Happy Birthday Monkey Island | Hacker News Reader

Happy Birthday Monkey Island

grumpygamer.com

266 pointsalblue119 comments

Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games.

Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlash card. Most of these games are free downloads these days, so we spend hours playing them. Some of them look a bit aged, but generally they hold up pretty well. The experience is still as captivating as it was back then.

I thought these were all DOS-based (Intel CPU) games...

How are you running these on a PowerPC/G3?

They are mostly pre-intel based games, as Apple switched to Intel in 2002. They are free for download through sites like macintoshgarden.org. Otherwise I use an emulator (Basilisk/SheepShaver) on my own PC/Mac.

Thank you. I remember playing some of these on a 486DX-33MHz in the early 90s.

I wasn't aware there was a Motorola CPU based version.

As others have said, there goes my weekend. Time to dig out my old G4 laptop, or the PowerBook 520c I seem to have kept for some reason...

Did I say thank you?

Nitpick: The Intel switch was in 2006.

I don't know how the parent is actually doing it, but many of these classic adventure games date back to a time when there were multiple competing architectures; the games were often written in some kind of bytecode, and getting them running on modern hardware just needs a new implementation of the VM, like ScummVM.

I would hardly call my '99 iBook G3 300mhz "modern"...

Scummvm - http://scummvm.org

Clamshell iBooks are capable of running OSX. Not spectacularly well (they are 366 or 466 MHz machines with limeted RAM), but still.

While I maxed out on the RAM (a whopping 512MB), as it's one of the first clamshells it's limited by a 300Mhz processor. So no OSX for me. I don't mind, it's on 9.2 right now, which is about the most stable as they come. And with my homemade ssd (CF card with IDE adapter) it's blazing fast!

I remember running 10.1 and 10.2 on the 466 Mhz/320 MB RAM clamshell. Not very fast, but enough for ScummVM.

I didn't know that OSX does not run on the original iBook.

I think the highest OS X version you can install on a clamshell is 10.4. I have it on one of mine (with memory maxed out to 576 Mb). As you say, it's not real fast, but ScummVM works, and so do C64 and GBA emulators.

Scummvm under Linux Mint PPC should run faster than OSX.

Most of these LucasArts graphical adventure games were written using a game engine known as SCUMM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM) that was able to target different platforms, which was ported to the Mac and so ran on 68k and later PowerPC Macs. There is now an emulator that can play SCUMM games on almost any platform known as ScummVM (http://scummvm.org/).

Don't forget the Indiana Jones games. Fate of Atlantis was a great game.

There is also Beneath a Steel Sky which is fantastic and now free. http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky

Did you ever play "Martian Memorandum", one of the Tex Murphy series?

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

I've been looking for years for this! I thought the name of the game was "under a red moon" or something like that but I couldn't remember. There were some shards of memory from a secret moon base and a head in a water cooler, but I just couldn't recall the name, franchise or anything else to put me in the right direction.

AFK right now...

"Under a killing moon" is the name of another Tex Murphy game.

If you liked the Tex Murphy games, a new one was made recently with a kickstarter campaign; http://www.bigfinishgames.com/games/tesla-effect

As games go it's a bit hit and miss, but if you already like Tex Murphy, it's a winner.

Hadn't come across them. Will take a look. Thanks.

Anyone remember Torin's Passage?

I never understood why George Lucas went with some nonsense alien plot for his new Indiana Jones. Fate of Atlantis was brilliant. It was pure Indy. It would have made a perfect 4th movie.

Yeah great game. Wonder how much nostalgia is part of my mindfak.

Me too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game.

One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the term "pick up", to pick up a book, for example. My basic english didn't know that verb, I tried every variation of get, hold, put in pocket and stuff.

I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced at natural language parsing; you could type "put key in bottle", and if you had several bottles it would ask you "Which bottle?" and you could simply answer "the green bottle". Wish I could think of more examples, but it's been a long time.

