Look! A Three Headed Monkey!

Friday 5th June

All right, so I lied to you.

It won't be the first time, certainly won't be the last.

But see, it was all worth it in the end, wasn't it?

OK. Let's start at the very beginning.

1990. Oldham. My parent's living room.

I was 14. I have no idea who or why or where we ended up with a copy of the Secret of Monkey Island. Probably my mother bought it. She had a passing interest in adventure games, I remember playing text based adventures like Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and King's Quest and even the Collosal Cave Adventure. They were pretty good, but all of a sudden there was this… thing.

It had pirates, it was fun, I could figure out the puzzles and it was absolutely hilarious. You accidentally fell off a cliff to be presented with a GAME OVER screen, only for seconds later Guybrush Threepwood pops back on screen with a simple explanation of 'rubber tree' and you carry on with the game.

It might have been 16 colours but that was the top of the gaming ladder at that point. PAC-MAN could go suck himself and Q-Bert? Don't talk to me of him anymore. Even Chuckie Egg and Dizzy, the two gaming heroes in the universe of all creation to that point might as well go and bathe in acid for all I cared about them, I had Guybrush and his quest to become a pirate.

Yes, this probably had a lot to do with why I took up roleplaying games many years later.

Then the nightmare happened.

I completed it. Finshed. Finito. Done. Dead. No More. There were no such things as easter eggs at that time in video games. Well, there were, but we didn't know that. No, all we could do was start it up again and play all the way through exactly the same story. I don't know how many times I played through that thing but it was more than a couple. It was almost exactly like being addicted to smack. The first high is great, after that the rush gets shorter and shorter and though satisfying, it doesn't match up to the first hit.

So I needed a fresh hit of something new.

I remember going with my parents to the video game shop. Well, I say it was a video game shop, you wouldn't actually find someone stupid enough to think a shop selling ONLY video games and think they could make money. It was an IBM outlet branch in what is now the walkabout bar in Oldham. There you go, go in and reminisce about my childhood why don't you? Anyway, it was a computer shop with one shelf that had some games on it.

Hey, a shelf was an improvement. A couple of years previously they had a spindle-rack with a couple of tapes on it, and again we're talking Dizzy and Q-Bert and the like. And one day, in the dim and distant past, Monkey Island 2 : LeChuck's Revenge appeared on that shelf.

Except it didn't.

It was a poster. It told me that it was out in a month or two. I forget how long that period was because to me it was a lifetime. I didn't have normal things like hobbies or friends or an interest in the opposite sex. All I had was a month to go until the ultimate game in the history of creation was released.

You think the kids of today are annoying and angsty? You have no idea. That episode of South Park where Cartman freezes himself to skip the time before the Wii comes out? If I'd have thought of that in 1991 then I would so be flying around with Buck Rodgers today, I swear.

Anyway, That day.

1991. Oldham. That Shop.

The very first game, and one of the very few, that I have bought on the actual day of release. OK, again another lie, my mother paid for it, but I was there and I demanded it. Demanded it on pain of death.

Well, somebody was going to die. I might have been only 14 but I was still over six feet tall at the time and I think it was probably one of the many moments my mother saw my future career paths being either Geek or Serial Killer.

The jury's still out on that one.

Anyway, she bought the game. We went home, and there in the corner of the living room was the magic box that would consume my life from that point on. Halfway through the installation process everything goes to hell. Windows probably got smashed, I don't remember.

It wouldn't work. You know that little panel on the side of the box that indicated minimum system requirements for a game to play? Well, we didn't check that beforehand.

Graphics? Check. We had VGA by this time. That was ok.
Sound? Check. We had Adlib. Whatever that was.
Mouse? Check. We had all the new technology.
Hard Drive Space? Ah. 11Mb. WHAT THE FRIGGING SOUL OF CHRISTENDOM?

Eleven Megabytes? For ONE game? You have to be kidding me! The entire hard drive was only 40Mb in total, and it had Windows 3.0 on it. That only took 8Mb as it was. My god, a game that took more memory than the operating system on the machine?

You laugh now, but how would you feel if you bought World of Warcraft and before you could play it, you had to delete all of the porn you had stored on your machine? You'd have a fit and have to be hospitalised before even thinking about making a decision.

An hour later and we had trimmed everything down to the bare minimum of what was on the hard drive and had deleted everything that wasn't literally vital to the continuation of mankind. It was like the Starship Enterprise choosing between life support or… well porn springs to mind again, but let's go with lights.

The game installed. I could play the game I had been waiting for.

Heavenly choirs sang. The police were stepped down from being on red alert.

Eventually, after time, I completed it. From that point on, I was hooked. Every point and click adventure must be mine, especially those to come from the gaming goldmine of Lucasfilm studios. (LucasArts were a long way off yet).

Day of the Tentacle, Simon the Sorcerer, Loom, Sam and Max hit the Road, Gabriel Knight, anything and everything. There was even one that came close to being as good as Monkey Island, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

But still I waited for the next Monkey Island.

Eventually I moved on to other things, most notably console games and that's a story for another time, but still a little bit of my heart belonged to Ron Gilbert and his masterpiece.

I tried Escape from Monkey Island and The Curse of Monkey Island when they came out, neither of which hit the same buzz. Then we get to Wednesday.

2009. Inside the Interwebs.

Wednesday, the Delphic oracle, she that must be argued with, tells me that the original Secret of Monkey Island is being released on Xbox live arcade. The sleeping choirs of angels perk their ears up and awake sleepily from their comas.

I must search more to find out if this is true.

It is. It was announced at E3 just days before, BUT, even better is the news that there is new Monkey Island. Chapter 5 is to be released just 3 days before my birthday.

Hint.

So I need to tell the world. Or at least the little piece of it that reads VagueNet. So I start writing, and all of a sudden it hits me.

What if this game is a hideous crock of shit? What if I've built up in my head something that will give corpses crashing orgasms? Even with the input of Ron Gilbert, (a man who by rights made me his bitch when I was still a minor) it might not be the greatest thing ever.

Hmm.

Well how crap could it be?

I mean it's not like it's going to be a kart racer, or a beat-em-up or a first person shooter or any of that rubbish. I mean, it would be inconceivable for someone to take such a valued piece of my childhood and bumrape it in such a fashion.

So, OK, I lied to you.

But it could be worse. Be thankful, there's a new Monkey Island on the horizon.

Actually, while writing it, and aiming for just the right level of believable bullshit in those games, with in-jokes and references, I was actually thinking that I would play these games.

Hey, I love Monkey Island, what more can I say?