The Secret of Monkey Island (SMI), designed by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman, was a breath of fresh air for the point-and-click adventure genre in 1990. LucasArts’s competitor, Sierra On-Line, designed adventure games that were notorious for their difficulty. For example, King’s Quest would punish the player with moments when the game was unwinnable. By contrast, players in The Secret of Monkey Island couldn’t die or put themselves in a position where it was impossible to finish the game. This allowed them to leisurely explore and experiment in the game’s humorous pirate setting. In 1991, a sequel was released titled Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Another sequel came six years later in the form of The Curse of Monkey Island (CMI), albeit without the involvement of Gilbert, Schafer, and Grossman. Although CMI was the last 2D adventure game by LucasArts, it received just as much praise as its predecessors and made the series a solid trilogy of adventure games. In 2000, a fourth game was released titled Escape from Monkey Island (EMI). Wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood, and his wife, Elaine Marley, return from a honeymoon they had embarked on at the end of CMI. Upon their return, a candidate named Charles L. Charles (who is actually LeChuck) is attempting to take over Elaine’s role as governor of Mêlée Island. The game introduces a new villain named Ozzie Mandrill, an Australian businessman who seeks to end piracy by turning the tri-island area into a resort. His real goal is to find a voodoo talisman called the ultimate insult. Escape from Monkey Island was a drastic change in many ways for the series, and despite good sales and reviews, it was the most divisive game in the series. Twenty years after its release, what is the legacy of Escape from Monkey Island?
The game had a lot to live up to. The Secret of Monkey Island was a classic, and its sequel was better in every way. Curse pushed the series in a new direction with a hand-drawn style that made it feel like you were playing a Disney-animated adventure. EMI pushed the series even further by being the first Monkey Island game to not use the ScummVM engine. Instead, it used GrimE, the engine used to create the 3D LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango. EMI’s transition from 2D to 3D changed how it played. The game replaced mouse controls with a keyboard control scheme that allowed the player to move Guybrush in any direction. Most players found this type of control scheme less intuitive than pointing and clicking. EMI had other problems that weren’t due to the engine it was on. Some players didn’t like the writing and felt the jokes were unfunny and rehashed. Players didn’t find Ozzie Mandrill as entertaining as LeChuck. Some players found the puzzles too difficult and the answers to them illogical. One notable example involved trying to anger Ozzie Mandrill to the point of breaking his cane. To anger him, the player had to spray cologne on a stuffed platypus. One part of the game that was universally despised was Monkey Kombat, a puzzle similar to SMI’s Insult Swordfighting. There are 5 stances in Monkey Kombat, and transitioning to each one requires selecting a combination of words. A stance beats two stances but is beaten by two others. One issue with this puzzle was that it required the player to write down the combinations needed to get into each stance and which stances they lose to and beat. Another issue was that randomization was involved in the puzzle, which made the use of a walkthrough impossible. The combinations to get into each stance were randomized every time the player started a new save file. This aggravated players because they could not, at the very least, look up the solution to a puzzle they didn’t enjoy. For players who weren’t enjoying the game up until this point, this puzzle could’ve been the breaking point for them. The puzzle was so difficult that the PlayStation 2 port included a diagram to make it easier. By pressing R2 during Monkey Kombat, the player could see the combinations needed to get into each learned stance.
Something about EMI felt off. It looked like Monkey Island but didn’t feel like the Monkey Island games fans enjoyed. This could be because a different team developed the game. Sean Clark and Michael Stemmle had previously directed Sam & Max: Hit the Road and they were brought on to direct the production of EMI. I believe most of the game’s problems occur when you get to Monkey Island because the puzzles there are the least interesting. One involves launching multiple rocks in a small amount of time, and another requires you to navigate a raft through a lava maze. This island is where the player encounters the infamous Monkey Kombat puzzle. The game’s climax — a showdown between a giant monkey robot and a possessed giant statue of LeChuck — ends with one of the least satisfying puzzles in the series. To defeat LeChuck, the player has to cause a draw in Monkey Kombat three times in a row by mimicking his attacks. If the island had followed the tourist trap angle that the previous islands established, then this act would’ve allowed for more interesting puzzles and humor. Regardless, if EMI had a stronger last act, perhaps the game would’ve been received more positively. However, EMI wasn’t universally disliked. Websites such as Gamespot and IGN gave it high scores. One of the most praised aspects of the game was the quality of its soundtrack and voice acting. The game won a Best of E3 award by the Game Critics’ Awards and was nominated in three categories by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. The mysts-o-time, a puzzle that involves a swamp and time travel, is one of the best puzzles in the Monkey Island series. There’s no doubt some players enjoyed the game’s writing and humor. John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun wrote about how superb the game was. PushingUpRoses, a YouTube channel about games and pop culture, has a video titled “In Defense of Escape from Monkey Island.” Likewise, there are plenty of positive reviews by fans.
