#herman toothrot

[arcanetrivia]

Pixel art of Elaine, Guybrush, Herman, and LeChuck; Stan; and Largo by bergni01 on Twitter

[dominustempori]

Elaine to the rescue!

Though why she sailed to Terror Island and somehow navigated her way through the cave maze and the dark waters and just HAPPENED to have a rope and...

Whatever. It's a Monkey Island game! (Thanks Ron and Dave!)

[the-philosophers-shirt]

That reminds me of Herman Toothrot from Monkey Island

[dragonairice]

What if Escape from Monkey Island was good though

[writinginthesecrettrees]

In my family, wandering around the house in a shirt and no pants is called “Herman Toothrotting,” after a character from Monkey Island and his iconic response to the question “what happened to your pants?”

“What pants?”

And he wanders off giggling like the madman he is.

[greatchampion]

Monkey Island Appreciation Week Day 2 - Funniest Moment

you'll never guess what's the answer guys

[arcanetrivia]

Me at 30 seconds: Haha that's funny

Me at 1 minute: Okay, tee hee, I get it

Me at 2 minutes: HOW STINKIN' LONG IS THIS VIDEO

(I'm a little surprised neither Guybrush nor Herman ran out of patience, honestly.)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to see it, what color is the tree?

Guybrush answers.

[tellytabby]

Secret of Monkey Island SE Part 10

Check out my channel: youtube.com/tellytabbygaming

[azurefishnets]

7, 13, 18

Thank you for your ask!

7. Name a game that taught you something that you still remember.

I can't think of one specific concrete thing but I do believe playing games like FFVI and CT when I was so small taught me a lot about using my imagination to build more out of these worlds. Never enough worldbuilding! Never enough character interaction! So it really influenced my imagination to start making up the rest.

13. Describe what would happen if the main characters of the last two games you played switched places. 

In Prehistory, it's Murray!

In Imperial China, it's Earthen Heart Master Herman Toothrot!

In Twilight of the Edo, it's Warimaru B Fiido (with the best damn map of the castle you've ever seen)!

In Wild West, it's GUYBRUSH THREEPWOOD, MIGHTY PIRATE COWBOY!

In Present, it's Elaine Marley!

In Near Future, it's the Voodoo Lady!

In Distant Future, iiit's Robo-Murray! (What goes around comes around you see)

And meanwhile on Mêlée Island, Pogo, the Shifu, Oborumaru, the Sundown Kid, Masaru, Akira, and Cube are having an excellent time doing various trials and becoming a mighty pirate crew...!

18. Name the first game you beat. 

You know this is actually harder than I thought on first glance because I distinctly remember playing FFVI first but I remember seeing Chrono Trigger's main ending before I saw FFVI's. And I can't imagine my older brother letting me play TWO games on his precious SNES at once, but I think I really did beat CT before FFVI. Maybe. 🤷‍♀️

[thenugking]

Return to Monkey Island Predictions/Hopes

Obviously we have Guybrush, Elaine, Lechuck and, judging by the trailer, Murray. Stan and the Voodoo Lady will almost certainly continue to appear. 

Unless the background on the Return to Monkey Island site is lying, we’re also returning to Melee.

The other characters in both original games are Herman Toothrot and the Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates) so there’s a chance of them too. Obviously Herman’s more likely, as a more popular and central character, but it would be great to see the Men of Low Moral Fibre (and a rat) back too.

Largo seems fairly likely, although honestly I’d prefer Bob.

I am begging on my knees for more Carla, Otis and Meathook. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but it does seem fairly likely, if we’re returning to both Monkey and Melee?? The more “canon” ending of Secret ends with them still on Monkey Island, pissed at Guybrush, and wanting revenge. Would love to see that, but it would also be nice to go with the opposite ending to Escape so Both Can Be Canon. It’s probably unlikely considering how hated Escape was, but I’d also like to keep the stuff it establishes about them. Let Meathook retire to do art, he deserves it.

I’m also hoping the Cannibals are still living on Monkey Island in this universe. And I mean the original ones, I want Red Skull and Sharptooth back. (We know Herman Toothrot existed as a character so there was someone to talk to during most of Under Monkey Island so there’s going to be people there and look we have so many great possibilities here, I need the crew Or the cannibals at least.)

