Maniac Mansion introduced me to Lucasfilm Games, but The Secret of Monkey Island made me a fan. This game epitomizes the LucasArts adventure game. It has a fantastic story, great humor, witty dialog, and great puzzles.

In this game, you really felt like you were a part of the adventure. There were other pirates walking on the island, which brought a bit of realism to a game that I hadn’t seen before. The characters that you could interact with were all part of a puzzle, but the beauty was that some of the characters such as the men of low moral fiber could either be used as a solution to a puzzle or skipped altogether, and either way you could still complete the game. The greatest thing that this game ushered in though was the option to choose what Guybrush had to say. Unlike Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, these options weren’t merely solutions to puzzles, they were part of a conversation much like those you would see in movies or even partake in real life. The conversations also allowed the game designers to create some really funny jokes.

That’s the beauty of Monkey Island, and the game that sets it apart from the others. This game is really funny. There are few games whose humor stuck with me so much that I would remember the jokes fondly among my favorites in any medium including television and film. But, this game definitely did just that. “How appropriate, you fight like a cow” has become one of my favorite all time quotes. The way it was used in the game was genius, especially the conversation with Captain Smirk after he taught you the second insult. His reaction made me giggle with glee when I was a little girl, and I still laugh at that to this day, even though I’ve seen the joke many times by now.

Michael Land did a tremendous job on the music here as well. The theme song to The Secret of Monkey Island is one of my all-time favorites, right up there with the themes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future. I really wish that they did make the Monkey Island movie rather than Pirates of the Carribean, as I would have loved to have heard a fully orchestrated version of the song on the surround sound speakers in a movie theater.