Return to Monkey Island

Guybrush Threepwood, pirate adventurer, would-be nemesis of the ghost pirate LeChuck and implausibly successful wooer of the beautiful Elaine Marley, has finally worked out that, despite all of his adventures, he has never actually worked out what the Secret of Monkey Island actually is. Returning to his original stomping ground of Melee Island, he sets out on his new quest, only to learn with horror that LeChuck is already three steps ahead of him.

Released back in 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island almost immediately became acclaimed as one of the greatest video games of all time. Fiendish puzzles, funny writing, awful puns and the daftest protagonist name in gaming history combined to make a memorably brilliant, if rather short, game. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge followed a year later with a better story, more interesting puzzles, a much greater variety of locations and fantastic music. It also, infamously, had a very strange ending that left a lot of people scratching their heads.

That ending was never really resolved. The creative team behind the first two games, most notably lead designer and writer Ron Gilbert, left LucasArts and moved on. A separate team eventually made a third game in 1997, but wisely skipped past the ending to the second title and picked up some years later with only minimalist references to what happened in the meantime. The Curse of Monkey Island was a great game in its own right, despite the change in ownership. Escape from Monkey Island (2000) and Tales from Monkey Island (2009) followed, to a middling reception. Better-received were HD remakes of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 in 2009 and 2010, which introduced them to a new generation and got people thinking about that crazy ending again.

Now the unlikely has happened: Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman have reunited to make Return to Monkey Island, a game that finally picks up after the ending of Monkey Island 2 and forges on. The new game also doesn't eject the others from continuity: having kinda explained the ending to Monkey Island 2, we fast-forwards a few years past all of Guybrush's other adventures to pick up on him returning to Melee for his new expedition. He and Elaine are now happily married and Elaine is running a campaign to eliminate scurvy from the Caribbean, leaving Guybrush free to take up his quest.

The first two-thirds or so of Return to Monkey Island is a journey which will trigger the nostalgia feels in players. This part of the game almost exclusively uses locations from the original title in the series, so once again you'll visit the SCUMM Bar, hang out at the Governor's Mansion and visit the Voodoo Lady for enigmatic advice, before visiting Monkey Island, falling off the overlook again and sneaking onto LeChuck's ship. But this is a melancholic form of nostalgia: Melee Island has had an economic crisis, a lot of the old businesses are shut down, and there's newcomers who don't recognise Guybrush or particularly care about him being a regular from years or decades before. There's still plenty of laughs here, but Return also examines its own status as a legacy sequel made years after the originals (not always the best of ideas) in a way that that is smart without vanishing up its own posterior.

The latter third of the game opens up and Guybrush gets to explore a series of new islands and locations never before seen in the series. This sequence feels somewhat briefer than it should be, possibly a budget issue or the decision they had almost too much material for one adventure game but not enough for two, so trimmed some things to keep it in the confines of one title. This has the unfortunate effect of meaning that the game is dominated by locations you've seen before, whilst the new and fresher material is crammed into a relatively brief part of the game towards the end, before we once again return to a familiar location for the grand finale.

But ultimately it works. The puzzles are fine, not too obtuse apart from a couple of eye-rollers (a built-in hintbook pretty much means you never need to look up online solutions, although the game encourages you to use it as little as possible), and the story is entertainingly told, with that undercurrent of melancholic nostalgia running through it to make it more interesting. 

Return to Monkey Island (****½) is, improbably, excellent. Once you get over the stylised new art direction, it works really well and the music is fantastic. Creatives in their fifties revisiting the scene of their greatest hit from their twenties could have gone badly wrong, but Return to Monkey Island emerges as far smarter, funnier, emotional and engaging than it really should. Even if its own ending does definitely skim around the edges of taking the mickey, but it does earn it. The game is available now on PC, Mac and Nintendo Switch.

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An official new MONKEY ISLAND game is coming from its original creators

Adventure game legends Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman are returning to their best-known series for a new game.

Return to Monkey Island is set for release later this year and picks up after the events of Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge.

The series began with The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990, which saw trainee pirate Guybrush Threepwood pitched into battle with the evil ghost pirate LeChuck after he kidnaps Guybrush's would-be girlfriend, Governor Elaine Marlee of Melee Island, and imprisons her on the titular Monkey Island. Guybrush gathers together a crew to help rescue her. The story continues in Monkey Island II (1991), where Guybrush is in search of the fabled treasure of Big Whoop, but once again comes into conflict with LeChuck, now resurrected as a zombie.

