game. I can't even REMEMBER what the other game was. I think it was a sierra game. We loaded it up and I remember the chilling thrill of the night backgrounds and cool music and I fell in love with it right there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bucket-o'-mudd Posted February 5, 2003 Author Share Posted February 5, 2003 Amiga Power was the only amiga magazine worth reading. I wonder what the staff do now. They once did a feature on what they thought a good graphic adventure game should be using MI2 as the shining example. If anyone still has this issue then you could try scanning it I first came to know Monkey Island when I first got my new Amiga 1200 when I was 10. In one magazine they had a panoramic screenshot of the whole of Woodtick from MI2. I think another one showed the game interface. I was very intruiged that there were verbs for different actions that you could get the character to do. This was, perhaps the single most important thing that made me interested in graphic adventures. It was much later though, that I decided to play it. Those amiga users among us will know that before the internet existed in everyone's home, shareware and freeware were released on a system called Public Domain. You would pay £1 per disk and it was posted to you. Once I came across the Amiga demo of SMI. If you have played this then you'll know it is very different in its puzzles from the full game. It was so interesting that the game gave the player a lot of freedom. There was the door to the Scumm bar, you could do any number of different actions to it After this I decided to purchase what was called The Lucas Arts Classic Collection (Yes, it was a classic even back then). It consisted of Manic Mansion, Zak McKracken, Indy 3, Loom and of course SMI. This, on 14 disks (I think) was a great gift As for resorting to walkthroughs I have to admit that I was probably the worst: I got stuck on the bit where you had to find the swordmaster. After that I used a walkthrough to complete the game. On the Amiga, I only played these games, but there was no use denying the Amiga's untimely demise. When I eventually got a PC like the rest of the world, the first game I got was CMI as this was never going to be made for the Amiga I still haven't had a go on EMI yet, which leaves me out of most of the conversations here. Perhaps one day when I am freer with studies Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scabb Posted February 5, 2003 Share Posted February 5, 2003 Actually, nobody dare speak of EMI, for fear of being mauled, impaled, quartered, hung, drawn, and being subjected to a unique device consisting of cogs, gears, and shiny steel. In other words, it's not that good a game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hellbeard Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 I was bored, I needed a new game. I bought MI. And you know the rest of the story... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderPeel2001 Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 You can see what the staff members from Amiga Power did here at AP2. Jonathan Nash now runs the satirical site The Weekly (along with "Reader Mills" if you remember him) and Stuart Campbell still has a website called World of Stuart. I think some of them (most of them?) still do stuff for Future too though. ~ Johnny Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jake Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 My friend told me I had to check out this monkey island 2 game as it looked just like a well drawn cartoon playing on your computer, and was funny. So I went over to his house after school and played it for a very long very sad amount of, hours and sucked horribly at it but reallly loved the game. I had to go home, so we quickly pirated me a copy and xeroxed the codewheel in his dad's copier. The rest is history. Anyone know someone who has actually called the 1-900 hintline number? My friend from earlier in the last paragraph did, because he couldn't figure out to put the rat in the soup. My brother figured it out at our house while he was wasting his parents money on the phone at his, so he was really pissed when he tried to call me and tell me, but my brother answered and told him how to do it. There, an amazingly true and interesting story, free of charge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benny Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 My brother and I got an Amiga 1200 between us for christmas. We were a bit pissed off at first, we'd been hoping for a snes or megadrive, instead we had this....thing. Anyway dad booted it up and we sat down to see what the hell this thing could do. As WWF wrestling was fairly popular among us kids then hed got WWF European Rampage too. A sidenote here, WWF European Rampage is one of the most piss-poor games every to shame any platform, 13% in Amiga Format, crap graphics, no gameplay, this game was programmed by monkeys and we're not talking semi-intelligent monkeys here like chimps. No, ugly, stupid baboons made this game. To fastforward, we still quite liked the amiga but thought it wasnt as good as the megadrives all our mates seemed to have got. A week after christmas my cousin came round, and he brought his amiga games, that completely changed things. My God they were fantastic and of course MI1 was one of these. We were in complete awe, we'd never seen anything like it, it was funny, it looked great and it had amazing music, i'll still be able to hum the damm MI theme when i'm 90. We promptly pirated all his games. Fastforward AGAIN (imagine one of those tv fuzzy wavy dream sequence transitions or, topically that wavy Scala transition amiga fans). Six months later i had enough money to actually buy it (this time with the codewheel, a valuable lesson on piracy and copy protection learned) and a few months later saw mi2 second hand on the local market and got that. My fate was sealed. Oh I was young and lazy and probably used walkthroughs for most of em too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gabez Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 I had been gaming for ages, and always meant to buy some LucasArts games, but hadn't bothered until... I randomly bought the Monkey Island Bounty Pack. Man! It was great. