Origin and writing Ron Gilbert conceived the idea of a pirate adventure game in 1988, after completing
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. He first wrote story ideas about pirates while spending the weekend at a friend's house. Gilbert experimented with introductory paragraphs to find a satisfactory idea. His initial story featured unnamed villains that would eventually become LeChuck and Elaine; Guybrush was absent at this point. He pitched it to
Lucasfilm Games's staff as a series of short stories. Gilbert's idea was warmly received, but production was postponed because Lucasfilm Games assigned its designers, including Gilbert, to
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. led the game's development and conceived its plot (2011 photo). Gilbert soon realised that it would be difficult to design the game by himself; he decided to join forces with
Tim Schafer and
Dave Grossman, both of whom he hired for Lucasfilm. The game's insult sword fighting mechanics were influenced by swashbuckling movies starring
Errol Flynn, which Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman often watched for inspiration. They noticed that pirates in those films often taunted their opponents instead of attacking them, which gave the designers the idea to base the game's duels on insults rather than combat. Writer
Orson Scott Card helped them write the insults during a visit to Lucasfilm's headquarters at
Skywalker Ranch. Many of Gilbert's original gameplay ideas were abandoned during the production process, although he stated that "most of that stuff was left out for a reason". When work on the plot began, Gilbert discovered that Schafer's and Grossman's writing styles were too different to form a cohesive whole: Grossman's was "very kind of a dry, sarcastic humor" and Schafer's was "just a little more in your face". In reaction, Gilbert assigned them to different characters and story moments depending on what type of comedy was required. Grossman said that Gilbert always wanted "to step off the ride" and "talk to the people who lived in that world". Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman's primary goal was to create a simpler and more accessible gameplay model than those presented in previous Lucasfilm titles. Gilbert had conceived the main designs and puzzles before production began, which resulted in the bulk of the designers' work to flesh out his ideas. The team decided to make it impossible for the player character to die, with one notable exception, which focused gameplay primarily on world exploration. For
Maniac Mansion, the developers
hard coded verb commands in the SCUMM scripting language. These commands become more abstract in subsequent versions of the engine. The developers carried over the practice of referring to individual segments of the gameworld as "rooms", even though the areas in
Monkey Island were outdoors. The game uses the same version of the engine used in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, with minor changes. A
dialogue tree was added, which facilitated conversation options and the sword-fighting puzzles. The game's improved interface became the standard for the company's later titles. The game also introduced logical verb shortcuts, which could be performed with the mouse; for example, clicking on a character defaults to the "talk" action, the most obvious action in the situation. According to artist
Steve Purcell, that became a major limitation for the art team; due to a low number of "ghastly" colors, they often chose bizarre tones for backgrounds. The game's "pirate
reggae" music was composed by Lucasfilm Games' in-house musician
Michael Land in
MIDI format. It was his first project at the company. The game was originally released for
floppy disk in 1990, but a
CD-ROM version with a high-quality CD soundtrack followed in 1992. The music has remained popular, and has been remixed by the musicians of
OverClocked ReMix and by the game's fans.
The Secret of Monkey Island ultimately cost $200,000 to produce, and was developed over nine months.
Special edition LucasArts released a
remake in July 2009 as
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition for
iPhone,
Windows, and
Xbox 360 via
digital distribution. LucasArts confirmed the game's development one month earlier on June 1; rumors appeared several days earlier when the Xbox 360 version of the game received an
USK rating. It was developed by A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Games and first displayed to the public at the
E3 expo in June. The voice actors include
Dominic Armato as Guybrush Threepwood and
Earl Boen as LeChuck. Brown stated that the decision to distribute the game online was because "digital downloads have finally gotten going". The Special Editions of
The Secret of Monkey Island and
its sequel were later released physically for Xbox 360,
PlayStation 3, and Windows (exclusively in Europe) as
Monkey Island Special Edition Collection. ==Reception==