A brand new tale in the
world of Monkey Island is coming out, and I’m hoping for a fun
old style adventure game in the vein of the original series. I went
ahead and pre-purchased all five episodes. But, before starting to
play episode one, I decided to refresh my memory on that which came
before. I started at the beginning in Secret of Monkey Island.

Installing

I
still have a couple working computers with 3.5” floppy drives,
which is handy because that is what my version of Monkey Island is
on. ( Sidenote: Does anyone have a 5.25 inch drive? I’d love
to restore some of the other games in my collection). I have the LucasFilm
classics collection which includes Loom, Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade – The Adventure Game, Zak McKracken, and of course The
Secret of Monkey Island. I copied all files onto the hard drive and
moved them over to my ‘main’ PC. Copying them from floppy
to hard drive took a lot longer than moving them over the network
if you can believe that.

Next up, I had to install
the game. The installer believes that you are installing from a floppy
drive and can easily switch discs during the install. I mapped each
disk directory into a drive letter, and launched the disc 1 installer.
It ran, but when it came time to put in the second disc, I was unable
to switch drives. Thankfully Windows XP is a lot more open to multi-task
than the old style dos windows are. I remapped each disc to the same
network drive when it asked.

As a side note, when I
installed Monkey Island 2, I discovered that you could put all the
data files in the same directory and map to that one directory. It
installed without having to remap after each disc. I suspect the same
approach will work here.

Running the Game

So, after I got the game
installed, I needed to run it. This was easier said than done. Selecting
the monkey executable did nothing. Thankfully the solution was in
SCUMMVM. SCUMMVM is a tool for running old games, as long as you have
a data file. It is named after the SCUMM engine which was used to
create the original Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and other LucasArts
titles.

I
downloaded and installed SCUMMVM. Then I pointed it to the Monkey
Island install directory and I was off. The one issue I had is that
the left and right of the screen were chopped off if I used my Dell
20 inch external monitor instead of the laptop monitor. After some
tweaking I addressed this by setting the graphics render mode to 3xinstead
of the default. I was off.

Enter the World
of Guybrush Threepwood, Elaine Marley, and the Ghost Pirate LeChuck

Guybush Threepwood shows
up at Melee Island, a young naïve adventurer wanting to become
a pirate. He stops by to chat with the three pirate lords and they
give him three tasks that he needs to complete to become a pirate.
The first part of the game consists of solving these tasks to find
the treasure, beat the sword master, and steal a statue from the house
of Governor Elaine Marley. The game is packed with humor and fun while
you solve these three tasks, find the treasure, and get the girl.

Although some of the game
came back to me quickly, I’m surprised at how much I didn’t
remember. How do you get ahead as a navigator? I didn’t know.
How do you navigate the volcano fire maze? Beats me! How do you put
the dogs to sleep so you can sneak into the mansion? No idea! When
I played the King’s Quest 1 remake a while back, everything
came back immediately almost as if it was ingrained into part of my
soul. Monkey Island never touched me that way. I believe it was because
I was young when I first played KQ1, but only picked up Monkey Island
after the fact, about 10 years ago or so.

The joy of this is that
I was able to re-discover the game for the first time. I was able
to be sidetracked by every red herring, walk down every false path,
and laugh at every wayward joke. It was a fantastic ride and I’m
happy to have been able to walk down this path for the second time.

And then they cast
Orlando Bloom as me

There
is a remake recently released to the Secret of Monkey Island. It includes
the old version that I played, but also updated graphics with a brand
new sound track and the addition of voice actors. It is available
on STEAM for the PC and I assume will end up in stores in some manner.
Reviews I’ve seen show that the game is a 1×1 copy, changing
nothing except the graphics and sound files while still retaining
the original dialog and puzzle structure.

One screenshot I saw was
near the end of the game where Guybrush is talking to a ghost, and
the caption was along the lines of “And then they cast Orlando
Bloom as me,” most likely referring to the Pirates of the Caribbean
movies. Lots of stuff in POTC reminds me of Monkey Island. As lots
of stuff in MI will remind you of the POTC ride. I assume this is
one update done for the sake of humor. I bet there are others scattered
throughout.

I think it’d be
fun to play the updated version. Anyone want to gift it to me?

System Requirements
(PC):

• DOS 1.0 to 2.11
• 10 MHz 80286 or higher
• 256-color VGA/MCGA
• 640KB memory
• Keyboard, mouse or analog
  joystick
• Soundblaster, Adlib,
  or PC Speaker