Return to Monkey Island’s art director talks inspirations and expectations

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Rex Crowle solidified his striking art style with games like Tearaway and Knights and Bikes. Now he’s serving as art director for Return to Monkey Island, the revival of the classic, pirate-themed adventure game series.

I had a chance to talk with Crowle about his love for the Monkey Island franchise and his work on this new entry.

GamesBeat: What is your history with the Monkey Island series as a fan?

Crowle: It’s the game that made me want to make video games. I never expected to actually achieve that dream, let alone actually working on a Monkey Island game. As a kid, most games seemed to be about one rectangle shooting smaller rectangles at another rectangle. Monkey Island was the opposite of that. I cared about the characters, laughed at the jokes, pressed my nose against the screen to study the art and I actually felt super sad for weeks after finishing the game. A state I remained in until I opened up Deluxe Paint III on my Amiga and started creating my own little adventure game graphics. It’s all the fault of that game.

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GamesBeat: Are you pulling inspiration from any specific past Monkey Island game?

Crowle: There’s the color palettes of The Secret of Monkey Island, the more painterly approach of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, as well as some of the shaper more stylized shapes of The Curse of Monkey Island. We’re a very small indie team so we didn’t go down the 3D route, but aside from that we’ve