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SamNMax Posted February 10, 2003 Share Posted February 10, 2003 On my brothers birthday in 1998, our cousins sent us the Cource of Monkey Island. My brother and me wern't very interested in it when we first played it. We didn't know what they were talking about. In the box, I found a smaller package. I opened it and found Monkey Island 1 and 2. I popped it in and relized that MI3 was a sequal. Being a big fan of the oldies (Mainly because I love their graphics), I finished the two first. I didn't care much for MI3, but after seeing the grapghics of MI1, I was hooked. When I finished MI4, I thought, why stop there? Why not play other Lucas games? That's how I got introduced to Indiana Jones and the others. I wouldn't have fallen in love with MI if it werent for Star Wars. When I was younger was obsesed with it. My cousins knew Lucas made Star Wars, so surley me and my brother would love his games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jannar85 Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 What first got you interested in the Monkey Island series of games? When I borrowed a copy of MI1 from a friend, years ago. That was when I fell in love with AGs Thank you, Ron! When and where did it happen? Um... my room, about five-six years ago. Don't remember... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brief Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 I was visiting one of my third-cousins, and he was showing MI2 to some of his friends--to demonstrate the "twisted" humor of the game, he nailed Stan into the coffin and took Stan's stuff. I didn't get the games, however, until much later, when PC Gamer included the first two games in one of their CDs, which could be "unlocked" by purchasing them online from LucasArts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jannar85 Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 Originally posted by brief The games, however, until much later, when PC Gamer included the first two games in one of their CDs, which could be "unlocked" by purchasing them online from LucasArts. A version like that existed? How was the unlocking screen? Care to take a screenie? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brief Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 Originally posted by jannar85 A version like that existed? How was the unlocking screen? Care to take a screenie? It was a Windows dialogue box that basically uncompressed the games (and the manuals) into the HD, nothing spectacular. I don't know if I still have the CD... probably do, but it's in with my stack of PC Gamer CDs, and would take some time to find The rest of the games were like the normal CD versions--i.e. no code wheel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wampa_one Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 My first experience with Monkey Island was on an Amiga 500, if I remember correctly there were 8No. disks in all. It was cracked & copied by my friend before he went away (the shame I felt). Anyway turns out the 8th disk was corrupt and so when I finally got the oars for the boat and tried to sail round Monkey Island it would ask for the 8th disk. So I never managed to complete the game until years later when I bought MI & MII on CD for my IBM PC. So the moral of the story is: If you’re gonna use illegal software make sure it bloody works! :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bucket-o'-mudd Posted February 11, 2003 Author Share Posted February 11, 2003 My first experience with Monkey Island was on an Amiga 500, if I remember correctly there were 8No. disks in all. I don't remember my Amiga version being on that many disks. I think it was 4 or 6. I never did encounter the "insert disk 260" joke in the forest when I played it, neither the "You've really screwed up this time" joke, until I played the CD version anyway Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Remi Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 Yeah, 4 disks for MI1. MI2 was a wrist-buster with 11 disks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stormy2021 Posted February 11, 2003 Share Posted February 11, 2003 The year was 1990, we went to friends of my mother for an evening, we owneda computer but it was still Black and White and all that good stuff. So Y talked to their son and he showed me their awsome computer with a thing like a sound blaster and stuff. So, he showed me Monkey Island. I was like, "What's the point of this." he said to become a pirate. So I watched him play the whole game, but he had to read for me Because I couldn't read English to well. I asked him stupid questions like... so can you die in this game?.... he said no....but that's easy just walk off that cliff....he said that he can't.....So what's the point of this?....Look, so he took out the dogs with the meat the the purpose of the game became clear to me... TO HAVE FUN AND SOLVE PUZZELS!!!!! After that I swore that I would have a computer like that one day and have MI on it!!!!! He also had a HUGE MI poster on he's bedroom wall (I wanted one so bad, I still want one). AS the years went by every time we went there He had something to show me, WOLF 3D, DOOM. I got my first PC from them for some money. It was a 286, EGA, PC SPEAKER, no mouse... but it had awsome games like. SKI or DIE, MI, Star Control 2, 4x4, Castle Wolfenstein 2D. The only game I played for a year on that thing was MI (it took me a year, had to learn to read english to play it!). Later on I got VGA and the games looked better! Now I play MI4 on my 1.5 GH, 256 MB RAM, Radean 9000 128MB, WIN 98... computer. (but I still miss me 286, it was so sweet, DAMN why did I have to give it away!?!) I was in a store the other day and saw the MI1 cd for like $3.99 and I almost flipped out and grabbed it like I was going crazy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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