Background
Ron Gilbert's two main inspirations for the story were Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride and Tim Powers' book '' On Stranger Tides''. The book was the inspiration for the story and characters, while the ride was the inspiration for the ambiance. Gilbert said in an interview that:" he POTC Ridekeeps you moving through the adventure but I've always wished I could get off and wander around, learn more about the characters, and find a way onto those pirate ships. So with ''The Secret of Monkey Island'' I wanted to create a game that had the same flavor, but where you could step off the boat and enter that whole storybook world”.
Media
Games
''The Secret of Monkey Island''
The series debuted in 1990 with ''The Secret of Monkey Island'' on the Amiga, MS-DOS,''Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge''
The second game, ''Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge'' from 1991, was available for fewer platforms; it was only released for PC MS-DOS, Amiga,''The Curse of Monkey Island''
''The Curse of Monkey Island'', the third in the series, was released exclusively for''Escape from Monkey Island''
''Escape from Monkey Island'', the fourth installment, was released in 2000 for PC Windows, and in 2001 for''Tales of Monkey Island''
''Tales of Monkey Island'' is the fifth installment within the series, co-developed by Telltale Games and LucasArts, with a simultaneous release both on WiiWare and PC. Unlike other installments, ''Tales'' is an episodic adventure consisting of five different episodes. The first episode was released on July 7, with the last one released on December 8, 2009. During a heated battle with his nemesis, the evil pirate LeChuck, Guybrush unwittingly unleashes an insidious pox that rapidly spreads across the Caribbean, turning pirates into zombie-like monsters. The Voodoo Lady sends Guybrush in search of a legendary sea sponge to stem the epidemic, but this seemingly straightforward quest has surprises around every corner.''Return to Monkey Island''
With the purchase of LucasArts by the Walt Disney Company in 2012, the rights to the franchise are now property of Disney. In the second half of 2010s, Disney Interactive ceased the production on gaming and transitioned to a licensing model. Gilbert wrote on Twitter that he was interested in buying the ''Monkey Island'' and ''Maniac Mansion'' properties. Fans of the series launched an online petition asking Disney to sell the franchise to Gilbert; by December 2021, the petition had gathered about 29,000 signatures. ''Return to Monkey Island'', the sixth ''Monkey Island'' installment, was released on September 19, 2022 on the Nintendo Switch and Windows, coming to other formats later. It is a collaboration between Gilbert's Terrible Toybox studio and Lucasfilm Games, and published by Devolver Digital. A frame story in the game serves to explain and continue from the ending of ''LeChuck's Revenge'', while the main narrative takes place after the other games in the series. Ron Gilbert has expressed his desire to tell a simple and focused pirate story in the game, while also redefining the adventure game user interface and deepening the greater lore. In addition to Gilbert, Grossman returns as co-writer, with music from veteran series composers Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian, and Dominic Armato, Alexandra Boyd, and Denny Delk reprising their roles as Guybrush, Elaine, and Murray. Jess Harnell replaces the retired Earl Boen as the voice of LeChuck.Other appearances
Stan's Used Coffins is referred to in one of the levels of the LucasArts game '' Outlaws''. In '' Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine'', Guybrush can be accessed as a playable character via a cheat code; in addition, a ''Monkey Island''-themed secret room can be found in the game's final level. Guybrush also appears in '' Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II'' as a playable skin for Starkiller named "Guybrush Threepkiller". Guybrush is paid homage in the Naughty Dog video game '' Uncharted 4: A Thief's End'', where a pirate with major similarities to Guybrush is featured as one of the twelve pirate captains that founded Libertalia. Although he remains unnamed throughout the game, the resemblance is uncanny and his sigil is represented by a monkey. His portrait can be seen in the Libertalia treasury with the other founders and though his name is partly scratched out, the letters still visible spell out the truncated name "Guy Wood". Several elements from the ''Monkey Island'' series appear in '' Sea of Thieves'' as part of its June 2021 "A Pirate's Life" update. Developed in collaboration with Disney and primarily themed after ''Pirates of the Caribbean'', multiple references to the characters and locales from the Monkey Island franchise can be found in journals by Kate Capsize scattered around the wreckage of The Headless Monkey during the update's first Tall Tale, accompanied by an original arrangement of the Monkey Island theme. According to the journals, Guybrush and Elaine Threepwood are celebrating their honeymoon somewhere upon the Sea of Thieves, while Kate perished attempting to get revenge on Guybrush for framing her. A full ''Monkey Island''-themed expansion for the game, "The Legend of Monkey Island", was released on July 20, 2023 and spread across three monthly episodes. In the story, set between ''Curse'' and ''Escape'', Guybrush and Elaine's honeymoon on the Sea of Thieves is interrupted by LeChuck, who traps them in a dream version of Mêlée Island where everyone worships Guybrush as a legendary pirate. To stop LeChuck from restoring the legendary Burning Blade and conquering the Sea of Thieves, the Pirate Lord recruits the now-revived Kate Capsize and the player pirates to enter the dreamworld and rescue Guybrush and Elaine. In an update to '' Hitman 3'', a new pirate-themed map was added, which featured an Easter Egg referencing ''Monkey Island'' in the form of a gravestone in the environment reading "G Threepwood, Mighty Pirate", a clear reference to Guybrush. In '' The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'', while completing the 'Fists of Fury' quest in the ''Blood and Wine'' expansion patch, the protagonist Geralt encounters a man named Mancomb, a reference to a character of the same name in the first game of the series.Cancelled film