What was that like? I've never tried playing a game in a different language before. How much English did you already know before starting those games?

Very basic vocabulary, I was like 10 years old and studied english at school, like, 2 hours a week. We used to play with a dictionary on our hands.

It is not easy, but still fun. It took around (i'm guessing here) 5 or 6 times more time to play it.

I played a lot of games as a pair with friends around that time. I think it was something about liking games that had a story and therefore didn't lend themselves well to taking turns. We even played Quake like this a few times, one person moving the other shooting, even when we could have taken it in turns with a level each.

I also remember arguing with my sister about who got to play Commander Keen one day, so our mum blindfolded one of us and had the other shout directions.

Thanks for reminding me, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it at the time.

WOW! your mother is a genius! Noted here for my future parenting guidelines! :D

King's quest was easier the alternatives. The worst for foreigners was Police quest. One command was seared into my brain: 'administer sobriety test'

Good luck figuring that out with a small learner's dictionary.

Police Quest was pretty picky. I remember the scene where you have to get the suspect from the car laying down on the ground. Shouting "Lay Down" would only give you nitpicking about the sexual meaning of "laying", which I never got until later.

Heh, this morning I was thinking about this in the shower, don't know why.

The worst for me was the part in the sewer, where you had to write "look at shit". I only knew the word's pronunciation. Spent days on the combinations: shed, ched, poop, and so on.

Hehe yeah I remember also going through a dictionary with my friend to look how to pronounce these things, and our mother helped too. Brought together the whole family for a while.

The worst for me was the "monkey wrench" puzzle in Monkey Island 2 ... Being French, playing with the French version, I had no way to put this together. I ended up trying every item combination in the whole game world until I found the correct one by accident. Took me days.

I realise my comment won't add much to the discussion, but Day of the Tentacle was a masterpiece.

Double Fine is apparently working to release a remastered version next year, and they were able to get the original reworked assets from LucasArts Singapore.

http://mixnmojo.com/news/Double-Fine-Has-The-LucasArts-Singa...

Day of the Tentacle was one of the games I was crazy about as a teen. What a lovely game!

> Most of these games are free downloads these days

Not legally, just conveniently.

Beneath a Steel Sky is completely free

Yep. Don't know about elsewhere, but you get it and a handful of others when you sign up for Good Old Games

You can download it on the ScummVm webpage if I recall correctly.

Or as an apt package on debian-based linux.

Good memories!

The Dig deserves a place on that list as well.

although it came later, don't forget Outlaws! Maybe the most underrated and unknown top-10 game of all time.

My favorite Western game and probably in my top 10 personal favorite games.

hahahahaha I completely forgot about this one!

If you didn't also play the Leisure Suit Larry series, you have really missed out. Hopefully that was included in your "etc."!

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Quest for Glory series yet (originally Hero's Quest)

QfG 1 (the one that made it to Mac) was pretty OG. Still one of the most creative RPG/adventure games ever.

CHeck Macintosh Garden.

And Lubuntu PPC with Scummvm.

Monkey Island 1/2 still remain one of the most influential games for myself. I triggered my strong interest in game programming and later programming in general. All I wanted in the 90s was to come up with programs that showed sprites moving around. Later I progressed to different fields of programming but I guess a part of me still dreams of programming an equivalent game like Monkey Island some day (2D of course!!!)

Chipping in on the memories. Lucasarts Adventure Game Pack on 5 floppy disks IIRC was the first game I ever purchased with my own money for our Compaq Presario 386-SX 25Mhz back in the day.

They used to remind to take backups of your floppies before doing anything else, so I purchased a 5-pack of 1.44 MB floppies to copy the diskettes unto. I will never forget the pain when I realized that I accidentally formatted one of the original diskettes in the process, and I could not install Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ever.

My imagination ran wild when I looked at the photos of this game in the contained cleverly disguided walk through that was in the format of a story, and I longed to install that game and play it but nobody had it. Luckily I downloaded it later from a local BBS and finally got to play it.

