The Secret of Monkey Island, a milestone was born 30 years ago

On September 2, 1990, as all attentive readers will know, Ron Gilbert and his team at LucasArts produced the final version of the first title of the most famous pirate videogame saga ever: The Secret of Monkey Island. Being called to talk about it is, of course, a great honor as well as a wonderful opportunity to evoke childhood memories. A childhood certainly made better thanks to Gilbert's masterpiece (plus Schafer and Grossman).

The secret of immortality

A first great merit of the title is undoubtedly its ability not to age, at least not in its narrative and playful power. In my personal experience, for reasons of both age and availability, the first game of the series was the third chapter (clearly more akin to contemporary tastes in terms of user experience and visual impact). Despite this, the transition to The Secret of Monkey Island was completely painless, and indeed represented for myself a real point of no return. Indeed Secret, together with the more colorful and explosive LeChuck's Revenge, expresses the state of the art of the graphic adventure of the "golden age", through a series of brilliant dialogues, some puzzles that have remained in the history of the medium and a more general mood as light-hearted as consistent.

The defects of the game, certainly present, are still attributable to style imperfections, which have nothing to do with usability. The remastered versions, then, made it possible to bring the historical saga closer to even younger consumers and, physiologically, less attracted to the graphic brick that were the point and click of the early 90s.