Guybrush Fact vs Fiction
I remember the first time I read this I just chuckled. That was 10 years ago and the myth keeps going. It's been printed (well, web printed) so many times that it is slowly going to become fact and I want to set the world straight.
What is true
During the early days of Monkey Island I didn't have a name for Guybrush. We just called him the "guy".
When Steve Purcell was doing concepts for "the guy" he was doing them in dpaint. In dpaint you could select a section of the screen called a "brush" and save it out.
It was these files I got from Steve. I saw the file names so many times that the name "guybrush" stuck.
What is NOT true
I have seen multiple places recount this story (most recently) but they get one fact wrong.
The file I would get from Steve was called guybrush.lbm
not guy.brush
. All artwork on Monkey Island was done on the PC under MSDOS[1]. MSDOS had a limit of three letters for filename extensions. It could not have been .brush
. One of three things is going wrong here.
- People are forgetting or never knew that MSDOS had a three letter file extension limit and the files dpaint saved out where
.lbm
or.bbm
files.
or
- The Amiga allowed longer filename extensions and people assumed we did art on the Amiga. We did not. It was all done on MSDOS using dpaint or dpaint animator.
or
- It makes a better story and screw the facts. Facts are so 2015.
If you read this incorrect fact anywhere, please direct them to this link.
[1] For Monkey Island 1 all the art was gone in dpaint on MSDOS. For Monkey Island 2, the backgrounds were scanned on a Mac using Photoshop 1.0 and then moved to a PC and finished on dpaint.

And then you ran back to the office to tell the rest of the team.
Don't know if any of that is true or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galahad_Threepwood
I just thought you did all of your artwork on an Amiga, since I'm 90% certain that the Amiga version of dPaint uses the .brush extension.
Wait, let me check... yep, the Amiga version definitely uses the .brush extension.
Now that I know that the artwork was done on a PC, the fact that it was called guybrush.lbm seems fairly obvious.
An compelling story will spread more readily than one which is truthful. For example, it's widely believed that the internet slang "ZOMG" represents someone so overexcited that they hit the shift key that they press Z by mistake. That makes sense, but it's not true--ZOMG was an early-2000s invention based on the 90s hacker fad of inventing fake acronyms, with the joke being that Z clearly doesn't stand for any word. The problem is, you have to have been online in the 90s to know this, and the false etymology makes more sense to a lot of people.
I sometimes wonder how many other widely-accepted etymologies to words we have wrong because we don't have historical access to the context in which the word was first coined.
And no, it does not sound good in Hebrew.
(a proper translation IMO is ``Ishbrush'', since ``Ish'' means man and ``brush'' is a root meaning, well, ``to brush'' by some weird coincidence. But I would just leave it as is)
Does that mean Guybrush's middle name is "lbm"? :)
https://www.thegamer.com/monkey-island-series-facts-trivia/
They mentioned:
The "brush" file of the main character was called "guy.brush
A belgium guy who speak English as a a Spanish Cow
- More complexity in a modern game;
- Possibly less QA resources to ensure more polished first release;
- Bugs don't delay release because upgrades are possible (they were not at the time in MI1);
- Others.
This is just a curiosity about how it works game development today for a game adventure, not a critique at all.

(*) we still want to know the names of the producers that allowed the release of abominatios like the Indy4 action game (and possibly Indy3 action game) with the Lucasfilm/LucasArts logos. They sold soul to devil for money for sure :D
The names are: "The Secret of Monkey Islandβ’" and "Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge", not 'Monkey Island 1" or "Monkey Island 2".
Your comma usage is inconsistent, too. You used the comma correctly after the erroneous name "Monkey Island 2", but you didn't use a comma earlier for the erroneous name "Monkey Island 1".
DPaint is a name, so it needs to be capitalized.
MS-DOS has a hyphen between 'MS' and 'DOS', because the separate acronyms refer to different things.
By the way, this blog's question box is inconsistent; it asks a number question using words, but then it doesn't accept a word-based answer, only number-based. Is inconsistency a hobby here, or what?
whaat a kool doood.
Thanks for MI & MI:2, Ron & Steve! (and Sam&Max)
PS: It's cool to know the Mac had an impact in the development of the second game π