EMI came full circle by returning Guybrush to the place where his desire to be a pirate started: Mêlée Island. He reunited with characters from his first adventure, such as the old pirate crew he left stranded on Monkey Island. However, one character returned with a drastic revelation. Herman Toothrot was an inhabitant of Monkey Island and had appeared in Monkey Island 1 and 2. In EMI’s third act, Herman Toothrot turns out to be Horatio Torquemada Marley, the grandfather of Elaine Marley. These were originally two separate characters and were now combined into one. Fans saw this retcon of Herman as an unnecessary change that resulted in several plot holes in the continuity of the series. This twist seemed strange, considering CMI went out of its way to explain the confusing ending to Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.
The biggest mystery of the series is what the secret of Monkey Island actually is. Ron Gilbert is the only person who knows the answer, and he took it with him when he left LucasArts. Likewise, he won’t be revealing it anytime soon unless he somehow gets the rights to the series and makes his Monkey Island 3 (this happened!). The strange ending to Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge fueled more speculation about what the secret may be. One popular theory is that the pirate setting is the imagination of a child. Another theory proposes that the secret is an underworld hidden underneath Monkey Island. There isn’t a definitive answer. However, what if the secret was already revealed? EMI features a cutscene titled “The REAL Secret of Monkey Island.” The cutscene reveals that the monkey head on Monkey Island is the head of a giant robot. A secret can be tricky because the answer to it may end up being underwhelming. The robot being the secret is unsatisfactory because LucasArts didn’t foreshadow it in the previous games. What would make for a satisfying answer? I believe it would have to have some type of revelation hinted at in Monkey Island 1 and 2 that makes the fans see the series in a new light. Lastly, Ron Gilbert would have to confirm the answer. Of course, there might not even be an actual secret of Monkey Island. It could be just a joke. If the secret is just a giant robot monkey, then it would be the meanest joke in the series. The secret that fans have been theorizing about for years is in the game rarely ranked over its predecessors.
One year after its release, LucasArts released a port of EMI for the PlayStation 2. The game could fit on one DVD as opposed to the PC version’s need for two discs. The tank controls were tolerable for the PlayStation 2 controller, and this version of the game supposedly had nine times as many polygons in the character models. The Murrayball mini-game, a pong clone, allowed for two players instead of one. The game also included an extra mini-game that played similarly to Space Invaders. Like I mentioned earlier, the port added a chart to make Monkey Kombat less tedious. The downsides of the port were load times that occurred when leaving and entering areas and even accessing the inventory screen. iMuse, a music system first used in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, allowed for music to match the action happening on-screen and smoothly transition from one track to another. And despite seemingly being a part of the port, it’s hardly noticeable or absent. By far, the most interesting thing about the port is that it has dialog choices that were hidden in the PC version. Here’s one example:
The extra dialog choices aren’t present in the game that’s available on the Good Old Games store. The reason for this is that a part of the game’s coding responsible for making these dialogue options appear is turned off. Thankfully, a patch was made that turns on the dialog choices. That alone, in a weird way, makes the PS2 port the more definitive version.
EMI poked fun at consumerism and gentrification. The grog-swilling, seafaring way of life Guybrush loved was being pushed out by a capitalistic businessman. On Jambalaya Island, Starbuccaneers and Planet Threepwood are parodies of Starbucks and Planet Hollywood. Pirates had to unlearn their swashbuckling ways and perform the labor this tourist trap entailed. On Lucre Island, the player meets a pirate-turned-perfume salesman. He tries to sell perfume to Guybrush but has trouble doing so because he continuously suppresses his urges of piracy. For disappointed fans, EMI might come across as a reflection of what it was satirizing. A review on MobyGames called the game a remarkable parody of itself. Piracy was packaged and sold as a product just so Ozzie Mandrill could make a profit. The recycling of characters, references, and jokes made EMI seem like a sequel that existed solely to make money.
EMI was the last point-and-click adventure game by LucasArts. A few years after its release, LucasArts canceled the development of Sam & Max: Hit the Road and Full Throttle. This was their reasoning at the time: “After careful evaluation of marketplace realities and underlying economic considerations, we’ve decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC.” If the legacy of SMI was that it was a refreshing breath of air for the genre, then perhaps the legacy of EMI was its last breaths. Despite its success, the game didn’t revitalize the adventure game genre. It also hasn’t been rereleased like the first two Monkey Island games. For the development team, the legacy of EMI could be the memories of working on it. For the fans, it was either a disappointing and unnecessary sequel or a good game that couldn’t reach the bar set by its predecessors. For the series, EMI’s legacy could be the fact that its status as an unnecessary sequel is part of the series’ cynical sense of humor. In my opinion, the legacy of EMI is that it was a bookend for the series, LucasArts, and in a way, the genre too at the time. Before TellTale revived the series a decade later with Tales of Monkey Island, EMI seemed to be a disappointing end to an important series in the adventure game genre. Even the game’s title seemed to indicate not only the exit from the titular island but also the departure from the series by LucasArts and Monkey Island fans.
