![]() ![]() Monkey Island’s enduring originality shines through even on the title screen, soundtracked by Michael Land’s digital calypso. Then there was island governor Elaine Marley, a formidable swordfighter and unlikely damsel who had been kidnapped by back-from-the-dead ghost pirate LeChuck. Players took control of Guybrush Threepwood as he tried to prove himself a seadog, rubbing shoulders with some of the most bloodthirsty – and self-aware – buccaneers ever conjured in code: Smirk, a cigar-chewing fencing instructor, and Meathooks, a brawler with metal claws for hands. So Monkey Island took players to the 17th-century Caribbean instead, the place and time of Treasure Island. ![]() Ron Gilbert, co-designer on Monkey Island and various other adventure games of the era, disliked the fantasy themes that titles like Loom (1990) were relying on, and wrote as much in a 1989 article Why Adventure Games Suck. After my 50th wrong marker buoy on Cambridge Software House’s Mary Rose had me contemplating hurling the floppy disks away from me like a pair of swimming floats, I’d learn that there was a new type of adventure game on the horizon: LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island, which turns 30 this month. These were the prototype point-and-click games, incorporating graphics into riddles and thinly disguised geography lessons. Educational titles such as Granny’s Garden and Flowers of Crystal were as compulsive as they were frustrating. ![]() A nyone who went to school during the Thatcher years will remember adventure games as something experienced on the class computer, typically a BBC Micro. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |