While cleaning out my bookcase a few weeks ago, I ran across a large and mysterious black three ring binder that contained a brittle and water stained printout of the entire Monkey Island 2 bug report. I have no idea why I had it or why I kept it.
Granted, it’s not quite as impressive as Steve Purcell’s Monkey Island concept art, but hey…quit your bitching.
Several hundred pages later…
I’ll be honest, I used the + signs in the title because I know they screw up some RSS feed readers and I’m just that kind of person. My next post will have lots of & and ? symbols and then we’ll move into utf-32. The Internet is a house of cards ready to come down with one seldom used Chinese character.
But onward we march, content in our ignorance…
So, my question is: would you rather be a game designer that is also an artist, or a game designer that is also a programmer?
For the sake of this brain twisting exercise, let’s assume that you can’t be a game designer+artist+programmer, because that combination just goes against god. And also, for the sake of argument (and because I like to argue), let’s assume if you’re an artist or programmer, you have no talent in the other profession, and by no talent I really mean no talent.
I ask this questions because I fall into the second category. I started programming back when disco was cool. I started with Basic on a CP/M machine, then moved to Pascal before discovering Z80 assembly language. I had always heard assembly language was fast, but I was not prepared for the shear speed of it over Basic. Running my first assembly language program was a religious experience. My eyes stared wide at the screen as it filled with the @ character in what seemed to be instant. I literally said “oh my god” and that was the beginning of my 25 year death march known as the game’s industry.
I learned C and C++ while working at Lucasfilm to build the SCUMM compiler and later when the SCUMM engine moved to the PC from the Commodore 64 and I have continued to program every day since, recently learning objective-c as I dabble in some iPhone games in my spare time (objective-c is very cool, it took three days of swearing before it clicked).
But the problem is I have no art talent. None. Absolutely zero. When I try and do art, it destroys nearby things that might also be art. I’m like art anti-matter. When my art comes in contract with real art, they annihilate each other. It’s hard to tell if my prototypes are any fun because people are always shielding their eyes and gasping when they see my art. Even my stick figures look crappy. I know some programmers that draw crappy art that looks cool because it’s so crappy. My art is just crappy. Clayton Kauzlaric did all the art on Grumpy Gamer, mostly out of pity, I assume.
Some examples of my art:
But I know some artists that feel the exact opposite. They produce brilliant looking mock-ups of game ideas, but can’t program enough to produce even a basic prototype in flash. They feel the same frustrating that I do.
So which is better?
Aye, arg, gar! Pull up a peg leg and have a seat, for me be tell’n the tale o’ the Scurvy Raider, the finest pirate ship t’ sail the sea. Lost one dark and stormy eve, near eighteen years ago, all her crew feared dead or worse. Arrr, but this tale be not ha’in’ a sad endin’, for the Scurvy Raider has returned t’ port with a mighty tale t’ tell. The tale o’ a dark and stormy eve near eighteen years ago.
OK, you know what? Typing Pirate is hard.
Back when I was working at Lucasfilm, I used to have a giant Lego pirate ship. It sat across from my desk on this low end table and when the nights would grow long and the work day became tiring I would look over at the Scruvy Raider and it would remind me of what we were building; it would remind me of the soul of this game called Monkey Island.
When I left Lucasfilm the Lego pirate ship mysteriously disappeared. I remember cleaning out my office and saying my goodbyes then noticing the Lego pirate ship was gone. I asked around but no one knew what happened to it. It was simply gone, lost at sea, never to be seen again…
…until…
A few days ago when a giant package arrive at my door step. I carefully opened it to find this inside:
Attached to it was a note scribbled on LucasArts stationary that simply said “We found your pirate ship”.
Thanks Guys!!!
The Scurvy Raider II has come home, sailing into port for a reunion that onlookers called teary-eyed and joyful. It will once again become a beacon of light into the soul of what we are making.
I’m pretty good at keeping secrets. I’m so good at it people actually send me death threats. If you have a secret, you can tell me. I won’t tell anyone. Go ahead. I’m listening.
Over the past few months, I’ve been the vessel for a couple of very exciting secrets and it’s been really hard to not give someone the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-don’t-tell-anyone, but I couldn’t. Not these.
The first is the re-release of The Secret of Monkey Island. Several months ago I was invited to LucasArts to get a sneak preview. Very cool.
