Early Access: Three Short Arguments About The Secret of Monkey Island
Hey team,
Here's a rough cut of a video that should go public tomorrow, though it could possibly need an extra day. It's a little rough - things that need tweaking are in the show notes on YouTube.
This is a video I've been planning since the very beginning of Innuendo Studios. I'm glad to finally have it (nearly) finished.
-I
Three Short Arguments About The Secret of Monkey Island (YouTube)
Comments (8)
This is fabulous
thank you senpai
You did it again. You made a video that I really really like. Thank you!
I'll definitely be waiting for that final cut! good work getting this one out Ian!
Secret of Monkey Island was incredibly formative to me, and I played it over and over again as well. It and as many other LucasArts games as I could get ahold of, but as much as I loved the others, none of them felt as special as Secret of Monkey Island. It felt like Secret had taught me a private language. And the other games were IN that language, at least in part, but the language itself came from Secret. I have lots of fond memories of other games—Loom, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam and Max Hit the Road being my favorites, with a soft spot still for Monkey Island 2 and 3—but it always came back to Secret, which wasn't even the first of them that I played, that was Maniac Mansion. You've articulated why I think it felt that way for me, and why a lot of the later games felt a little hollow and disappointing in a way I hadn't really consciously understood as a kid, in its theming. I think a lot of the later games took that theming and used it as a veneer over the design of the game—this was how a LucasArts adventure game "worked," it's how things are done—but without understanding necessarily why it was that way in Secret and what made it work so well. In the end I have a fonder memory of Loom, with its radically divergent design, than I do the later Monkey Island-veneered games.
Loom is so good.
Great video, Ian! Keep up the great work!
I am sooo glad to see you do a video about The Secret of Monkey Island. Like you, it was also one of those formative games for me. I played it and replayed it over and over, and heck I could recite the walkthrough from the hint book from memory. I am looking forward to showing this video to my father when it goes public.