The Secret of Monkey Island (HQ Remake) - SCUMM Bar
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The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the most beloved point-and-click adventures ever made. Development began in 1988 by Lucasfilm Games, and was released in October 1990. Ron Gilbert, who is renowned for his work with point-and-click adventures (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones Last Crusade) pitched the concept of a game set in an alternate reality Golden Age of Piracy Caribbean loosely based on the aesthetic from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at various Disney theme parks all over the world. He built a team and modified the SCUMM engine and put the Monkey Island series in the pantheon of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. The original game came with a feelie called "Dial-A-Pirate", which was used to match up a picture of the pirate on-screen as a form of early copy protection.
The game itself is a comedic adventure following Guybrush Threepwood on his quest to become a pirate on the island of Melee. The gameplay itself is not unlike the other SCUMM games, with death being nearly impossible (though you can drown in Monkey Island)(a lot of early adventure games punished you with death and restarting the game with any mistake, which led to extreme frustration - this practice kept up for many years in both text adventures, and in text/graphic adventures games like Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Zork series, the Magnetic Scrolls games, Lurking Horror, etc.). The player moves around with point and click and uses a Object + Verb gameplay loop to solve puzzles. The game also featured lots of cutscenes which were considered to be great graphics at the time. It would go on to see 5 games in the series: The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of Monkey Island, Escape from Monkey Island, and Tales of Monkey Island. The original version of the game was featured as part of "The Art of Video Games" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2011.
Monkey Island is the 5th game to use the SCUMM engine, which was customized just for this game. SCUMM stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion", and it was an engine/language created by Ron Gilbert obviously for the cult classic point-and-click adventure 'Maniac Mansion'. It made programming these point-and-click adventures much easier, and it would go on to be the engine used for an entire library of games now referred to as simply "SCUMM games". It is capable of being used across many platforms: 3DO, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, CDTV, Commodore 64, Fujitsu FM Towns & Marty, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo Entertainment System, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Sega CD (Mega-CD), and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine.
Some of the other games that used SCUMM:
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, Monkey Island series, Moonbase Commander, Panama Sam series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and the Spy Fox series.
You can get The Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition for $9.99 on gog.com , but most of these SCUMM games have been released for free as part of "ScummVM" (google it). That's a rabbit hole you can fall into.
Original Score by Michael Land and Patrick Mundy ©1990
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