It was a cartoon made controllable, with the now-famous pirate reggae music perfectly accompanying the on-screen adventures. I loved the look and sound of Monkey Island. It continues to be such an infrequent occurrence in my gaming life that it’s rarely been replicated, save for a couple of reality-swallowing trips to San Andreas and the apocalyptic wastelands of Washington DC. The living, breathing, colourful Caribbean of Monkey Island was a world I fully believed in while playing.
My brother and I burned through what felt like a million games, since the mid 80s, starting on the ZX Spectrum, and I’d loved loads of them, but this was the first game to fully immerse me. It’s worth noting that Monkey Island wasn’t my first video game love. Enid Blyton books had always left me cold and I was frequently bored during Scooby Doo, so why did a game with a plot that sounds like some hell beast amalgamation of the two – which involved no shooting/running/jumping on heads, but instead required players to talk to characters in order to solve puzzles – appeal so much to me? Along the way he meets a girl, falls in love and gets into scrapes involving a ghost pirate. Our hero, Guybrush Threepwood, wants to be a pirate. “I wanna be a pirate!”Īt its core, The Secret of Monkey Island sounds like the type of Boy’s Own adventure story that I’d have baulked at as a teen – and still look unfavourably upon now. Little would I know that it would kick-start a lifelong love of the genre, and becoming a constant companion for years to come.
It was a gift I’d barely even acknowledged because a) it wasn’t a SNES and b) I was an obnoxious 13-year-old at the centre of my own unfair universe. Originally released in 1990 – a decade and some daylight before Captain Jack Sparrow ruined Caribbean pirates for everybody – The Secret of Monkey Island found its way into my hands a few months after its 1992 CD-ROM release. There are but a handful of things that have stayed with me over the years, whether they’re tangible objects like the soft toy from my first birthday which is now enjoying a second lease of drool-filled life in my infant daughter’s bedroom, or life’s more abstract mental collectables – echoes of shame, elation and depression around which the frail walls of the psyche are constructed.ĭoggedly joining my stuffed friend Donkey, the psychological hang-ups in traversing the minefields of teenage social inadequacy, the oft-forgotten drunken hazy wastelands of my 20s, and the realisation and acceptance of the rest of the world and my place in it through my mid-30s, has been the offbeat humour, bizarre populations and pixellated worlds of LucasArts 1990’s adventure games and, within that esteemed roll call, the Monkey Island series.
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