Gilbert and Grossman developed the first two games alongside Tim Schafer. LucasArts subsequently released two more games without the trio's involvement: The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) and Escape from Monkey Island (2000). The IP was licensed to Telltale Games, who released Tales of Monkey Island in 2009.

The canonical status of the new game is unclear, save it is a sequel to Monkey Island II and will address that game's infamous cliffhanger (which The Curse of Monkey Island kind of sidesteps). Whether Return to Monkey Island is an interquel set between II and Curse, or an alternate universe kind of sequel, remains to be seen.

The game is being published by Devolver Digital and developed by studio Terrible Toybox, responsible for Gilbert's last game, the splendid LucasArts throwback game Thimbleweed Park.

UPDATE: Ron Gilbert has clarified that the new game takes place between Monkey Island II and Curse of Monkey Island, and will not remove Curse from canon.

MONKEY ISLAND and COMMAND & CONQUER celebrate their birthdays

Two of the most influential names in gaming celebrated anniversaries this week.

It's been ten o'clock on Melee Island for twenty-five years now...

The Secret of Monkey Island went gold on 2 September 1990 and hit shops a couple of weeks later. It was the latest in a series of graphical adventure games released by LucasArts using the SCUMM Engine. The previous games using the engine - Maniac Mansion, Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Loom - had all been successful, but The Secret of Monkey Island was bigger still. It may still be the funniest video game ever made, as well as one of the cleverest, with some exceptionally fiendish puzzle design and the excellent idea of insult sword fighting still resonating today.

The same team made the superior sequel, Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge, but then began leaving the company. The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) and Escape from Monkey Island (2002) were made by different teams and are not counted as wholly canon (although Curse has numerous fans). Ron Gilbert, the main creative force on the first game, talks about the original game's release here and how he would handle a third canon Monkey Island game here. Gilbert is currently working on a SCUMM-esque retro adventure game called Thimbleweed Park, which he hopes to release next year.

You can play The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island II today, using special editions which allow you to either play in "classic" mode or with revamped, modern graphics.

Westwood couldn't afford a lot of actors for C&C's cut scenes, so drafted in their staff to help. Joe Kucan, the director of the cut scenes, became the game's bad guy, Kane, inadvertently creating (arguably) the most iconic non-pixellated bad guy in video games.

Meanwhile, it is also the twentieth anniversary of the release of Command and Conquer. Developed by Westwood games and released on 31 August 1995, Command and Conquer had a huge impact in the way it popularised the real-time strategy genre. The same developers, Westwood, had effectively created the genre with Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis in 1992, but that game had problems with the player only being able to select one unit at a time. C&C allowed for entire armies of mixed units to be assembled and used to attack the enemy en masse. The game was also influential with its elaborate cut scenes and the focus on a narrative, the battle between the Global Defence Initiative (GDI) and the terrorist Brotherhood of Nod for control of tiberium, a potent energy source brought to Earth by meteorites.

The game was followed by three direct sequels: Tiberian Sun (1999), Tiberium Wars (2007) and Tiberian Twilight (2010). However, the game also spawned two spin-off universes. The more famous of these was the Red Alert series, which used time travel to create a series of conflicts between the Western Allies and Soviet Union (and later the Japanese Empire). The Red Alert series is considerably sillier and camper than the core series, but is also arguably superior, with better units. This sub-series consists of Red Alert (1996), Red Alert 2 (2000) and Red Alert 3 (2008). The second spin-off was Command and Conquer: Generals (2002); a sequel/reboot was in development before being canned a couple of years ago.

The influence of the C&C games can be seen and felt in all the RTS games that followed, from StarCraft to Homeworld to this week's Act of Aggression (a self-aware homage to the original series), even if EA has seemingly abandoned the franchise.

You can get most of the C&C games on Origin.

Disney shutting down LucasArts

LucasArts, the game-making division of Lucasfilm, is being shut down by the company's new supreme overlords at Disney.

Disney is instead switching video game development of Lucasfilm properties (i.e. Star Wars) to external companies under a licencing model. The fate of 1313, a new Star Wars game internally developed by LucasArts and set between Episode III and IV, is unclear, although rumours have stated that the game has been on hold since late last year as Disney wants all new Star Wars games to focus on the time period of the new movies.

LucasArts was founded in 1982 and worked on some very early home video games before the release of its first big hit, Maniac Mansion, in 1987. That game introduced the SCUMM Engine, which put impressive graphics and a mouse-driven interface into the adventure genre, previously dominated by text inputs. Further games refined this system, such as the brilliant Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), the latter of which may still be one of the very best movie tie-in games ever made. LucasArts adjusted their formula in 1990 with the quirky and enjoyable LOOM, which replaced the typical command system with a music-driven one. In 1990 LucasArts released arguably their best-known, non-Star Wars game with The Secret of Monkey Island, following that up a year later with the epic and superior Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was released in 1992, followed by Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road in 1993.