But back on the subject, seeing Monkey Island logo on the screen, with glorious 256-color VGA, the PC Speaker playing the theme music, in the dark cellar where our PC was, was just pure magic. Nothing has ever come close to that moment and will never come, it is one of the few rare memories that I wish I could re-live, to feel the magic of entering that Island and being there again, for the first time.

Monkey Island 2 came close, but the magic of playing my first really graphical adventure had already passed. Oh, I wish to share that feeling with my child in the future :)

As my username probably reveals, this is my favorite game, and one of the most enjoyable / funny gaming experiences that I have had. The part that I still remember, after all these years is sword fighting insults. Till today, my friends and I sign off our emails with some of these dialogue writing gems [1]

"Nobody's ever drawn blood from me and nobody ever will." "You run THAT fast?"

"People fall at my feet when they see me coming!" Even BEFORE they smell your breath?

"I'm not going to take your insolence sitting down!" "Your hemorrhoids are flaring up again eh?"

What a great game, and what a great era for gaming.

[1] http://monkeyisland.wikia.com/wiki/Insult_Sword_Fighting

"I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me."

I wonder if anyone high up in Disney could be persuaded to give Ron Gilbert enough control to make MI3a. Would surely boost their brand and create a community of grateful fans.

If selling the IP is a no-no, maybe there's another way.

I guess he could propose a game to Disney and see if they bite. From his blog (the title of which includes the phrase "bitter ramblings") Ron appears opposed to working on MI3 unless given full control first. However, I would think his best course would be something like a kickstarter campaign which might demonstrate to Disney the kind of market MI3 could have.

From the article:

> Please don’t suggest I do a Kickstarter to get the money, that’s not possible without Disney first agreeing to sell it and they haven’t done that.

Yes that is what I meant by 'appears opposed'. However, I wonder if he wrote that because even he realises that he will need to do more than just ask if he really wants to do MI3.

He has written about it at length: http://grumpygamer.com/if_i_made_another_monkeyisland

There's no way to force Disney to sell. There's no reason for Ron to do a MI game that he didn't have creative control of, since it still wouldn't be his vision.

There's just no good way to solve the problem at this point.

I find it interesting that Ron doesn't consider "The Curse of Monkey Island" part of the trilogy.

Anyone know the back-story there?

Wikipedia says "Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert parted ways with the series after Monkey Island 2, and the new project leaders were Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, both of whom had previously worked on Full Throttle (the interface of the game was adopted almost entirely)."

Curse was actually a pretty good game, mind you.

MI 1 & 2 support several lectures of the story. Due to Guybrush inability to explain his real age and various weird occurrences, it can be read as a little kid snooping around a theme park. It explains why he has to think that hard before giving his age, why a tshirt would be a treasure given after vanquishing a sword-master, why some areas are closed off with modern looking out of order signs, etc. It can also be read as a pirate in a weird weird world.

IIRC, the evil laugh of Le-Chuck and his read eyes were added just before the game shipped against Gilbert (and others) wishes.

Curse and subsequent games completely disregard this and quickly brush it off as another trick of LeChuck. This side of the story telling is then totally absent from the various MI sequels (I don't think there was much involvement from the original team in any of the sequels, Gilbert was briefly consulted for the last episodic game but that's it).

So if Gilbert were to make a new MI game, he would naturally like to take the story where he left it.

The thing is that whatever Gilbert thinks about it, the ending of MI2 sucked. MI2 was genuinely scary in places (http://monkeyisland.wikia.com/wiki/Screaming_Chair), and the revelation that it was all a daydream just made everything you've done up to that point feel completely pointless. This put the writers of Curse in a difficult position, and although their solution was a bit awkward, I can't really see that they could have gone forward any other way.