Wally is a strong possibility! (We’d better have Wally back and they’d better have him confirmed to be Okay by the end of the game, I can’t deal with two Monkey Island universes leaving his fate uncertain.)

I know it’s too much to ask for but it would be nice if they confirmed the grey monkey with Elaine’s root beer was the same one from Monkey Island and in this universe definitely Didn’t starve to death.

It’s possible we’ll get more characters from Curse onwards, since we’re getting Murray. I adore Morgan and Winslow and would love to see them again, but Tales very much feels like its own thing, and I’m not really expecting any characters, islands, or lore from it?? Other than Murray, I think the only characters from Curse and Escape I wouldn’t be surprised to see would be the Barber Shop Quartet, but I still don’t think that’s super likely.

Parrots. Gotta be more parrots. Monkeys would be nice too, y’know.

I’ll be very surprised if Lechuck doesn’t get his fiery beard. It’s so iconic by this point.

Also the Monkey Island volcano has to stop being dormant, right? If you say in the first game that there is a volcano sitting on the island, in the third game it absolutely must erupt.

There’d better be an easier way to get to the north of Monkey Island this game.

We have Monkey Island, presumably Melee, and likely Dinky too (I doubt we’re keeping Curse’s retcon that Big Whoop is actually on Monkey Island). As much as I’d love to return to Scabb and Blood and Lucre…  we’re probably more likely to get a new island than a nostalgia tour. 

I don’t know if Guybrush and Elaine will end up together or not, but I’m assuming we’re not going to go from Elaine going from being annoyed at Guybrush, to declaring he’s the only man she’s ever loved and getting engaged to him with nothing in between this time. Considering Ron Gilbert’s part in writing her in Tales, it seems like she’ll get a lot more autonomy and generally Better Writing than Curse.

Also y’know we’re presumably getting an Explanation as to what the hell was happening at the end of Lechuck’s Revenge it’s been 30 years but finally. I’m assuming we’re getting a different explanation for Big Whoop than in Curse too.

We might finally even discover….. What Is the Secret of Monkey Island?

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #448

Top Ten Moments in The Secret of Monkey Island

This week was one of those weeks where I had a list all ready to go, and then I discovered something that made me throw the whole lot in the bin and write something new in a hurry. And the thing that I discovered is that it is, approximately, the 30th birthday of my favourite videogame of all time, The Secret of Monkey Island.

When I was a kid, I’d go round my cousins’ house and play on their Spectrum or their C64. I played the usual 8-bit hits of the era; Dizzy, Ghostbusters, Skool Daze, that really weird and probably insanely offensive Spitting Image beat-em-up… then I got my Amiga around Christmas 1990, and I figured games would be more-or-less the same but with more colours. I was wrong.

I got two games in short succession that utterly changed my appreciation for the medium: Lemmings and Monkey Island. The first was funny, inventive, colourful and characterful; a fiendishly difficult puzzler that nevertheless made you want to come back for more, because you just fell in love with the Lemmings themselves. It was like nothing I’d seen before, and felt impossible. Monkey Island, on the other hand, was not only better, not only more my cup of tea gameplay wise, but just blew the doors of my perception of what games were and what they could do. It was like an interactive movie before that was even a term; a living cartoon where you were the main character. A funny, wordy, witty adventure story, full of gags and references that I didn’t quite get but that I knew were smart and humorous (and there was lots of daft humour in there that I did get, too). It wasn’t just a case of being able to talk to people – I’d done that in stuff like Skool Daze – but the ability to solve problems, to divine solutions; to work out that you can drug dogs by smearing meat with dubious petals. And even when do did something like that, the game was irreverent enough to put a disclaimer on screen assuring you that the dogs were only sleeping. It broke the fourth wall, and I was only just old enough to understand what that meant in narrative terms; this was a game about gaming, about stories and adventures. It was filled with movie references (George Lucas even makes a cameo!). It inspired me to write into Amiga Power for help with a particular puzzle, and they printed my letter, but by the time it came out about three months had passed and I’d solved the puzzle on my own.

