Hey kid—I’ll level with you. I grew up a Sega kid. I cut my teeth on our family’s Packard Bell PC playing LucasArts adventures. Hang with me here, Genesis freak—what I learned from those games is that games didn’t need cutting-edge graphics or blazing fast processors to entertain me.
I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at my cousin Mike’s house in Tucson in July of 1992. Mike’s father worked at some computer company and had one of those monster computers from the early ’90s—you know, the tower thing that cost more than most people’s cars at the time? Mike was showing me some racing game or other when I noticed a box on the shelf with a monkey on it. “Oh,” he said, “that old thing.” “Graphic adventure? Dialogue puzzles?” I scoffed internally. “No way.”
Half an hour later, I’m playing as a not-so-distinguished wannabe pirate named Guybrush Threepwood and I’m completely addicted. This was groundbreaking for me as an arcade kid. No twitch reflexes were needed. You didn’t need to memorize enemy patterns to survive; you just needed to think logically and enjoy the wittiest dialogue I’d ever read in a video game. I laughed out loud when Guybrush confidently declared that he was not a “mighty pirate.”
On the console side of things, being able to just point and click blew my mind. There were verbs at the bottom of the screen (“walk to,” “pick up,” “use,” “talk to,” etc.) and you simply clicked combinations of the two to perform actions. I wasn’t typing commands and hoping the computer would understand my shorthand of “get ye flask.” I wasn’t dying because I used the wrong verb tense. I was interacting with my environment intuitively.
I ended up borrowing that game for probably three months. Mike didn’t care–he had better things to do, like play whatever was the latest shooting game. But I would ride my bike to Mike’s house every other day or so to pick up where I’d left off on Guybrush’s island escapades. That insult sword fighting taught my teenage brain.
Basically in the insult sword fighting, you come up with comebacks based on defeats in combat, and then you have to use those comebacks against other guys who will insult you in different ways. Kind of a dialogue puzzle mixed with swordplay.
“You fight like a vegan!” “Oh yeah?! Well, YOU fight like a wimp!” I shout these things to students when they talk back to me. I’m sure they think I’m having a stroke.
LucasArts didn’t just revolutionize gaming with their interface, however—they redefined what games should strive to be. I had played many Sierra adventures growing up at friends’ houses and all of their games were waylords of misery. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest…they all took malicious pride in allowing you to get permanently stuck OR randomly dying because you forgot to pick up a shoe earlier that you didn’t know you were supposed to collect four hours ago.
LucasArts said, “Fuck that.” They had a design philosophy called “no dead ends.” Literally, you could not do anything to make the game unbeatable. Sure you could get stumped on a puzzle, but you would never be faced with a situation where you’d have to reload from a save because you skipped something. This was groundbreaking in 1990. Most adventure games treated you like you should know transcendental knowledge.
I remember trying to explain this to my friend Carlos who was into Sierra games. “But why don’t you die?” he asked. “If you can’t die, what’s the point?” This was followed by me watching him play Monkey Island 2 for about an hour before he hit the infamous banana-spitting contest puzzle. Dude was hooked. “OK,” he conceded, “I guess it’s better not to die every five minutes.”
LucasArts pulled all this off thanks to their wonderful adventure game engine aptly titled the SCUMM engine. (SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, because obviously LucasArts programmers were badass with acronyms too.) Every single adventure game LucasArts released from Maniac Mansion up through The Curse of Monkey Island ran off some version of SCUMM.
Maniac Mansion had the ugliest interface with like 15 verbs available to you. Day of the Tentacle slimmed it down to nine. Sam & Max Hit the Road introduced you to the verb that appeared when you right clicked. By Full Throttle, they had cut down verbs even farther. Watching them streamline the interface was like watching paint dry…but investing.
Day of the Tentacle … okay Day of the Tentacle fucked with me. Three timelines? Puzzle logic where you had to match up what needed to happen in Past, Present, and Future? I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to get the hamster from the past to the future so he could run in the generator. When I finally solved that puzzle, I felt like I won the Nobel Prize. My mom thought I had lost my mind because she heard me laughing hysterically at my computer.
The writing in these games was … other-worldly. It wasn’t like other game developers were sitting around drinking java when these guys were writing scripts. These motherfuckers wrote jokes for a living and they happened to make video games about it. The writing was witty; the scenarios absurd but made sense; the characters acted like believable people even though they were basically glorified stickers on the screen.