Hopefully this will open up the pure pleasure that is Monkey Island to a whole new generation of gamer that knows only how to use a console controller.
The second secret is that TellTale is doing an episodic version of Monkey Island. I had the great pleasure of spending a few days with Dave Grossman, Mike Stemmle and the rest of the TellTale crew getting my head into Guybrush Threepwood again.
I am very exited for both of these games. It’s strange and humbling to see something you created 20 years ago take on a life of it’s own.
This next year is going to be very interesting. Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer all have games coming out. Someone check the scriptures. Might be a good time to start hoarding canned goods.
About a year and a little more ago, as I began designing the uber-awesome DeathSpank, I played all the way through The Secret of Monkey Island to refresh myself on the puzzles and dialog.
I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but I don’t spend my evenings playing through Monkey Island. It’s probably been 15 years since I sat down and really played it.
Much like the experience of watching the Maniac Mansion Speed Run, it bought back a lot of memories and little tid-bits of facts, so I started keeping notes and in celebration of all things Monkey Island, I thought I’d share them.
Before we begin, a couple of points:
Some of this I’ve written about before, so I apologize if I’m wasting your time.
I was playing the VGA version that was released after the original EGA version. The original original version used 16 colors and the inventory was text only.
These are only “some-what” in order.
You may disagree with me on some of these, and that’s perfectly OK. My life is forever intertwined with this game and some of these are more reflective than anything else.
It’s been almost 20 years. My brain is full.
If anyone has specific questions about Monkey Island 1 or 2, feel free to ask them in the comments or send them to me. If the answer contain interesting information or fuels a good story, I’ll add it to this list.
Someone please turn off the lights, and I’ll start the projector.
The very small “hot spot” areas are very annoying today but they were accepted back then; they were even considered a good thing. It’s called Game Play! It would be hard to make an adventure game today where players were forced to hunt for small objects.
Most people know you can hit the period key to skip a single line of dialog, but I’m surprised when I run into people that don’t know why I chose the period key. It seems obvious to me: a period ends a sentence.
While Insult Sword Fighting is one of the first things people think of when they hear Monkey Island, I thought it seemed little tedious (but fun) as I played though it again. There is a point where you say “I get it”, but your still forced to go though the motions again and again. If I was going to do Insult Sword Fighting in a future game, I’d make it more free form allowing the player to be clever and construct their own sentences.
During the early stages of the Monkey Island design, we would watch old Errol Flynn era pirate movies. One thing that stood out was during the fights they always taunted each other with insults. I knew we needed to have sword fighting in the game - it was about pirates after all - but I didn’t want to introduce any action game play and the old pirate moves provided the perfect solution.
Back in the late 80’s, the mere thought of a scroll wheel on a mouse would have been crazy talk, but today I found it hard to break the habit of trying the scroll the inventory with it.
You only have to follow the shop keeper to the Sword Master once, after that it’s just automatic. That was a good design choice. No point in having to solve the same puzzle over and over.
Scene behind the walls of the governors mansion seemed a little long. The original plan was to have real game play and puzzles, but the game was feeling too big and we need to cut stuff. This gag was perfect, and in some ways better then making the player solve more puzzles. Never be afraid to edit you game down if it needs it. It will often be better for it. Except this went on too long.
“Ahoy there, Fancy Pants” is my favorite throw-away line ever.
Back then, the randomly generated forest was cutting edge technology. Disk space was at a premium. Everything had to fit on 5 floppy disks. Sierra would ship games on 8 or 10 floppy disks. That was always a sore point for us.
I like the way you meet Otis, Sword Master and Meathook during regular puzzles, then hire them later. Builds a sense of friendship before they are needed. They aren’t just three random people you meet for the first time while look for a crew.
The circus tent could have been more utilized. Bit of a waste for one puzzle and the Fettucini Brothers didn’t add much to the story. That said, this was one of the first screens (“rooms” as we called them) where we used the SCUMM system’s exclusive scrolling screens for dramatic effect. Tim was the programmer on this room and he spent a lot of time getting it to scroll at just the right time to revel the tent. I also like that the dialog choices are shown up up-side-down after Guybrush is shot from the cannon. Doing that pushed the SCUMM system to utilize multiple fonts. We didn’t have that feature before this gag required it. Guybrush being shot out of the canon was also foreshadowing for later when he needed to be shot out of the canon. OK, come to think of it, this was a pretty useful room.