Monkey Island was the first game that I loved as much as the cartoons I watched or the comics I read; Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck and the rest were the first gaming characters that I took to my heart in the same way as Bumblebee, Garfield, or Peter Venkman. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure I’d love games the same way if I’d never played Monkey Island. It certainly changed the types of games I wanted to play; even though I’ve enjoyed my fair share of platformers, racing games, and shooters, it’s always the slower-paced narrative games that I come back to, the Fables and Mass Effects and Deus Exes of this world (even faster-paced games like Halo, Gears and Half-Life still grab me with their stories, as daft as they may sometimes be). Basically, Monkey Island made me a sucker for a dialogue tree.

Monkey Island was my gateway to a whole host of other LucasArts adventure games; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango… Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer were among the first names of games creators that I ever knew (probably the very first, in all honesty, was Peter Molyneux – I am British after all). It was a window into a much larger world, one filled with choice, consequence, non-sequiturs, and rubber chickens with pullies in the middle.

Anyway, to celebrate Monkey Island, here are my Top Ten moments from the game. See you next year for the Monkey Island 2 list.

How to Get Ahead in Navigating: I’ve gone about it before, but this simple, daft joke – swapping a guide book for an actual navigator’s head – blew my mind as a kid. It forced me to think differently about puzzles and comedy and how to approach the game. For little old me, it was a revelation, and just desperately funny.

How Appropriate, You Fight Like a Cow: a discussion of Monkey can’t be had without talking about the innovative swordfights; a wholly successful attempt to replicate the verbal parrying of a classic Hollywood swordfight, the insult-riposte dynamic also reinforced the puzzle mechanics of the game. Sublime.

Order Hint Book: Monkey Island was the first adventure game I played, so I didn’t realise at the time how innovative its gameplay was, because you could never get hopelessly, game-ruiningly stuck, and nor could you die. Except at one point, when you drown, but even that is a hilarious gag that is easily avoidable. The control verbs changing from things like “Pick Up” to “Decompose” is just tremendous.

Use Staple Remover on Tremendous, Dangerous-Looking Yak: Monkey plays fast and loose with game conventions, sending itself up in the process; the moment when Guybrush enters a room and is hidden from view, undergoing a series of preposterous and expensive-sounding adventures, which you only know about because you can read his actions in the sentence line as if you were still controlling him (“use… gopher repellent… on another gopher…”), is a phenomenal piece of comedy stagecraft, a game parodying games parodying itself, using its own architecture to tell a joke (as well as being a play on the whole “noises off” style of gag in the first place).

Ask Me About Loom: like I say, I’d never played an adventure game before; I’d never heard of any LucasArts (sorry, Lucasfilm Games) titles, apart from maybe Maniac Mansion. So the bloke in the SCUMM Bar with his “Ask me about LOOM” badge, who launches into an intense sales spiel when you speak to him, didn’t make sense at first. But when it clicked, the very idea of a pirate in this game directly referencing another game was fourth-wall-breaking hilarious genius; happening right near the start of the game lets you know what you’re in for.

The Rock: when you get to Monkey Island, there’s a puzzle where you need to use a makeshift seesaw to catapult a boulder onto a tree (or something). If you line it up wrong, you can sink your own ship (and presumably drown your mutinous crew). The first time I played the game, this is what I did; there’s another great gag where castaway Herman Toothrot turns out to have a ship of his own. But the second time I played through, I didn’t sink my ship, and sailed back with my original crew. This blew my mind; whilst obviously not at Warren Spector levels of emergent game design, the fact that you could actually change what happened, to have a different experience to another player, was phenomenal, and another one of those watershed gaming moments for me.

Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates): the trio of loitering pirates are funny in and of themselves, with their breath mints and Pieces o’ Eight and minutes from a PTA meeting. But what I always found really funny was that they are literally called “Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates)”; that’s what it says in the sentence line when you hover your cursor over them (an aside: Monkey Island and Lemmings probably taught me how to use a mouse). Again it was the game using the structure of a game to tell a joke.

Rescuing Otis: this is what promoted me to write into Amiga Power back in the day: how the heck do you rescue Otis from the jail?! There are delightful red herrings regarding files and whatnot, but the eventual solution – juggling acidic grog from mug to mug as you make your way through the town to eventually pour it on his lock – was a rare moment of fast-paced tension in a relatively slow game. Solving it on my own made me feel so clever at a tender age. And it’s funny! So great!

A Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle: ah, my beloved rubber chicken. Found early on in the game and used in a couple of puzzles, I don’t think I quite grasped the silly brilliance of it; as a kid you’re just more accepting of the surreal. Why does a rubber chicken have a pulley? It’s basically just so you can zip-line across a chasm; it’s a wholly functional, boring plot device. But it’s also a rubber chicken. It’s sublime comic genius. And then you cook it! Madness!

The Voodoo Root: I’ve not even mentioned The Ghost Pirate LeChuck yet (if I’m honest his best “moments” are in the sequel) but the finale of the game, when you’ve distilled your Voodoo Root and you’re dispatching ghosts left right and centre, brilliantly marries an epic adventure action sequence with the point-and-click structure of the game itself. But then you fight LeChuck and he boots you around the island, until finally you crash land on a soft drinks dispenser, and finally defeat him with… a can of root beer. Cue fireworks and a strangely romantic ending. Is it as good as the ending of Monkey 2? No, but nothing is. Literally nothing, in the history of the universe.

Wow, there we are. I never had room for the dance steps, the recipe, finding the treasure, defeating the Sword Master, or Stan. Stan! I didn’t have room for Stan! See, that’s how good the game is; I barely mentioned one of the greatest gaming villains of all time, and I didn’t even get round to one of the medium’s funniest supporting characters. Blimey.

Man, I love The Secret of Monkey Island. Ron and the rest of you guys: you done good. Thanks for the memories.

[arcanetrivia]

[stagmanparty]

Well Rise of the Friendz-I mean Rise Of The Skywalker Honestly...I really liked it! For real! Waaay better than the other two messes. Sure Abrams did this one?

Heard Lucas helped and boy it shows cause finally good writing!

Now I can buy this people are friends cause they actually spend time together. And while still not a huge fan of her acting (sorry) finally I can like Rey since she has an actual arc. Same with Kylo.

They retcon the shit out of the two previous movies (good!) and even how the Force works but hey I welcome it, it looks cool. I even like the Herman Toothrot cameo XP

I´m still a prequels guy (they came out in my teens) and ep III forever will be the best one. And I doubt this series will go out with so many iconic or meme scenes like those but at least this one I actually want to see it again unlike the other two BLEURGH

[ollamhproductions]

Time to delve deep into the brain of one Herman ToothRot. Not that I *WANT* to, but surely he has something interesting to tell us....

[dazzlinglatte]

LeChuck's got a voodoo doll and I feel bad for not talking to Herman Toothrot.

[innuendostudios]

New video essay: Three Short Arguments on The Secret of Monkey Island. I’ve been planning this since I first started making video essays three years ago.

You can support my work on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.

Three Short Arguments on The Secret of Monkey Island

1. Theme

The adventure game has long positioned itself as the genre that treats games as a storytelling medium in the same way the novel treats prose and film, television, and theater treat performance. And many adventure games from the classic era feature the things we have come to expect of a good story: intricate plots, compelling characters, and pretty good dialogue. But, often, some of the higher-level things we expect from a narrative are missing, things like character development or solid pacing, and I couldn’t point to many classic adventure games that have something even so basic as a theme.

But The Secret of Monkey Island, what I’d argue is the most influential graphic adventure game ever made, has a theme. In fact, it has two. And each one is neatly encapsulated by a single line of pretty good dialogue.

Here’s the first: Early in the game, protagonist Guybrush Threepwood has to get these petals fed to these dogs because reasons, and he can do this by just rubbing the flowers on a hunk of meat, but he can also stew the meat in a pot of soup and add the flowers to the broth. And, if that’s the route you choose to take, when he drops a petal into the water, he says, and I quote, "It's not a bay leaf, but every cook makes substitutions."

Here’s the second theme: Another early puzzle is Guybrush having his path blocked by a bridge troll. He can't get to the other end of the island without giving the troll what he wants, but the troll isn’t interested in money. When asked, he says he wants "something that will attract attention but have no real importance." The solution is to give him a red herring.

These are the twin themes of the The Secret of Monkey Island, the guiding principles behind not just its story but much of its design. Together, they form the game’s philosophy, because, yeah, it has one of those, too.

A good example of the first would be basically all of Part Two, essentially one long puzzle chain that is literally Guybrush as a cook making substitutions. He needs to cast a spell following a recipe for which he has none of the ingredients. Need monkey blood? Use some wine. Need brimstone? Use gunpowder. Need a pressed human skull? Use the Jolly Roger. And, despite all this “obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit,” the spell works; apparently the gods that govern this universe aren’t picky.

