The Secret of Monkey Island is one of those experiences with which you remember your first time, whether it was on your dad's Amiga during its first release or if it was something you discovered, perhaps with the help of an insistent friend, in more recent years. This probably has to do with the fact that for many people, this game is an indelible part of their childhoods (or if it isn't, it may feel that way). It's hard to write about a game like Monkey Island without succumbing to the desire to reminisce about one's first experience, which is imprinted in the brain and is a memory often synonymous, fairly or not, with perfection. Assembling an almost able bodied crew and guided by the enigmatic foretellings of a local voodoo lady, Guybrush will sail to LeChuck's secret hideout beneath the mythical Monkey Island, rescue his true love, and maybe learn a few unconventional uses for a rubber chicken along the way. While completing the Three Trials tasked to him by the pirate leaders (found, in one of many in-jokes, in The SCUMM Bar) to accomplish this seemingly straightforward goal, Guybrush falls for the island's governor, the more than self-sufficient Elaine Marley, who is eventually kidnapped by the nefarious Ghost Pirate LeChuck in his spectral ship. The game kicks off "Deep in the Caribbean" on the Island of Mêlée where we are immediately introduced to our hero Guybrush Threepwood - an eager, clumsy, pony tailed lad who has arrived on the shores of Mêlée to seek his fortune by fulfilling his lifelong hope to become a swashbuckling pirate.
It is, in every sense of the overused word, a masterpiece. There's nary a false step taken it does just about everything right. It's a culmination of improving technology and refined interactive storytelling, the flexing of muscles that the creatively healthy company it sprang from had been gradually developing. The Secret of Monkey Island feels like what those four preceding titles were always leading up to, holds the status of a benchmark story game and continues to put most others of its ilk to shame. However, there is a reason why the goofy exploits of a certain lovably nebbish pirate wannabe are the subject of what's considered to be LucasFilm Games' breakthrough adventure title, not to mention one of the greatest games of all time, by more than a few. If you ask me, neither Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, nor Loom are middling affairs, and I'd have no qualms with a call for any of those games to be recognized as classics, both for what they brought to the table of their genre, and less contextually for their entertainment value as undeniably great individual games. To play The Secret of Monkey Island is to witness the grand payoff of a three year training period on the part of a ludicrously capable game studio.
The world is divided into two people: those who have played this game, and those that really should. We delve into secret LucasArts past once more to unearth The Secret of Monkey Island.
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