I agree, while I wouldn't say it outright sucked, it was a bit disappointing. In fact, when I played it as a child I literally had no idea what was going on. I guess it was doubly confusing for me because Curse was the first Monkey Island game I played! Perhaps that's why I don't think too hard about it, I love all of the games and readily overlook the inconsistencies in the story.

Ron left LucasArts before Curse of Monkey Island and it was made without his consent or original design plans by essentially and entirely new and different design team. To be fair to the Curse design team, it sounds like Ron's vision for his Monkey Island 3 has never really existed outside of his head and he didn't leave them any/many notes to even be able to attempt to end the trilogy with whatever story Ron may have envisioned. Ron also had mostly made it clear that he doesn't like that LucasArts continued the IP without his consent, as it was his baby, but that's the wonderful world of work for hire for you.

There is no other way. MI is too close to the Pirates of the Caribbeans franchise to let anyone run wild with it. Disney will keep it as buried as possible, and strictly under control.

Ron is publicly begging for it (and not even for the first time) because all other avenues have failed. It's easy to predict nothing will change as long as Johnny Depp is alive and working.

Related bit of trivia: MI was heavily inspired by Tim Powers' novel "On Stranger Tides" (which is a classic piece of secret history, involving Blackbeard, the Fountain of Youth, and of course zombie pirates). For the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, they bought the rights to the novel -- but pretty much the only thing they kept from the book was the title and the Blackbeard character. Everything else has been changed, for the worse. (So much worse.) So Disney's two pirate franchises are related, in a weird way.

Pirates of the Caribbean movies heavily borrowed from "On Stranger Tides" from the very first movie, so it was only fair that they eventually actually licensed the book, even if only to mostly just use the (fantastic) title, because they'd already picked so much of the book apart.

Also, further mutual inspiration trivia between the two franchises: Ron's never made it a secret that Monkey Island was also directly inspired by the original Disney Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. (The influence of which can be felt strongly throughout, but which most directly manifests itself in the complicated and controversial MI2 ending.)

I understand your thinking.

Yet I am still asking if there is another way, because in my experience, it's so easy to slap 'impossible' on something. Fell into this trap myself.

HN isn't exactly a community of people who accept conventional wisdom. Wouldn't it be nice if, say, we figured out some way to attack this, connected with the right person to handle it, and take the idea somewhere?

If not for Monkey Island, consider it an exercise in hacking supposed impossibilities.

Anyone got something? What kind of conditions would compel Disney to un-bury the IP and listen to suggestions?

>> I wonder if anyone high up in Disney could be persuaded to give Ron Gilbert enough control to make MI3a.

> It's easy to predict nothing will change as long as Johnny Depp is alive and working.

Clearly, Ron Gilbert should try contacting Johnny Depp to get the rights from Disney ;)

Depp seems to be the kind of guy to appreciate the creativity in Monkey Island, and Disney would actually respond to him. Hell, Johnny Depp might even be interested in doing some Guybrush voice acting for the game.

Even if he couldn't get full rights, Disney would be much more likely to acquiesce to the notion of another Monkey Island without a complete stranglehold on creativity.

Why "3a" and not just 3?

The Curse of Monkey Island, while being the third game released, was never officially called Monkey Island 3.

His current Kickstarter project, Thimbleweed Park, looks very similar in tone, humour and gameplay. I really have high hopes for it. Maybe if it's successful it will prove that there is still a market for "retro" adventure games and help give Disney a prod in the right direction.

That was certainly my hope when I backed it, anyway...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimble...

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

I hope you're right. However, I think Broken Age that even in the best possible conditions, there's just no real market for classic adventure games beyond the fanatics willing to kickstart it out of nostalgia (like me). At least, there's no market large enough that would make Disney reconsider its position.

I was so lucky to have grown up during this time and I hope it's not too pretentious to say it affected my life in many positive ways.

Agreed, as a kid with a short attention span MI 1 & 2 must have been pretty special to have kept me glued to my Atari ST every night for weeks on end. I still haven't found a game series that appeals so much to my bizarre sense of humour. Or maybe it was MI that made it what it is today? ;)

I still to this day think Guybrush Threepwood is the greatest character name.