Now, savvy viewers are maybe saying, Ian, this is a genre famous for thinking a deflating duck floaty around a clamp on a string is an effective way to pick something up off the ground! Jerry-rigged solutions are what adventure game puzzles are. But most games treat this as a gimme, part and parcel with playing an adventure game. They don’t bother to justify it thematically.

Guybrush himself is a jerry-rigged solution. It's laid out early in the game, when he declares that he wants to be a pirate. At first the pirate leaders dismiss him, but then they remember that the fabled Ghost Pirate LeChuck is terrorizing the Caribbean and all the other pirates are too scared to go out on the water. "No pirates means no swag and no swag means no grog and we're getting dangerously low on grog." That's the only reason they take Guybrush on, because they're making do; in this world a pot will serve as a helmet, root beer will serve as a magic potion, and a baby-faced cabin boy with no skills with serve as a pirate. Anything in a pinch.

With his good manners, perfect English, and utter inability to lead a crew, Guybrush resembles the other pirates in the game a lot less than he resembles... an early 90's computer nerd. A young guy who wants to act like a pirate; presumably you bought the game because you want the same thing. Guybrush is a terrible candidate for being a pirate, but, by some rounding error in fate's ledger, he gets to be one. The wish-fulfillment is that you’re getting away with something.

The second theme is the idea of things central to the game having little to no intrinsic value, and it runs deep. One of the better gags in Part Three is this red herring about a banana picker. Shipwrecked castaway Herman Toothrot mentions that he lent it to the cannibals, and there's this ongoing puzzle where you have to collect a bunch of bananas, sometimes with very roundabout methods, so, yeah, a banana picker would be useful. When you meet the cannibals, they imprison you (for stealing bananas), and inside their jail is the banana picker. But it's too big to fit through your little escap-y hole so you leave it behind. By the time you can come back through the front door to take it with you... you've already solved the puzzle where you needed bananas.

And, get this: The cannibals don't even want it! The only reason they have it is because they lent Herman the key to the monkey head idol, and they won't give him his banana picker til he gives them the key. And Herman doesn't want the key, he's just keeping it til he gets his banana picker. So this banana picker has no value to anyone in the game, it's all just the principle of the thing.

And that’s true of the entire plot of The Secret of Monkey Island. What are Guybrush’s three trials to prove himself a pirate? Find the treasure of Melee Island, defeat the Swordmaster in combat, and steal the idol of many hands from the governor's mansion. The treasure is a tourist attraction, the Swordmaster fights until she gets bored of him, and the idol of many hands, when procured, is likened to a fabulous doorstop; nobody actually wants it, it's just a thing that's hard to steal.

And Guybrush’s entire quest is equally pointless. He arrives on Monkey Island to rescue the Governor just in time for her to be taken back to the island he started on, which means he would have done just as well sitting on the church steps the whole time picking lint out of his bellybutton. He does defeat LeChuck, but only after bungling Elaine’s better plan to do the same, so the only thing he actually accomplishes in the entire game is solving a problem he himself created two minutes earlier.

The plot of The Secret of Monkey Island is something that attracts attention but has no real importance. It is a series of improvised solutions to meaningless problems. It's all right there in the title: we never learn the secret of Monkey Island; there almost certainly isn't one.

And if you wanna get technical about it: The pirate leaders say, to become a pirate, Guybrush has to complete three trials and bring them proof of his success. The way the game is designed, the kidnapping plot always begins right after you finish the third, at which point all the pirates disappear. Which means he never shows them proof that he completed all three. Guybrush never actually becomes a pirate.

But that’s the point. Guybrush doesn’t want to be a swordfighter, treasure-hunter, or thief; he opens the game saying he wants to be a pirate. Swordfighting, thievery, and, er, treasure-huntery are only valuable as means to an end: performing pirate-ness.

The fact that Guybrush never finishes the trials is no more important than the trials themselves, is no more important than the damsel not being an actual damsel, because the damsel in distress was only ever an excuse to go on an adventure. In this world, pirates dig up treasure not to make themselves rich but because that’s what pirates do; who cares if all that’s in the chest is a t-shirt? The journey has to be the destination because destinations don’t matter; nothing matters; nothing is supposed to matter.

