So far in the Quirky Muffin, I've jabbered away mightily on the subjects of books, movies, television and the world at large but I've never touched computer games in any depth, apart from some throwaway mentions of the excellent world of interactive fiction, also known as text adventures. You should all go and check out interactive fiction, as its awesome and still free in its current non-professional state. The world of puzzles and riddles is still out there.
Not all adventure games were purely textual however, as there were also graphical adventure games, a whole subgenre of puzzling and storytelling that is for the most part now gone. The king of the graphical adventure publishers was LucasArts and the its crown was mounted with spectacular gems mined from deep beneath Monkey Island, the setting for its greatest games.
"Look behind you, it's a three headed monkey!"
The 'Monkey Island' games were events, as were 'Grim Fandango' and 'Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis'. The first play through of each being by turns hilarious as well as endurance puzzling events. I spent days trying to work out how to turn off a mechanical waterfall in the historical Caribbean before finally looking up that we needed to use the 'monkey' wrench! Yes, there was a monkey in lead character Guybrush Threepwood's capacious inventory-holding pantaloons! You'll just have to live with that knowledge. It was awesome.
On this day of monumental happiness - look, world, out the window... Isn't it lovely? - it's natural to remember happy things and this whole genre forms a satisfying and fulfilling little corner of entertainment. In many ways the death of graphical adventures has drawn a line in the sand computer games between the era of non-violent PC games and the following age of combative console games. Advances in graphics killed the graphical adventure ironically, and the ubiquity of strategy games like 'Civilization' too. Oh, 'Civilization', you monumental time waster, you magnificent historical epic. You shouldn't need a good PC to play Civilization, it should run on everything! You should be able to put it on your calculator and run your world with function keys! Take away those animated heads, blast it and I could play it now!
Ahem. "Soon you'll be wearing my sword like a shish kebab!"
Everything I learnt from computer games I learnt from Monkey Island. The game was a funny little microcosm that you could even play multiple times and still do new things you had missed before. It was fascinating, right from the insult swordfighting to the voodoo dolls in the second game to the repeated 'deaths' of the third and even Monkey Kombat from the fourth. And the puzzles were always great. The followup from 'TellTale Games' is actually pretty good too, although it is split into five standalone episodes instead of one monster game, resulting in an overall loss of maximum complexity. It makes up for it with the Pirate Pox though. More green women in the world is always good.
For jokes, for story, for characters transcending crummy 80s graphics, and even for just plain goofiness there was really nothing to beat Monkey Island. Or 'Grim Fandango', or 'Fate of Atlantis', or 'Day of the Tentacle', or even 'Zak McKraken' and 'Sam and Max'. Was it a Golden Age for a now moribund genre? Certainly. Is there no activity in graphical adventures now? Mostly, although Telltale Games did followups to 'Sam and Max' and their 'Tales of Monkey Island'. Much as did text adventures ultimately went to the world of the Internet and the people, maybe this genre should too, although I wish Telltale would refocus and make some more quality adventures.
To 'Monkey Island'. It actually was good, and it's not just nostalgia.
O.
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