This summer LucasArts is releasing a remake of Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island, the greatest video game of all time (along with its sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge).
Monkey Island was inspired by the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides, and the subsequent Pirates of the Caribbean films were so obviously influenced by Monkey Island that Ron Gilbert joked on his blog about being mystified that his royalty check from Disney hadn’t yet arrived. The game also features a brilliant insult swordfighting mini-game with insults written by Orson Scott Card.
Recently a younger relative of mine asked me if I play video games. I told him I used to play a lot, but don’t any more, because they stopped making the kind of games that were my favorite, adventure games, and after a while I just got bored with the other kinds of games I used to like, shooters and rpgs, because really how many hundreds of hours can you spend killing monsters before it just gets old? This young man didn’t even know what an adventure game was. I tried to explain that in adventure games you would have a character and you would explore and pick up items and talk to people and solve puzzles. His friend said, “Like Zelda?” And I said, “Yeah, sort of. Except in Zelda you spend 95% of your time killing things and 5% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people. In an adventure game you would spend 0% of your time killing things and 100% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people.”
I keep hoping that adventure games will make a comeback someday. If you’ve never played Monkey Island before and you own a PC or XBox, definitely keep an eye out for this new version.