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.
Ah, Monkey Island. . .so many beautiful childhood memories.
But the adventure game genre isn’t dead. It’s just not as prominent as it used to be. A lot of smaller/indie companies are still making fun games. One thing you don’t mention is that Telltale Games is making a MI sequel in conjunction with the MI 1 Special Edition. Telltale are the folks who made the recent Sam & Max remake, which was quite a lot of fun, and they’ve made other games too.
http://www.justadventure.com is a good site to keep track of goings-on in the adventure game genre. Not that I’ve been keeping up. I don’t even own a PC these days, alas.
I didn’t blog about the new Monkey Island game because I’m just not that excited about it. The series hasn’t been the same since Ron Gilbert left LucasArts. Monkey Island 3 was okay, but it didn’t have the same magic, and Monkey Island 4 was lousy. The 3D graphics were ugly and the puzzles didn’t make any sense. The new game looks a lot like MI4, unfortunately, but I understand Gilbert was involved. If someone I trust plays it and tells me it’s awesome, I may it check it out.
I am aware that indie studios are still making adventure games, but since I’m not familiar with any of the developers, let alone the designers, I have no idea what’s good or not, and I have no inclination to spend a lot of time figuring that out.