Insight on Monkey Island (Eng)

Artwork of Monkey Island 2

Monkey Island changed the graphic adventure and with the wonderful Return to Monkey Island. I wrote some curiosity about the saga.

  • During the development of the first game, the name of the protagonist was still not decided, he was simply called Guy. Graphic artists at the time used a tool called Deluxe Paint which saved their work in .brush format
    So was that when the sprite of the protagonist was created, the filename guy.brush was generated. The surname Threepwood, comes from a romance by the English author P.G. Wodehouse
  • The man in the troll suit on a bridge in Melee Island is George Lucas. To let the player pass, he asks our protagonist “Something that will attract attention but have no real importance”. The enigma was based on a play on words and the solution referred to term “red herring”. In the italian version of the game, this joke was maintained but for italian people it was not so easy to solve this riddle
  • The game was released on all major computers of the time, arriving also on some consoles. A version remake in VGA was released with a talkie version on CD-ROM. In 2009 and 2010 the Special Editions were released, also on consoles, which allowed the use a new graphics mode and new controls.
    Monkey Island 2 released for Amiga 500 had 11 floppy disks that in the absence of a hard disk to install the game had to be changed continuously during the game
  • Ron Gilbert, in addition to Return to Monkey Island, only developed the first two chapters of the game
  • The beginning of The Secret of Monkey Island is famous because introduce the protagonist and his goal with a single sentence (“My name is Guybrush Threepwood and I want to become a pirate”), making the objective of the game immediately clear
  • Unlike the Sierra graphic adventures, in Monkey Island it was impossible to di . The only way to kill Guybrush was to wait 10 minutes while he was under water tied to the idol
  • In Return to Monkey Island, Guybrush, having aged since the first adventure, can hold his breath only for 8 minutes instead of 10.
  • The jacket texture of Stan, the boat salesman, does not follow his movements. Born as a technical limit, it was then re-proposed in the other games
The jacket texture
  • Mark Ferrari, the graphic artist who had already works Maniac Mansion, invented the dithering technique. At that time, the EGA supports only 16 colors so this imposed technical limits on games. With his technique, Ferrari mixed the available colors and created better images
Example of dithering with 16 colors

If you want to read the review of Return to Monkey Island click here