Years later, I actually met Tim Schafer at a video game conference in Los Angeles. Oh man, did I geek out. Butt idiot words came out of my mouth as I tried to explain to this legendary game designer how much Full Throttle meant to me growing up. He was super gracious about it, gave me a signed copy of my beaten up game manual. To this day, I have it tucked away in my closet somewhere. Probably worth more than my car now.
Full Throttle took everything we loved about Monkey Island and matured it into a dark hellishly-paced badass roadtrip. Mark Hamill was the villain. The freakin’ opening cutscene had Ben cruising on his motorcycle through the desert. You never felt like you were “playing” puzzles, you felt like you were an ass kicking biker trying to solve problems along the way. Stylish is the word most adventure games couldn’t grasp.
Then came The Dig, which was a drastic departure from everything they’d done before. Hard science fiction vs. comedy. Aliens and space versus pirates and talking pirates. Dude…I’ll be honest, it took me weeks to get used to it. I kept waiting for jokes that didn’t come. But once I adjusted my expectations, man oh man was it a trip. That game oozed ambiance.
Grim Fandango….look, I get it—the tank controls sucked. I know they had interface problems when they abandoned SCUMM for their own in-house 3-D engine. I don’t care. That game was art. Film noir + Mexican Day of the Dead folklore + the soundtrack from every other LucasArts adventure blended together. I called in sick to school the day it came out—played Grim Fandango cover to cover for three days straight.
If you’re gonna play these games—and please god, let you do—here’s how I recommend you play them. Maniac Mansion because you gotta start somewhere, but it is very rudimentary. Then play Monkey Island games in order—Secret, then LeChuck’s Revenge, then Curse of Monkey Island. Then Day of the Tentacle, then Sam & Max Hit the Road. Followed by Full Throttle, Dig, and then Grim Fandango.
You’ll see game design and storytelling evolve with each game. The earlier ones are cute, but cumbersome. The mid-era games are the pinnacle of SCUMM. Then watch them experiment with new things and fail … and succeed.
It wasn’t an overnight crash and burn. More like watching your favorite band slowly release crap albums one after another until they phoned in Escape from Monkey Island in 2000. Sure it still had it moments. The spirit was still there. But…it wasn’t the same. Something got lost along the way. Maybe it was staff leaving to start their own companies. Maybe corporate pressures to invest in other “marketable” intellectual properties. Probably both.
LucasArts swiftly jumped into developing Star Wars games right after. Which made sense business-wise but felt like betrayal from my beloved adventure pioneers. Don’t get me wrong, some of those games were stellar, I played my share of Jedi Knight and X-Wing. But they just didn’t have the same magical feel to them.
Hell when Disney decided to shutter LucasArts in 2013, I half expected to receive a funeral invite. LucasArts adventures were such a huge part of my gaming life and now the studio that made them was just … kaput. All those amazing game designers scattered to the wind and together they flew the freakin’ coop.
Look, I love the remakes/remastered SCUMMV editions as much as the next guy. Playing through Monkey Island 2 Special Edition was a very strange trip of me flipping between “Look at these fancy new pixels!” and “NO! I WANT THE ORIGINA BIT MAPS!” graphics. The new versions play beautifully and the remastered graphics are gorgeous. But those blocky old pixels are seared into my memory in a way no shiny new graphics can replace.
What I will say is hearing actual voice acting in these games for the first time was astounding. Casting Dominic Armato as Guybrush was genius on their part; he nailed my imagined voice of what Guybrush sounded like all those years ago when it was text on the screen describing his every action.
About two years ago I tried teaching my nephew how to play Monkey Island. Figured the kid who was born playing games on his parents’ smartphones wouldn’t have the patience for tedious puzzle-solving adventures. Two hours in he refused to look away from the screen at me cackling like an asshole at the sword fighting showdowns. Guess some things will never get old.
Sure the point-and-click genre never really went extinct. Telltale tried to pick up the torch for a hot minute before spectacularly self imploding, and there are always smaller companies releasing fantastic point-and-clicks/games these days. But none of them ever reached that magical LucasArts feeling. Maybe it was just those guys at that point in time. Maybe I’m just yearning for the good ol’ days. Truth is, those games will always have a special place in gaming history.
I still have all my original boxes in my garage back home in Arizona probably rotting away. Heck I can’t even play the CDs anymore—who even has CD drives installed on their computers?!? Luckily there is ScummVM to play these games whenever I want. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I’ll pop Monkey Island into my emulator and just wander around Melee Island aimlessly. It’s like visiting old friends who don’t change and never age, much like your teenage years refuse to do in real life.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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