Yeah, the game’s philosophy is nihilism. But it’s cheerful nihilism.

2. Design

When designing an adventure game, there are a couple types of player you have to contend with. One experiences the narrative the way it's supposed to be experienced. If someone tells them to go to Algiers to meet with Omar al-Jabbar, they're going to go to Algiers and meet with Omar al-Jabbar. But then there's these other players that I refer to as futzers. They’ll make their way to Omar al-Jabbar eventually, but they're gonna futz around along the way. Anything that smells like a puzzle, they're going to start solving it, so they tend to get ahead of the story; by the time Omar al-Jabbar tells them what to do, they've already done half of it, which weakens the story, because, generally, this scene [Indiana Jones finding well of souls] shouldn’t come before this one [Indiana Jones measuring the staff].

Most adventure games are designed for normal players. Most adventure game players are futzers. That leads to problems. Here’s how Monkey Island avoids them:

The game begins with Guybrush saying he wants to be a pirate and being directed to speak with some pirates in the Scumm Bar. He instantly has an immediate objective and a larger goal. A normal player will just head to the Scumm Bar, while a futzer will interact with every hotspot along the way. So, between the cliffside and bar, there's only one hotspot, a re-election poster for Governor Elaine Marley, a character who is not relevant yet but soon will be. The next hotspot is the door of the bar.

Now, a normal player might head straight to the back to talk to the pirate leaders, but a futzer will chat up everyone in the bar first. This guy tells you a bit about the island and the LeChuck situation, this guy tells you more about LeChuck, this guy is a gag who just tells you about LOOM, and then there's the dog... who tells you about LeChuck. The next hotspot is the pirate leaders.

If I haven't made it obvious: Guybrush has walked in a straight line left to right with no inventory, no puzzles, no branching paths, and nothing between him and his first objective that isn't immediately relevant or can’t be experienced out of order. If he talks to the pirates first, he knows why the leaders are taking him on; if he talks to the leaders first, they hint at “this LeChuck thing” which the pirates can then fill in. Everything makes narrative sense no matter how the you play.

You can contrast this with Monkey Island 2, where you get vague hints of what your larger goal might be while chatting people up around town, and only stumble on your first objective halfway across the island, by which time you’ve probably solved half the puzzles with no context while you were searching for the plot. It’s a futzer’s paradise.

Now, you know what else is neat? Once Guybrush is done talking to the pirate leaders, if he keeps following that line to the right, it ends at the door to the kitchen. The pirates in the front mention that the cook is inattentive and they all sneak into the kitchen from time to time. So I'm willing to bet that, for the overwhelming majority of you who've played the game, sneaking into the kitchen was the first puzzle you solved.

Guybrush can complete his three trials in any order. He steals the idol of many hands by breaking into the Governor's mansion, which he does by putting the guard dogs to sleep, after giving them a sedative he finds in the forest, which he feeds to them by spiking a hunk of meat, which he finds here in the kitchen. Guybrush finds the treasure of Melee Island by digging it up in a clearing, which he reaches by following a strange map, which he buys from a shady guy in town, which he affords after getting paid to get shot out of a cannon, for which he uses a pot as a helmet, and he finds the pot here in the kitchen. And Guybrush defeats the Swordmaster by learning the art of insult swordfighting, which he masters by fighting strangers on the road, whom he challenges after getting trained by Captain Smirk, whose house can only be accessed after paying the bridge troll, whom Guybrush bribes with a red herring, which he finds here in the kitchen.

Unless you're the type of player who waltzes past the Scumm Bar because you refuse to be told what to do, in which case no one can design for you, these are your first three bits of inventory. This is where the game opens up, where you are now free to go in any direction, and this tiny bit of suggested linearity at the beginning makes sure that all three paths you can follow become available to you at the same time.

I hazard the reason The Secret of Monkey Island is so influential is that the design of Part One is, in many ways, immaculate. Just look at how each of the three trials stresses a different part of the engine: The treasure hunt takes place in the picture window and the player’s mind, stealing the idol is all about inventory and telling jokes with the sentence line, and swordfighting takes place entirely in the dialogue system, because how else would you gamify an Errol Flynn movie?

There is a playfulness to its design, stemming from a time when each adventure game still had to write its own rules. As much as modern adventures have refined and improved on Monkey Island’s template, I’m always amazed when I think that, before this game, the template didn’t exist.