Following this point, the widespread adoption of 3D technology for games left LucasArts feeling that their adventure games looked outdated. The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) was their last adventure game using 2D animation, with both Grim Fandango (1999) and Escape from Monkey Island (2000) featuring 3D graphics. Though critical acclaim was still forthcoming (rather less for Escape), LucasArts wound up its adventure-producing division in 2003. Many of the people working there went on to found Telltale Games, who eventually ended up producing episodic new Sam and Max and Monkey Island games. Their most recent hit was The Walking Dead episodic game series.

Meanwhile, LucasArts branched into other areas of gaming. In 1993 they published X-Wing, a Star Wars-themed competitor to Chris Roberts's Wing Commander series of space combat games. The critically-acclaimed series eventually ended up comprising four core titles: X-Wing (1993), TIE Fighter (1994), X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1997) and X-Wing Alliance (1999). Disappointing sales for X-Wing Alliance - accompanying the wholesale collapse of the space combat simulator genre after a decade of success - saw the series cancelled at that point. LucasArts moved into console gaming, working with BioWare to produce the RPG Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 and with Obsidian on the ill-fated Knights of the Old Republic II in 2004. They also produced the action game Star Wars: Republic Commando in 2005.

Increasingly, post-2000 LucasArts was working more and more with external companies to produce their games, with LucasArts often only providing oversight. The most recent example of this is the highly troubled MMORPG The Old Republic, co-produced with BioWare and apparently the most expensive computer game of all time (with rumours abounding about how close the game has come to breaking even). It is likely that these elements also factored into Disney's decision to shut down the company.

Sad news for the once-great games development company which kick-started the careers of, amongst many others, Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer.

Wertzone Classics: Monkey Island 2 - LeChuck's Revenge

Having vanquished the evil ghost pirate LeChuck, Guybrush Threepwood's life seemed to be on the up. Unfortunately, his girlfriend Elaine has dumped him and his attempts to dine out on his former adventures forever seem to be wearing a little thin. Guybrush resolves to undertake a fresh new adventure: to find the legendary treasure of Big Whoop. To this end he travels to Scabb Island, only to find it under the tyrannical rule of Largo, a former lieutenant of LeChuck's who is searching for a way of resurrecting his old master. If Guybrush is to find Big Whoop, he must lift the Largo Embargo and search the Caribbean for the four map pieces which, legend has it, will lead him to the treasure.


Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge was originally released in 1992 and is pretty much the single finest graphic adventure game ever made (despite very, very stiff competition from Day of the Tentacle). Released just a year after its predecessor, the sequel dwarfs it in every respect. It's much larger, more than twice as long and features a much larger cast of characters. It's also considerably more difficult, with the greater number of locations, items and puzzles meaning that some hefty lateral thinking is required to solve the game's conundrums if you don't want to resort to spending half an hour combining every item in your inventory with every clickable object on every screen until you stumble on the answer. Luckily, the game rewards logical thinking, with arguably only one extremely obtuse and random puzzle in the whole game (involving a metronome-mounted banana, a hypnotised monkey and a giant faucet).

Monkey Island 2 also uses a more interesting structure, with the game initially limited to one small playing area which then expands, in the second act, to a much vaster free-roaming section where you can visit different islands and undertake different jobs and puzzles in any order you wish until you complete your objective, and then the plot narrows down again towards the denouncement. Obviously BioWare were paying attention to this, as they later used the same structure in almost every single one of their games. That's because it works pretty well, giving you the semblance of freedom in the second act to explore, meet new characters and do more stuff at your own pace. It would have been quite nice to have seen some more optional stuff in this section (pretty much everything you do is necessary to further the plot and game objectives), but I suppose that is why Monkey Island 2 is an adventure game, not an RPG.

As with The Secret of Monkey Island, the game has now been reissued in a new Special Edition, with completely re-recorded music and full voice acting for every line of dialogue in the game (given the amount of it in the game, this is very impressive), using the same voice cast as Curse, Escape and the Monkey Island 1 special edition. Graphically, the game has been completely updated to HD standards, which must have been an fair amount of work given its size, and the quality of the artistic update is superior to the previous special edition. This appears to be because the original concept art and storyboards from the second game were far more detailed, allowing it to be scanned and updated more efficiently and faithfully. As with the first game, you can hit a button at any time to replace the game graphics and sound with the originals and you now have the option to mix the old graphics and new voice-overs. There are also more extras, such as a ton of concept art (for both the special edition and the original game) and a voice-over commentary from original creators Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, which is intriguing but rather lacking in depth.