CORRECTION: It is July 21, 2022 and Dave Grossman informs me it was he who worked on the circus.
Touching the parrot puzzle was a little lame and linear. I remember being rushed and we couldn’t think of anything better. The game was feeling good and long already, so I just punted on this puzzle.
UI for having to open and close doors independently from walking though them was obnoxious. You’d never do this in an adventure game today, but like pixel hunting, it was accepted.
Something I added to the Humongous Entertainment adventure games was the cursor changing into a big arrow when you hit the edge of the screen and it was an exit. Monkey Island would have benefited from this. I was so used to it from the Humongous games that I’d scan the screen expecting to see it over exits.
OK, I’m going to admit that I was completely stumped by the grog puzzle. I finally went and looked it up on the internet. That’s a damn good puzzle. I found several puzzles would give me pause because I’d remember some previous unimplemented version of them and it would throw me off track. My brain is filled with a lot of old adventure game puzzles, most of which never made it into a game. DeathSpank actually has a couple of puzzles ideas that we talked about for the original Monkey Island.
Stan’s Grog machine was one of three interesting lessons was I given about trademarks and copyright during the production of Monkey Island. Originally, I wanted the Grog Machine to be a Coke Machine, baring that, I wanted it to look like a Coke machine. It originally had the “Coke Wave” on it, but said “Grog”. The Lucasfilm legal team came back and said it was too close to the real trademarked Coke Wave. I tried to argue Parody to no avail. We kept changing it little by little until legal was satisfied it didn’t look too much like a Coke machine.
Getting stuck on the Ocean floor is one of my favorite puzzles because the solution is so obvious most people overlook it. The other puzzle I did in this same vane was in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game where Indy has to have faith and just walk over a ledge. Players that had faith and just clicked on the other side of the crevice had no problem. Players that fiddled around and clicked on other stuff, ignoring the advice, always fell.
I forgot about the ladder to get the pirate flag for the soup. I kept focusing on Meat Hook’s tattoo, which was something we talked about during the early design.
I had wanted the time you spent on Monkey Island to feel more like a RPG, which is why you had top-down view. As the game progressed, I slowly scaled back those plans, but we were still left with these very cool maps. I love maps. For me a game design always starts with a map.
The key to the Monkey Head used to be called a Q-Tip(tm), but in my second legal lesson of the project it was changed. According to our legal advice, it would have been OK if we were using the Q-Tip in a “correct fashion”, but taking a giant Q-Tip and sticking it into a stone monkey’s ear is not “correct usage”. Interestingly enough, a Q-Tip box states: “Do not insert cotton swab into ear canal”. I think we were doing just that.
“I had a feeling in hell here would be mushrooms” was one of Tim’s lines. Tim hates Mushrooms. I also hate mushrooms, but unlike Tim, I’m happy to pick them out.
We called them “Special Case Animations”. The first SCUMM game they appeared in was The Last Crusade and then used to an amazing (well, amazing for 1990) extent in Monkey Island. Each of the “actor” sprites had a set of basic animations that including standing, walking, talking, picking up and reaching. If we need an animation that would only be used on one place, it was called a Special Case Animation and each one was carefully considered due to the 5 floppy disk limit. Every pixel had to count.
Begging for the necklace from the head of the navigator is a bad puzzle. It’s too easy for players to think they’re on the wrong path.
After getting the root, we didn’t make the player walk all the way back to the cannibals then all the way to the ghost ship. There was much discussion about this. I think we made the right decision.
For the most part, Monkey Island is fairly open ended allowing players a lot of freedom to explore and solve several puzzle threads at a time, but there are two big choke points where the puzzles become very self contained. The first is on the ship as you’re sailing (or trying to sail to) Monkey Island. The second is while you’re on the ghost ship. All the solutions to puzzles can be found right where you are. These were done on purpose to give the player a small break and allow them to focus on one area.
After you’ve made you way back to Melee Island, you are forced to kill two ghost pirates with your root beer. This was important because it showed not only how the root beer worked but that it would work.
Elaine Marley was just called “The Governor” until the scene in the church was written. Dave Grossman wrote that scene and put in the gag dialog choice where Guybrush shouts “Elaine!”, which is from the movie “The Graduate”. I liked that, so it became her name. In the original design, Elaine was a more ruthless Governor, but she softened up and became a true love interested as the project processed.