3. Character

There's a quality to Guybrush in The Secret of Monkey Island that was never recaptured in the sequels. Later games put Guybrush somewhere on the spectrum between smartass and dipshit. But in Monkey Island 1 Guybrush is actually the straight man. His deal is he's clever without necessarily being intelligent, the brightest dim bulb in the Caribbean, smart enough to realize that everyone he talks to is a wacko and everything they have him do is nonsense, but not quite smart enough to do anything about it.

It may be the limits of EGA graphics and a small animation budget that Guybrush is Buster Keaton, utterly stone-faced no matter how ludicrous things around him get. By the sequel the team had 256 colors and so they had Guybrush mugging for the camera. But, here, the world is a cartoon, and he knows it, but he plays along.

There's this great moment where he opens the Monkey Head Idol by jamming an enormous q-tip in its ear where he just looks at the camera like "what the fuck am I doing?" It's this great Oliver Hardy moment. "I wanted to be a pirate. I guess this is it?"

I can kind of respect what they did with Guybrush in the second game. They made him a dick. Monkey Island 2 Guybrush is selfish, conceited, neither intelligent nor clever, he's definitely not the straight man anymore, and Elaine hates him because fame turned him into a shitty boyfriend. He's on a quest for the biggest buried treasure known to piracy, not because he wants another adventure but because he's The Guy Who Blew Up LeChuck; that's his reputation, and that was a while ago, and if he doesn't soon become The Guy Who Found Big Whoop he's going to stop being famous.

The very idea of getting huge off your first adventure and feeling obligated to go on another one just to keep up appearances even though keeping up those appearances kind ruined your home life, I'd almost think that was a metaphor for doing a sequel to a hit game with a one-year turnaround... if not for the fact that Monkey Island was never that big of a hit and no one asked Ron Gilbert to do a sequel. He apparently just started working on one.

Still, none of the other games in the series try anything so bold, so I respect Monkey Island 2 for walking its own path, I just... don't like it. Even when I was 7, the nihilism didn’t feel as cheerful, more like thumbing its nose at the idea of having ever cared about any of these people.

And, you know, I like Dominic Armato's interpretation of the character, but Monkey Island 1 will always be the canonical Guybrush to me. The kid who's maybe a little too swept up in Pirates of the Caribbean.

And as long as we're talking about Guybrush, we do have to talk about Elaine. The team that made Monkey Island 1 and 2 were the only ones who knew how to write Elaine. In Monkey Island 1, Elaine is a subversion of a trope, the kidnapped woman who secretly has the whole situation under control. In Monkey Island 2, she's not subverting anything, she's just a capable, respected woman with a rich life outside of the main character; LeChuck is so fixated on revenge he doesn't try to kidnap her; and in the end she rescues Guybrush! (Well, almost.)

But what happens when Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman aren't on the team anymore? Monkey Island 3: damseled, rescued by Guybrush, immediately re-damseled, rescued by Guybrush. Monkey Island 4: stripped of her governorship, to be restored by Guybrush, then damseled to be... actually at the last minute Guybrush helps her rescue herself, so that's something. Tales of Monkey Island: damseled as the curtain rises, rescued by Guybrush, damseled again, rescued by Guybrush, triple-whammy damseled, rescued by Guybrush, but, then, says it was somehow on purpose.

This is what people don't get about Elaine, why you can’t write her as a damsel: the essence of Elaine is that she's the only major character who isn't a pirate, and she's the best pirate. That's why Guybrush loves her: she's everything he wants to be. And she doesn't love him because he's the pirate who rescues her, she loves him because she doesn't want a pirate, and, deep down, he isn’t one; he’s just a sweet boy who likes pirates.

Obviously this is, to some degree, headcanon. But it’s headcanon that makes more sense than most of the sequels do.

Part Four: Epilogue

The Secret of Monkey Island is a game I’ve known backwards and forwards since I was six years old. I can’t remember what it’s like to play this game for the first time. I can’t separate what’s on the screen from how my pre-adolescent brain filled in the empty spaces. And I certainly can’t tell you whether or not it’s “good.”

Objectivity is overrated. What I’ve said in this video is the product of playing, thinking about, and loving this game for the last 28 years. I hope it has provided you some insight that objectivity wouldn’t. (And it could have been so much longer, you have no idea.)