On the minus side, the original classic intro sequence has been removed (the bit with the dancing monkeys) and there have been a few (and thankfully only a few) 'tweaks' to the dialogue, with a few new in-jokes and dialogue options added. The casual player and even most of the dedicated fans (I count myself amongst the latter, having played the game to completion at least a half-dozen times in 1992-96 before my Amiga stopped working and I moved onto PC) won't have a huge problem with this, but extreme hardcore fans will likely be up in arms over it, despite the fact there's nothing stopping them playing the actual original game on DOSBox.

Unfortunately, control issues remain. The same clunky system from the first special edition has been retained, although keyboard shortcuts have been added for the PC version, making things slightly easier. The control system is actually much more problematic for Monkey Island 2, which is several times dependent on time-limited puzzles, where you sometimes have to combine items in your inventory and then use it with an on-screen object in the space of a few seconds at best. Hitting F1 and switching to 'classic' mode and using the superior menu system from the original game is often the best way to achieve this. This is particularly noticeable in the game's extended final confrontation between Guybrush and LeChuck, where the inability of the new control system to cope with several time-constrained puzzles in rapid succession becomes so frustrating you may have to resist the urge to fling your monitor through the nearest window.

But, returning to the good points, Monkey Island 2 is still a stunning game. The graphics are gorgeous. In this 3D-driven age, there is something to be said for the simplicity of painted backdrops, especially now re-rendered in HD. The writing is smart and funny, the puzzles are intelligent and well-conceived, and the game is long and complex enough to be challenging without ever getting too frustrating (the aforementioned 'monkey wrench' puzzle excepted). The biggest surprise on revisiting the game is that I have gained a greater appreciation for the highly divisive ending, especially spotting the little hints that the game has been dropping for a while that something isn't quite right, not just in the plot but with the entire Monkey Island universe. The metaphysically mind-blowing ending, which comes across like Gene Wolfe taking over a Terry Pratchett novel in the last quarter, is still one of the boldest and possibly most suicidal risks I've ever seen a computer game take (only exceeded by Planescape: Torment). It was controversial and unpopular in 1992 and it remains so now, especially since The Curse of Monkey Island (the third game, held by some purists to be non-canon due to the non-involvement of the original programming team, despite being a fine game in its own right) brushes it under the rug fairly quickly by simply going for the most obvious solution.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (*****) is available now for PC and X-Box 360, with iPhone and iPad versions available from the Apple store.

Wertzone Classics: The Secret of Monkey Island

Young Guybrush Threepwood arrives on Melee Island with just one ambition: to become a pirate! Unfortunately, to prove himself he must undertake three challenging missions for the pirate leaders. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with Governor Elaine Marley and earns the ire of the ghost pirate LeChuck, leading him into a search for the fabled Secret of Monkey Island (TM).


Back in the late 1980s, Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts) joined Sierra as one of the companies determined to life the adventure game out of the text-driven environment. With animated graphics, fiendish puzzles and a genuine sense of humour, the first three games Lucasfilm developed with the 'SCUMM' interface became classics of the genre: Maniac Mansion, Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. For the fourth game, and employing a streamlined interface and better graphics, veteran designers Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman decided to make a game about pirates, inspired by Disney's 'Pirates of the Carribbean' ride and by Tim Powers' novel, On Stranger Tides. Mixing traditional pirate lore with a great sense of humour and an injection of the supernatural, The Secret of Monkey Island became, almost instantly, Lucasfilm's most successful adventure game, bettered only two years later by the arrival of Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge.

For the purposes of this review I purchased the newly-released 'Special Edition' of the game, available for the PC and X-Box 360. This new edition of the game is an enhanced remake of the original. It is incredibly faithful, employing all of the original game's puzzles, locations and characters, but the low-res original artwork has been replaced by hi-def graphics and the MIDI music score has been completely reworked by the original composer into a high-quality orchestral soundtrack. All of the dialogue in the game is also now fully voiced by the same cast who have worked on the series from Curse of Monkey Island onwards. Aware that grumpy old-school fans might get irate with the game looking 'too good', LucasArts have included a very nice feature: at any time, a nudge of the controller or hitting F10 will instantaneously swap the 2009 graphics for the old-school VGA graphics, and the sound and music will be likewise swapped out for the original equivalents.

In its own way, as iconic as that blockade runner and Star Destroyer screaming overhead.