One of the things I love about Guybrush's name is that it he was supposedly named accidentally.

    From Wikipedia:
    
        The origin of the name "Guybrush" comes in part from Deluxe Paint, 
    the tool used by the artists to create the character sprite. Since
    the character had no name at this point, the file was simply called 
    'Guy'. 
        When the file was saved, Steve Purcell, the artist responsible 
    for the sprite, added 'brush' to the filename, indicating that it was 
    the Deluxe Paint "brush file" for the "Guy" sprite. The file name was
    then "guybrush.bbm", so the developers eventually just started referring
    to this unnamed 'Guy' as "Guybrush".

Couldn't agree more.

"Guybrush Threepwood? Ha ha ha!!! That's the stupidest name I've ever heard!"

Yep, together with Zaphod Beeblebrox. Those two together mark the high end of fantastic naming and few others come close.

I worked at Software, Etc. when these games were released. I was in high school, and I got my first promotion to Assistant Manager.

I enjoyed all the adventure games during that time, but then Civilization was released, and I was hooked! Adventure games seemed flat compared to the endless possibilities in Civilization.

Ron Gilbert was recently a guest on Retronauts, and he talked about making Monkey Island: http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1147

Recent remakes of Monkey Island 1 and 2 are really nicely done with superb voice acting. Played through them last summer with my kids on the iPad and enjoyed every moment of it. Highly recommended.

A great interview with the creator is here

http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1147

I remember getting a demo floppy with it on it and being absolutely blown away by it. I had played Sierra games before that, and the artwork and interface made those games look and feel absolutely stone aged in comparison.

The excellent writing was icing on the cake.

I must have played through that short demo a hundred times before getting the retail game for a present. It's kind of amazing how much fun fit into such little disk space.

Hello, Craig Thomson? Are you here? Did you, indeed, become a programmer?

Has anyone played Broken Age? It's nowhere near as difficult as the adventure games of old, it feels more of a casual adventure game, but the story, characters, art and voice acting are superb. My favourite game genre by far, happy birthday Monkey Island!

Broken Age looks and sounds great, but I really hated how the whole game runs on rails pretty much from the beginning. You can't wander around much, so it feels less like a world and more like a movie where you occasionally help the plot along by clicking on things.

The original LucasArts games were only occasionally like this. They invited a lot of trial and error (some of it extremely unintuitive; Zak McKracken had some of those), exploring areas you couldn't access yet, and so on. They were difficult, and they never held your hand.

Unfortunately, this dumbed-down form seems like a fairly new trend in games. (Double Fine's The Cave, which looked fantastic, failed partly because it was just too simplistic.) I suppose they are afraid of losing audiences if they are too hard.

You're right, this isn't quite the same genre anymore, it's more of an interactive story. The trend towards simplicity has definitely crept in. I really enjoyed Broken Age, but not for quite the same reasons as the Monkey Island series.

Monkey Island 2 was incredibly frustrating at points and for whatever reason (shorter attention spans probably) there is less of a market for that type of game; people are more likely to stop playing after the first bit of difficulty.

I'd still play that old style of game because the more time it takes you to figure the puzzles out the more immersed you get in the game world, but for a lot of people that's not fun.

I think a big reason why MI2 was so hard was the lack of an internet. I knew one other person who owned MI2 so when one of us got stuck we would have to wait until the other got caught up to see if they could figure it out.

I think i spent over 6 months of real-world time suspended over the cauldron.

The Secret of the Monkey Island is mostly a comedy game. And it's funny. There is satire, absurdism, meta-jokes. Something for everyone. But it also made very good use of interactivity for humor - something characteristic for adventure games and something Lucas Arts was very good at.

Broken Age is far more bland in comparison. And while I'm not a fan of brain-wrecking puzzles, it could do with a bit more challenge.