Shortly after Pixar, a spinout from Lucasfilm, found success with the first '' Toy Story'' film in 1995, there had been a push across Hollywood for more digitally animated films. Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), in the midst of transitioning from practical to digital effects, offered its services for producing these films to other studios. One of the first projects they tried to work on was with Universal Pictures to revive the Universal Classic Monsters line with a film called ''Frankenstein and the Wolfman''. While several scripts and preliminary art was produced for this film, shake-ups at Universal due to the financial failure of '' Babe: Pig in the City'' led to changes in leadership for the film and ultimately its cancellation. David Carson, who had been set to direct ''Frankenstein and the Wolfman'' but left after the Universal shake-up, came back to ILM with the idea of an animated film based on the first ''Monkey Island'' game around 2000. With initial support from ILM, Carson worked an initial script with Corey Rosen and Scott Leberecht as to pitch the idea to Amblin Entertainment, the production company owned by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg had told Carson that he had previously told George Lucas that he should have made a ''Monkey Island'' movie years before, and other meetings with Amblin went well to proceed to further screenwriting work. The rest of ILM's story department was brought in to help write, including Steve Purcell, but this team worked separately from the writers that were developing the actual games, creating a disconnect between story the film was going with and the narrative already established in the video game series. As they continued to work out the screenplay, the direction of the film continued to veer further from the video game series, including at one point where Spielberg had suggested the game be about the monkeys on Monkey Island instead of the pirates. According to Carson, the lack of a creative direction at this point led to the film being shelved at ILM. Details about the film were first revealed publicly in 2011 as part of the ''Monkey Island Special Edition Collection'' which included some of the film's concept art, storyboards, and scripts. It had been rumored that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had been involved in the writing of the ''Monkey Island'' script which they subsequently used as the basis for the first '' Pirates of the Caribbean'' film. Both Elliott and Rossio had been to ILM and were shown parts of the ''Monkey Island'' script, around the same time they were working on their script for ''Pirates''. When ''Pirates'' was released, many fans of the ''Monkey Island'' series made comparisons of parts of the film to the games, and when news of the cancelled film first arose in 2011, the potential connection of Elliott and Rossio to the ''Monkey Island'' script started. Both Carson and Rossio stated that many of the tropes in both ''Monkey Island'' and ''Pirates'' are based on the classic pirate movies and that there was no direct reuse of the cancelled ''Monkey Island'' film in ''Pirates''.The "Secret" of Monkey Island
None of the first five games explicitly reveal the "Secret of Monkey Island". The team behind ''Escape from Monkey Island'' attempted to resolve the issue by showing that the Giant Monkey Head was actually the control room of a Giant Monkey Robot. The cut-scene in which the revelation was made is called "The Real Secret of Monkey Island". Gilbert stated that he never told anyone what the true secret of Monkey Island is. In a 2004 interview, Gilbert stated that when the game was originally conceived, it was considered "too big", so they split it into three parts. He added that he "knows what the third artis" and "how the story's supposed to end", indicating that he had a definite concept of the “secret” and a conclusive third game. The true nature of the secret is the main focus of ''Return to Monkey Island'', with several characters competing amongst themselves in a race to discover "the Secret". The game's conclusion reveals the secret to be a novelty T-shirt earned as a prize at a pirate-themed amusement park, which has acted as the setting for all of Guybrush Threepwood’s previous adventures. Threepwood, as the game's narrator, is intentionally ambiguous as to whether this is the actual secret, even suggesting that the secret means different things to different people, and putting forth the notion that the story of the journey (and the joy of speculating about the secret with others) is more valuable than the reward itself. After the release of ''Return to Monkey Island'', Gilbert stated in an interview that the true secret (as conceived during development of the first installment of the series) is that Guybrush was, in fact, inside of a pirate-themed amusement park the entire time.See also
* LucasArts adventure games * SCUMM * ScummVMReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Monkey Island (Series) LucasArts franchises Video game franchises Video game franchises introduced in 1990 Video games about pirates Video games set on fictional islands