As kids, we truly know no limits.
We can spend entire days dreaming about the jobs that would one day (hopefully) put food on our tables and feed us, clinging on to amazing-sounding career paths with the kind of blind confidence that can only be attained in the age of the purest innocence. Of course, circumstances both within and beyond our control quickly dash most of those dreams, as our personal peaks and shifting interests close off some career paths and open others. And so, I find it quite sacred that I can still tell people that I'm a pirate (one of my earliest dreams) without actually lying. I can't tell them that I'm a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut or any of those things, but I can, indeed, still claim mastery of the (digital) sea without stretching the truth.
I took a healthy interest on a lot of things as a weelad: my "best friend" was a robot, I raced RC cars and collected metallic vehicles for a while; I even had a ton of plastic dinosaurs on my shelves... however, my true calling was on the sea. And as such, I'd spend countless hours just wandering around the Puerto de Quilmes, watching as both national and foreign vessels docked in there, loading and unloading supplies as their rusted hulls proudly displayed nameplates filled with adventure, foreign names and banners that took my young mind to frozen and sandy lands, across crystalline seas and through stormy extensions of water that might lead to a tropical paradise. I also loved watching the sailors as they moved around and did their jobs with tired expressions and steely exteriors that talked of many moons without touching land, with their gigantic coats, sunburnt skins and long beards giving them maturity way beyond their years. I was mesmerized by the human and the mechanical spectacle playing out before me, and I couldn't wait to join them in sailing the seas.
This is probably one of the most famous screenshots in history. I always laugh at the guy hanging from the chandelier... he's having the time of his life, and nobody minds. People get THAT wasted all the time here.
And a few years later, I finally got my chance.
I was invited aboard a small (but worthy) sailboat as its owners tried out the new engine they had just fitted to it. The plan was quite simple: we would take the ship as fast as it'd go, leaving Quilmes and going into the Rio de La Plata, then we would hang around the maritime border between Argentina and Uruguay and head back, once we checked that the newly-installed "fins" did their part.
I had never been so excited in my life... I was living my dream! At just twelve years of age I was finally aboard a ship, sailing across the sea and into a new, foreign land. Unfortunately... I quickly realized that I wasn't cut out for the sailor's life. As soon as that boat took on speed and began swaying under its own power and the few waves that were disturbing the otherwise perfectly calm sea, I just lost my nerve. I went below deck and sat on one of the bunks as the ship continued her trial run. A few minutes later, the crew signaled a motorboat that was following us in case of emergency and had them carry me back to shore while they continued to monitor the performance of "our" boat. It was a shattering experience, and my first taste of how dreams die.
I love how casually out boy, Guybrush, walks up to a guy wearing a coat and standing in a street corner without even flinching as he opens to reveal what's inside it. Maybe people were more civilized back then. Huh.
That fiasco quickly terminated any and all hopes I had left of one day becoming "Waffles, King Of The Sea", but I wasn't about to give up on my juvenile passion so easily... I was absolutely OBSESSED with the life aboard a ship, and I wasn't about to let a single mistake stop me. After all, I had watched TinTin's "The Secret Of The Unicorn" more times than I could count, and I had read a lot of books on the lives and times of famous pirates. I even begged my parents to get me a whole stack of magazines I had seen for sale at a flea market just because one of them had a special on Caribbean Piracy all across the so-called "Golden Age Of Piracy". The magazine had something else in it, too... something I dismissed quite quickly as a child, but that would come back with full-force just two years later.
You see... that young magazine had quite a few sections for you to read, and one of them was a PC Gaming corner in which the guy running it sometimes gave complete walkthroughs of whatever game was popular at the time. Most of them were absolutely terrible and would not help you solve the games he was talking about (probably because he had to slash details left and right and assumed that you knew about them just to fit the damn thing on three pages that also had to have screenshots and other things on them), but that particular number was reviewing a PC game I hadn't heard about before and never would again until the age of the internet began in full; a stupid-sounding, uninteresting thing called "Monkey Island 2".
The irony of the situation never fails to bring a smile to my face: I was in the peak of my obsession with the world of piracy, I had just gotten a magazine that detailed said world in extreme detail, and I was fortunate enough that it also included part of the walkthrough to perhaps the most famous pirate-themed game of them all... and I just dismissed it because it didn't "sound interesting"! What a beautiful thing indeed. I probably also didn't even give it a second glance because I was part of the group of people who had been fooled by the gaming industry to completely sideline anything
but those titles which sported the best available graphics. So, no, our boy Guybrush didn't have a chance there. He was too... two-dimentional for me to care about.
I used to be very weirded out and grossed out by this fella.
But just two years later I would be browsing the net with my freshly-installed, gloriously slow 56K beast of a modem, taking ages just loading the simplest of websites and reading the same two or three things over and over, while I waited for the almost coin-flip chance of an outcome to see if the sites would actually finish loading or would just fail as the machine would give up entirely and leave me with half a page of broken images and disjointed text that seemed to have gone wild, now that it was "freed" from the boxes and frames that were supposed to contain it. And because I was visiting lots of Abandonware sites at the time, one name kept coming up over and over on those broken, slow messes of sites: The Secret Of Monkey Island.
To say that this was a popular game would be the understatement of a century.
