The History of Money Island [DRAFT]

( NOTE:This is an incomplete draft of ramblings and unfinished notes.)

For the personal enquiry part of my researched I wanted to talk about one of my favourite games series, Monkey island, 5 point and click adventure games. these are games fairly dear to me as its something that me my sister and dad would play together, and is what eventually got me into adventure game genre in general. Throughout the history of games lectures we had, amongst new information the one company name that stood out for me was Atari as my dad would frequently tell me of how he and my mother played the secret of money island on the Atari ST, until they got stuck and gave up. This inspired me to do more research on Atari as a company as seen in my blog post "the history of video games part 2".

The monkey island game series were produced from 1980-2010 with each game passes from pixel art, side scrolling based game play, to full on 3D animated worlds with cut scenes. This is a game that is very dear to me as its a game myself my sister and my dad played together over our childhood, and recently adulthood, as the game monkey island 5 came out. Though as I'm older some things that amazed me from the games make me cringe now. By some things I mean the whole of monkey island 4. Just all of it.
So to start this first off I needed to find all of my  old monkey island games CDs, Check
upon putting in all of the CD's I found that none of them work on my PC so I had to find an emulator for this to play my games, but fair enough, the games are 30 years old. Throughout this post I'm going to be addressing the overall look of these games and the game play, and how this links in with how the gaming technology and industry was at at this time.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

The Secret of Monkey Island was developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It takes place in a fantastic version of the Caribbean during the age of piracy. The player assumes the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who dreams of becoming a pirate and explores fictional islands while solving puzzles. (1)
The secret of Monkey island was developed in 1990 in an age of arcade adventure games such as Space Ace and Dragons lair ( both released in 1983) monkey island was an answer to the frustration felt playing these games, as some were insanely difficult due to how easily the player could die, one hit deaths and death due to quick timed events were common in games, the difficulty of these games is partly due to the aim of getting kids to keep putting money into the arcade machines, and partly because games were short, a game that takes hours to master, with a perfect play through would only take 10 minutes to get through.

(placeholder for SCUMM Engine research)

This is the first scene of Monkey island, and sets the main goal for the beginning of the game. The style of Monkey island 1 is pixel bit graphics. The aim of the game is to guide the hero, Guybrush Threepwood through the world using commands such as "talk to" for communicating with characters and "pick up" for collecting items between commands and the world's objects in order to successfully solve puzzles and thus progress in the game.[5] While conversing with other characters, the player may choose between topics for discussion that are listed in a dialog tree; the game is one of the first to incorporate such a system. The control are fairly simple and within a few minutes I'd settled back into the swing of things.


Monkey Island 2 1991

Monkey Island 3 1997

Monkey Island 4 2000
Monkey Island 4 was actually the game that I started out playing, when my dad first introduced me and my sister to the series, and consequently point and click adventure games. Monkey island 4 is the first monkey island game to us 3D polygon based graphics.......... back then I never noticed the graphics, though later after playing the previous games I'd say that visually number 4 was the worst to look at. Now looking back on it, this opinion hasn't changed at all, in fact I kind of hate the graphics now, especially as I've now been learn about 3d modelling, all the mistakes of the game are glaringly obvious to me. Part of me wishes that like the remakes of 1 and 2 there should be a remake of 4 to fit in with the style of the 2009 release of monkey island 5. But I digress.......

Monkey Island 5 2009

Points to write about:
Previous Technology
Game engine
Gameplay
Sound
Graphics
Overall feel
The gap between monkey island 3 and 4 and monkey island 5
future of monkey island and point and click adventure games
Write about the change in graphics in more detail

write about the change in companies and platforms, for the Atari,arcade, and pc

write about other games like monkey island (broken sword, Sam and Max etc)

write about why I think monkey island is the best game in the world

write about how its become a classic adventure game.