Monkey Island

Guybrush Threepwood has a nasty tendency to be a bit of a pillock at times.

In the beginning, Lucasarts Gaming Division produced a graphic adventure game, which was hailed as one of the greatest and funniest ever written, and Guybrush was a young man desperate to become a pirate and sail the seven seas. And he puzzled, sword-fought, rowed, walked, followed and laughed his way to victory and met the one true love of his life, Elaine, and killed his one true nemesis, LeChuck.

All good games get sequels, and when LeChuck is reincarnated as a ghost Guybrush got his second outing. For a change the sequel was also hailed as the greatest, funniest graphical adventure game ever written, and Guybrush once again set off, only now he was searching for the great treasure of Big Whoop. And it was funny, and it still is good, and it is, in some ways, better than the second sequel.

By this time Lucasarts were, and are, heralded as the creators of the definitive Graphic Adventure game, as Sam 'n Max, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango are all testament to, but the Monkey Island series has always been the most popular, but when the creator and genius behind the games, Ron Gilbert, split to make a new company Cavedog, everybody assumed that Monkey Island would never be as good again. In a way they were right.

The third Monkey Island game was a game made from putting the ideas from the other two games into a large pot and picking at random. The sword-fighting from the first game returned, along with people from the second, including people with fruit for heads, and the characters were as I for one had imagined them to sound, but there wasn't much new, and it was generally thought that the Adventure game, as of this and Grim Fandango, was dead.

Speculation has always been rife for MI4, and I was always going to put it in preview on my website if it was officially announced, but for a company whose films are announced 6 years in advance, they still deny games existence up to 2 weeks before they are released. Ron Gilbert, creator of MI1 & 2 has an idea for another story, and has said that he would make another MI if he could buy the rights from Lucasarts. Recently increasing evidence has been found to suggest that the game *was* in fact in development, and the final straw came when I saw it listed in PC Gamer UK's Games 2000 feature. As far as I can gather, MI4 is on it's way. Bow before it, for we are surly not worthy.

There is a wide median surrounded by curb and filled with grass and bendy trees, located in the center of one small stretch of Randolph Street; just the block between Harvey and Lombard in Oak Park, IL. This small oasis has been known as Monkey Island by generations and generations of Oak Park youth because all of us have climbed its trees and swung from their branches at some point.

I was driving through my hometown the other day and turned down that small stretch of Randolph. The small and insignificant looking tree-filled median made me laugh, but I saw one small girl playing with her toys at the base of a center tree. To her, the island was still a big place, magical, a child's recluse.

A cannibal-infested island Deep in the Carribean.

Also, a series of humourous graphic adventure games released between 1990 and 2000 by LucasArts Entertainment Company (formerly LucasFilm Games). The brainchild of Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion), although he departed from LucasArts after the second game. The brilliance of the series is not down to Gilbert alone - it is the SCUMM engine that he helped to create that makes the games possible, and numerous writers, designers and animators have added their own unique contributions to the series. (Some prominent Monkey contributors include Tim Schafer, Aric Wilmunder, Dave Grossman, Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, Jonathan Ackley, Larry Ahern, Steve Purcell, Michael Z. Land, James Dollar, Sean Turner, and Dominic Armato as the voice of Guybrush Threepwood).

The series so far:

• The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) PC, Amiga, Mega-CD, Mac
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991) PC, Amiga, Mac
• The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) PC, Mac
• Escape From Monkey Island (2000) PC, Mac, PS2

An island in Brayford Pool, near the University of Lincoln in the UK. So-called because of the beer monkeys which live on it. Strangely enough, their calls can only be heard by the very drunk.

I mention this because I think it's an interesting example of the way pop culture evolves: inebriated students adopting the name of a computer game for a landmark would never have happened a few years ago.

The deck above the bridge on a ship is called the Monkey Island. Typically it's simply the roof of the steering cabin and often the highest point on a ship. Used for lookout.