I haven't played the game through from start to finish for about fifteen years, so was surprised at how many of the game's puzzles had seemingly lodged themselves in my brain (with one or two head-scratching exceptions). One of the reasons why Monkey Island fared so well on release was its unashamed non-hardcore, newbie-friendly status. In all the earlier SCUMM games, characters could die and in a few places the game could be 'broken', where the failure to pick up the right item an hour earlier led to it being impossible to progress any further. Monkey Island has no truck with that at all. Your character is never in a truly life-threatening position, you can save the game at will and there is no part in the game where you are stuck and cannot progress any further, which was and remains very welcome.

The game's humour is still excellent and the new graphical style does work well, although I am broadly not in favour of the overtly cartoonish direction the series took after Monkey Island II. The voice work is also top-notch, with the exception of the actress playing Elaine, who is really not very good at all. The 'old-school' graphics mode is well-implemented, but it's so insanely low-res by modern gaming standards that it becomes uncomfortable playing with it for any length of time. Most irritating is that the original low-quality PC soundtrack is employed on the old-school version rather than the high-quality stereo music used on the Amiga version. You also can't match the old-school graphics with the new music (which is exactly the same as the old music, merely re-recorded at much higher quality with a proper orchestra) or mix the two versions up to any degree (such as mixing the old graphics with the new voice-overs), which is a shame.

"That's the second-biggest monkey head I've ever seen!"

The most problematic aspect of the game is the interface which is annoyingly cumbersome. The original version of the game - the one released in 1990 remember - had all your commands and inventory on-screen at all times, and it was extremely easy to match commands with items in your inventory or on-screen, especially useful when you needed to combine two objects in your inventory to create a new one and then use that new item in the game world. The new version has decreed that that would make for too much sense. Instead you have a seperate item screen which you have to switch to and then back to the game world, sometimes needing to open the other screen several times to solve certain puzzles. It's insanely annoying and actually makes several puzzles considerably harder than in the original version of the game (to the point where switching to classic mode is recommended). Exactly why each successive game in the series after Monkey Island II uses an inferior interface to the one before it is one of the greatest mysteries of the Monkey Island series, and it is very annoying to seem LucasArts repeat the mistake in this remake of the original game (I strongly suspect it's down to the game's 360 version forcing a menu-driven system on the designers, but even so they could have found another way around it).

Still, it can be borne for this is still one of the funniest, smartest, well-characterised and just plain fun computer games ever made. An absolute bona-fide classic, and at the insanely low price of £6 for four hours or so of top-notch entertainment, there isn't really any excuse for not picking up this game.

The Secret of Monkey Island (****½) is available now for legal download on PC and X-Box 360. LucasArts and Telltale Games are also releasing an episodic series of new games in the series, called Monkey Island Tales, with the first two available now. According to LucasArts, if this first remake is successful they will strongly consider a similar relaunch of Monkey Island II, which has a viable claim to being one of the very best computer games ever made for any system ever, and thus it must happen :-)

Return to Monkey Island

LucasArts have, somewhat out of the blue, revealed that they are releasing a specially-remade version of their 1990 classic adventure game, The Secret of Monkey Island, this summer. This will coincide with the release of a new, five-part episodic game called Tales of Monkey Island, produced in conjunction with Telltale Games (producers of the recent Sam 'n' Max and Wallace & Gromit episodic games).


The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the most influential games of all time, combining a ton of humour and inventive visuals with fiendish puzzles and excellently-realised characters. For 1990's standards, it looked amazing and was a huge hit. Its 1993 sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, was considerably larger, far funnier, with jaw-dropping graphics (for the time) and a far more epic story with an ending that people are still talking about today. I'd easily rank it as the best single adventure game ever made (and if they do a remake/re-release of MI2, which is probably dependent on sales of this one, I will be first in queue to pick it up). Series creator Ron Gilbert departed LucasArts after MI2 and the later Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island were comparatively disappointing, although not without merit.

The Monkey Island remake is interesting because, anticipating purist fans who hate the new art style, the team have enabled a mode to allow you to switch between the new, sharper HD graphics and console-based controls to the old-school pixels and cursor controls at will (no word if the PC version will allow the use of the mouse cursor with the new graphics, although it would be weird if it wouldn't). It looks very nice indeed, with the original soundtrack re-recorded and the new graphics looking solid without going way overboard (and they're not 3D, thank LeChuck).

Tales of Monkey Island I'm less crazy about. Telltale Games have a very variable track history, and the graphics look ropey and the trailer didn't make me laugh at all. Maybe it'll turn out okay, but for now I'll stick with the remake.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition will be released on PC and X-Box 360 in the summer, Tales of Monkey Island should launch on the PC and Wii in a few weeks.