People not only discussed the game to such lengths that the only thing left to talk about was speculation about any possible return to the series (unlikely after the Monkey Island 4 had lost a lot of good will among the players due to its... less-than-genius execution) or new spins on threads that had already been done to death. It was interesting being a newcomer into those communities because the love they could send was endless, but they were also almost fierce in the way they treated any disrespect (both real and perceived) to a franchise that apparently had changed entire lives just by playing it.
A lot of sites had references to those games (hell, the first forum I joined couldn't reference them enough! It had Monkey Island 2 graphics as its logo, Monkey Island 2's main theme played automatically as soon as you entered the site, Wally from Monkey Island 2 was the character they used for their article section, and the lookout from the first game was the logo of its partner site). Others were specifically about those games and were built from the ground up to cram as many references, images, trivia and downloads based on them as possible. It was quite the spectacle.
Still... I didn't play the game right away. Something about it feeling "mandatory" (as many people in the community --and the internet in general-- seemed to agree it was) rubbed me off the wrong way.
I eventually caved in (of course) after a friend from that very same community couldn't believe that I hadn't played the game, getting almost angry at all the references I hadn't caught in the weeks prior, as we both had an almost "dance" of obscure trivia being thrown back-and-forth, never landing due to our mutual ignorance of the topics at-hand (she was as hopeless when it came to cartoons as I was to Monkey Island-related jokes).
"Insult Fighting" was probably my least favorite part of the game, although I do recall several communities turning it into an actual, sanctioned sport of sorts, with tournaments and such.
Now... here's the thing: first impressions were excellent (can anyone actually dislike that epic theme song? It shouldn't have been possible to make the PC Speaker --a certified torture devise-- sound that good), but the follow-up was underwhelming at best. The game looked fantastic, but I just wasn't getting it. Was this really one of the best PC games ever made? Seemed like a stretch, and I honestly believed that I had been victim of one of the largest, most involved pranks in history... this WAS the internet, after all, so having thousands of people just hailing a terrible thing just to laugh at the confusion of a bunch of noobs as they desperately tried to make some sense of it seemed completely within reason.
The game had a miserable time grabbing me (and almost lost me multiple times)... until it threw a nuke by introducing me to Stan, the used-boat salesman.
I LOVE Stan and the many things he represents, and he's effectively the reason why I'm still playing this game some 21 years later. I feel like they weren't pulling any punches when they created this hyperactive, bullshiting machine of a man whose only purpose in life seemed to be to perform the ultimate sorcery: transferring money from your pockets to his.
Now that I think about it... where DID he get all those boats for selling?
There was something incredibly charming about this one joke character that simply couldn't be matched by any of the other (extremely colorful) personalities found within the game. His mile-a-minute speech, the little foot taps and wildly exaggerated gestures he made as he tried to sell you the most rotten, useless, un-sea-worthy crap the sea had to offer whilst wearing the loudest, most tasteless suits imaginable was a joy to behold (and, in fact, I liked him so much that I even took to editing his entire animation cycle, sprite by sprite, just so I could turn his coat into my national colors for an avatar contest, which I won). I also adored the little details found within his shop, like the Grog vending machine that just draws you in like a magnet after first spotting it just for how delightfully out-of-place it looks and feels. And, of course, there's his whole emotional speech near the midpoint of the game, as he tries to backpedal on an absolute gross deal he agreed to while watching the moonlit, "majestic" ship he had just sold you, getting all emotional about it while a shooting star (!) crosses the sky above her main mast... which promptly collapses on itself, causing him to pull a complete reversal and scramble to seal the deal before you can punch his nose off. It's a thing of comedic beauty that never fails to get me, despite me knowing (and anticipating) it being there and coming.
I beat the first two Monkey Island games multiple times, going from the EGA, floppy disk version (which I could download relatively fast with my dial-up connection), to the VGA CD Version (gotten just to experience the game again in high quality) to Monkey Island 2, which became the fist graphic adventure game I beat without using any clues. Just the fact that I downloaded an upgraded version of the first game just to enjoy it in a whole new way should tell you how much it won me over, how much I ended up enjoying it... that's not even up for debate. That's just a fact. But I still can't decide whether I actually really liked these games or was just drawn in by the deafening roar of the universal recommendations that seemed to follow them whenever they were mentioned somewhere on the net.
Was this a case of a single character working so splendidly as to elevate the whole thing for me? It's certainly possible, and it isn't even that rare (I played Grim Fandango because of Manny and The Last Of Us because of Ellie). Or was it because I had a genuine admiration for the people who put this thing together, mixing humor with technical expertise and a genuine mastery of their craft to put this one into pretty much any machine in existence, all whilst making it look and sound awesome? I was always one to appreciate those kinds of feats. Personally, though, I think that I just found something I could relate to without actually going out of my way to do so. I wanted to feel like I was a novice pirate trying to make into the high seas, adventuring in unmarked territories whilst searching for treasure... and that's precisely what's being "sold" here.
Regardless of what exactly moved the needle for me, I can't deny that this was a very important entry into my gaming journey, and that I had a lot of fun seeing it being elevated into something entirely new by a loving community that seemed to truly get it. Never before had I seen a game being so universally loved, and while it is true that there's little evidence of that now that two decades have passed and that all those sites have been long deleted as a result of the ever-shifting online landscape that didn't allow them to exist, that's also what makes the whole thing even more precious... it makes those memories into hidden treasures, things that can totally still be found, but only if you know where to look. And that's just So. Dang. Fitting.
What about you? What are your memories with this one? Do you consider it a masterpiece or grossly overrated? I have seen (and being a part of) both camps at one point or another. Tell us!
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