When it comes to point-and-click adventures these days I would recommend titles from Wadjet Eye Games. They're more serious overall, but still have that characteristic "adventure game" humor.

oh god that font choice. Really, Ron? The c64 font in the eyestrain-inducing default blue? Do you really want to wallow in nostalgia for that? And Safari's 'reader' view isn't working.

edits the css manually so she can actually read this

Dear Mr Gilbert,

We do own the Monkey Island brand, but we are of course ready and willing to let go of the three headed monkeys and scary voodoo curses once again. You have our blessings. And curses.

Sincerely, Disney

(oops, looks like we accidentally posted on Hacker News, sorry, won't happen again!)

Old fart still dreaming of Lucifer's Realm, Fifth Eskadra and The Bard's Tale on Apple //c here eheheh Monkey Island good though, even if more a Carmen Sandiego kind of guy tbh eheheh

"It amazes me that people still play and love Monkey Island."

I'm still playing Monkey Island 20 years after the first time I discovered it on the Amiga.

The real way to celebrate a happy birthday is with a 90% off sale (on the remastered version)! Keeps fingers crossed.

He writes that Disney owns the rights and isn't showing signs of wanting to do anything about it. However, check out the first reward-tier on his new game: http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/backer :)

I love the music. You need a Creative Music System / Game Blaster or Roland MT-32 for the best experience.

The Monkey Island series along with Loom and Zak McKracken bring back some super fond memories.

This is one of the first games that completely captivated me. It was almost magical.

While 1 and 2 are OK, Curse is by far my favorite...so many fond memories

My name is Guybrush Threepwood. Prepare to die!

Where is disk 22?

If anyone is unaware, they've got some pretty good versions of MI 1 and 2 on the Apple App store. I played it on my iPad a couple of years ago, and it was great. The adventure format works really well on a tablet. You can even play with updated graphics or in classic mode. Easily worth the 10 bucks or however much it costed.

Oh boy. That's my weekend gone.

IMO the updated graphics are an unmitigated disaster that ignore what made the original great. Since there is a classic mode, it is still a great way to play these games.

The updated graphics work better for MI2 than MI1. That's because the MI2 graphics were scanned. (They even admit to that in the audio commentary.)

I just played the updated versions a few weeks ago. I'm a lifelong MI fan—I first played MI1 on my family's Tandy 1000 (16 colors and 3-voice sound!). I also was disappointed by MI1, which felt like a cheap money grab more than a faithful remake. The remake of MI2, OTOH, was a masterpiece—beautiful graphics and less clunky overall.

One really cool thing that both remakes offer is the ability to seamlessly switch between the remake and the original: At any point in the game, press the correct function key (F10 in MI1 and F1 in MI2—not sure why they switched that) and the game morphs between the remake and original without skipping a beat—down to the dialogue, music, etc. It didn't really add anything to gameplay, but it was really cool.

There is also a remake of Grim Fandango I saw on there. I haven't played it but I loved the original. Amazing game.

the remake was done by Double Fine, and is essentially a port of the original game with a few touch ups. They did a great job!

The normal course of action used to be: You build a game for console & Windoze, then wait 10 years, then maybe port it to Mac.

The current course is: You build a game for console & Windoze, then wait 4 years, then maybe port it to iDevice, and probably never to Mac.

That's at least a relative improvement over before, even if it's still not really satisfying for folks that don't have a console or a PC.

Here you go!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/secret-monkey-island-special...

Unfortunately Disney pulled the iOS versions from the App Store in April.

https://help.disney.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/About-The-Secret-...

I don't see it listed in the app store when I search. Does this mean if you bought it, get a new iOS device and don't have a backup, the game has essentially been erased from your collection?

If you purchased them and they're in your collection, then you are able to download them again from the App Store. I just did it and they play fine on the current version of iOS.

Ah, the "Disney Vault" is alive and well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault

The best part of that article is the end: