The True Secrets of Monkey Island’s Development
The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the seminal releases of its era; a comedic adventure game with heart, humour, and problem solving rubber chickens. Created by Ron Gilbert and with a team that included a fresh-faced Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, this inventive take on both adventure games and the swashbuckling life of a pirate debuted in 1990 and was followed by a sequel the very next year.
So. Instant, genre-defining classics, right? “It was very much a surprise for me,” says Ron Gilbert, of the enduring popularity of those first Guybrush Threepwood adventures. “It's hard sometimes for people to look back and think that Monkey Island wasn’t this giant franchise, and it confuses them that I left the company right after Monkey Island 2 and that Dave went on to do Day of the Tentacle. It's like, why would you leave such a massive franchise at that point? The answer to that question is it wasn't a massive franchise. Both of the Monkey Island games sold well, but they sold nowhere close to the games that Sierra Online was doing at the time. They were good, but they were not major hits.”
At the time of Monkey Island’s debut, Sierra was the biggest name in computer games. The studio’s bread and butter were adventure games, having single-handedly created the genre as we know it with the very first King’s Quest in the mid-1980s. Sierra made many more adventures with Quest in the title, from King’s Quest sequels to Space Quest to the very weird Police Quest, which Ron Gilbert cites as a somewhat surprising influence for The Secret of Monkey Island, but more on that in a bit.
For Lucasfilm Games, it was Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion and the SCUMM toolset he created that would serve as the foundation for a string of beloved
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