Ahoy there me 'hearties!! Come join me with a bottle of rum as I tell you the tale of a young salty sea dog who became one of the most recognised scallywags in video game history.

Image by the point and click legend, Steve Purcell

It all started in 1990 when young Ron Gilbert came up with idea for The Secret of Monkey Island by gaining inspiration from Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride and a book written by Tim Power entitled On Strangers Tides. In an article on Scummbar.com Gilbert said

With the power of the Gilbert co-created SCUMM engine, his vision became a reality. The fifth game to use the SCUMM engine. References to the Disneyland ride were also made from within the game. Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Studios, and Dave Grossman, founder of TellTale Games, co-created the game with Gilbert, helping mostly with the games dialogue which was originally supposed to be a serious story but later turned into a comedy after Schafer and Grossman used humorous placeholder dialogue which Gilbert read and liked.

Image by Designersnotebook.com

The ideas for The Secret of Monkey Island were conceived through short stories that Gilbert wrote which contained content about ghosts which is an integral part of the story of the game. When Gilbert finished writing these stories he would hand them over to Schafer and Grossman to put into the game.
The game was finished first with placeholders for everything. No graphics, fake dialogue and no audio.
It is said that due to the game being behind schedule, other members of LucasFilm were asked to create game boxes for the games initial release.

Image by Collection.maruska.cz

Few versions of the Secret of Monkey Island exist. These include versions for the PC, Amiga and most recently the PS3, XBOX 360, iPhone and iPad via the Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition remake. The remake includes full HD graphics, full voice and updated UI.

Image by Steve Purcell

Image by Blogcdn.com

The story of TSoMI is simple yet highly entertaining due to it's fantastic humour. Guybrush Threepwood is a wanna be pirate who washes up on the shores of Melee Island only to see the near blind Watchman standing in front of him. The opening lines of the game are also some of the most memorable when Guybrush says:

The Watchman lets Guybrush know where he can go to become a pirate and from here Guybrush goes through a crazy journey that sees him undergoing the "Three Trials" of becoming a pirate, falling in love with the governor Elaine Marley and defeating an undead ghost pirate Le'Chuck with the help of a voodoo lady and a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.

Needless to say, the plot isn't a complex piece of storytelling but the journey Guybrush undergoes, the characters he meets and the situations he is faced with make it a storytelling experience that nobody should miss.

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The gameplay in TSoMI (The Secret of Monkey Island) is traditional to point and click adventure games. The player can perform several actions on people, the environment and objects by clicking on a command and then clicking on a target. For example the player can click on the "Talk to" command and then on a pirate to talk to him.

Image by Distantcreations.com

The primary objective is to use these commands to solve logical puzzles which on completion will progress the story of the game. For example, in the following image the only way to get past the troll is to give him the fish from your inventory. This is one of the easier puzzles.

Image by ScummVM.org

The inventory is also an important part in any adventure game. It's a core component that not only provides a place to store items you find throughout the game but also as a tool to use for puzzles. For instance you might have a stick and a rope in your inventory, if the player combines them together you can create a fishing rod. These types of puzzles exist in TSoMI.

Another important feature in TSoMI is the dialogue system. Guybrush is able to talk to other characters in the game and when he does, dialogue options will appear allowing the player to select what line of dialogue they would like Guybrush to say.

Image by ScummVM.org

The puzzles in TSoMI are fantastic for the most part even if they are a little hard given todays standards however this issue is addressed in the remake which we will look at in another part. The puzzles require Guybrush to do many crazy tasks like finding a way to obtain a giant cotton bud, because it's the key to a door in a secret location, which has a monkey ear for a lock, or creating a secret recipe, that Guybrush finds, hidden, on an old ship, which is used to create a substance that can be used with a cannon to blast him onto the secret shores of Monkey Island.

Image by Gamesradar.com

As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics are outdated by todays standards but it was one of the best looking games out at the time which made TSoMI a visual masterpiece. The art style was created by Steve Purcell and has remained a trademark of his throughout all of his games. He adds a certain quality to the game that gives a unique hybrid between cartoony and realistic. The graphics are all hand drawn digitally after being drawn on paper first and scanned into a PC for the conversion. The pixelated nature of the art however gave way to one of the most complained problem of adventure games which is called "Pixel Hunting" which has the player hunting for small objects that were hard to see because they were easily blended in with the environment due to low pixel count. Never the less, the retro art in TSoMI is some of the best retro art you will lay your eyes upon making it a joy to look at even after 20 years.

Image by Pirates-privateers.com

The audio in TSoMI is phenomenal and is still regarded today to be one of the greatest video game soundtracks in the history of video games only to be surpassed by it's sequel in Monkey Island 2 due to the Micheal Land created iMUSE system which he created due to feeling restricted when composing for The Secret of Monkey Island, even though it's still one of the most beloved soundtracks in gaming. The soundtrack has a Caribbean feel to it which was different at the time. The main theme is still one of the most recognised in gaming.