By design, the whole ending of the game is a “gimme”. The player has worked hard to get to this point, I wanted something they could just sit back and enjoy playing.
There was supposed to be ship combat during your voyage to Monkey Island. It would have been done top-down view with you controlling the ship and firing a cannon. It was right to cut that. Never be afraid to cut. It’s rare that I watch a “director’s cut” of a film that is better then the original. Most of that stuff was left out for a reason.
Last legal snafu we had with Monkey Island revolved about a “Look At” line in the voodoo shop. When you’d look at a statue, Guybrush would say “Looks like an emaciated Charles Atlas.” We got a cease and desist letter for that and has to change it in future versions. I don’t know for sure when version it changed in.
THE END
P.S. I was always bothered by these close-ups. While they were great art, I never felt they matched the style of the rest of the game. Not sure how I feel about them 20 years later.
I have to admit I only tangentially knew who Studs Terkel was, but the first time I ever heard of him I remember thinking: “Damn, I wish my parents had named me Studs Terkel”.
What a great name.
It seems like only yesterday that I was cranking out 6502 code slowly building up what would become the SCUMM System. OK…that’s a lie…it really does feel like 20 years ago.
IGN has a quick interview with me helping to commemorate 20 years of a development system that no focus group in the world would have liked the name.
Bob Denver, the actor who played Gilligan on the 60’s TV show has died.
A secret desire of mine has been to make the Gilligan’s Island movie. Not as a comedy, but as a serious drama exploring the dark and twisted reality of what would happen if those seven people were stranded on that island. In my version Gilligan would have been the last alive and the most diabolically insane.
If there are any studio’s interested, I’m taking meetings.
With the oh-my-fucking-god-circle-jerk-boy-mass reporting of E3 in full swing, it nice to see a few articles come out that question the direction of the industry, especially ones I am quoted in.
From the article:
“When you spend all day at work, the last thing you want to do is go home and become frustrated by video games,” Gilbert said. “There is a gigantic group of people who want easy-to-play games.”
The article goes on with:
“Midway Games Inc. Chief Executive David Zucker said the company’s core audience - males between 18 to 34 years old - has a more mature sense of fun that involves complexity and full immersion.”
But…isn’t that the problem?
This industry is too focused on males from 18 to 34 and everything is made to satisfy them and - in my option - to the exclusion of a much larger audience. Also, don’t be a statistics goof and confuse “most game players are 18 to 34 males” with “most 18 to 34 males are game players”. In the lower end of that range, I can believe that, but as people (even males) get older they stop playing games. They outgrow them because all that’s offered is high-testosterone head-banging, and if the floor of E3 isn’t testimony to that, I don’t know what is.
I have no doubt, like the current movie business, much of the money we make comes from that demographic, but like the movie business, we need more diversity. Right now it feels like we are just in the spiral of a hardcore-gamer feedback loop. They are spending a lot of money, so they are getting all the attention, yet the masses sit just outside the playground, quietly holding their credit cards asking “Is there anything I can play?”, only to be screamed at by the anonymous raging hardcore gamer “Shut the Fuck up if you don’t like Halo 2”.
So what do they do? They move to web games like Bejeweled and play them by the millions, but they want more than that, and they’ll pay for it if anyone would listen.
P.S.
My actual quote was: “Most adults spend all day failing at the office, the last thing they want to do is come home and fail at their entertainment”. But it’s probably better cleaned up a little…
I am not a big player of MMORPMMGOMMGS, the last one I spent any time on being Ultima Online when it first came out, plus a few hours on EverQuest, so I might be impressed by things that are old-hat…
In the interest of brevity and for all the executives and marketing people that read the Grumpy Gamer, I figured I’d just bullet point my feedback.
Now for the obligatory screen shots:
A poem by Gilbert and Kauzlaric
On the twelfth day of crunch time, My project gave to me…
Twelve cents in royalties,
Eleven kiss-ass previews,
Ten nerdy testers,
Nine patent lawsuits,
Eight unplanned for features,
Seven frames a second,
Six angry spouses,
Five focus groups!
Four unstable hacks,
Three days without sleep,
Two surly artists,
and a crappy publishing deal.