The Background

With LucasArts now Gilbert-less, the task of re-charging the Monkey Island universe for 1997 fell to Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, two experienced developers who between them have worked on some of LucasArts' best-loved adventures, including Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Monkey Island 2. "People around here had been talking about doing a third Monkey Island game for quite a while, but nobody had gotten around to it", says Ackley. "Monkey Island 3 has probably been the most talked-about game, in house, for us to do, but we've both been on other projects, and it takes some time for all the personnel to get into synch so you can start a project like this. I was working on The Dig and Larry was on Full Throttle, but we were working together and doing design on Monkey 3 in the evenings so that we could get the project rolling". The Curse Of Monkey Island picks up the story of Guybrush's adventures somewhere very vaguely after Monkey Island 2 ended, but it's not quite as straightforward as that - while Monkey 2 ended in a bizarre "it was all a dream" type conclusion at a county carnival, Curse begins with Guybrush adrift at sea in a floating bumper car! "We wanted to make sure that this was a self-contained game, but we didn't want to discard what happened in Money Island 2, because we knew that Monkey fans would hate us if we just pretended that events in the previous games didn't really happen", Ahern explains. "So what we decided to do was pick up the story at a point where even Guybrush isn't quite sure what happened at the end of Monkey 2. He's kinda confused, but right from the start of the game, he begins uncovering details, and there are some flashbacks, which is our way of giving the player some information if they hadn't played Monkey 2. And by the end, we do explain everything".
        As the story unfolds, all the familiar characters return, primarily the other two corners of the infamous love triangle that has been a driving force in the Monkey Island saga. Guybrush's spirited girlfriend Elaine Marley is back, along with the ghost pirate LeChuck, who's got designs on Marley - and a bitter vendetta against Threepwood who, accidentally or otherwise, has foiled LeChuck's evil plans on several occasions in the previous two games. "We really enjoyed the love triangle thing in Monkey 1", says Ackley, who is the game's chief programmer as well as co-project leader. "Monkey 2 is the darker version of that, with more tension in the relationship".
        So for Monkey 3, we knew we had to bring that around again, and find out how this relationship between Elaine and Guybrush works out", he says. "Are they still fighting? Do they get back together? LeChuck got kind of distracted in Monkey 2, he was just interested in getting revenge on Guybrush. But now he thinks Guybrush is out of the way; he's come back for Elaine."
 

The Look

        So all the old characters are there, but maybe not quite as you remember them. As the game's lead animator and person in charge of the game's look, Ahern has redesigned the protagonists. With five years of improved graphics technology since the release of Monkey 2 to play with, he's been able  to make some pretty radical changes. The characters, and the environments they explore, are now rendered in gorgeous high-res SVGA. "We wanted to get a real illustrated storybook feel to the game art, and now that we have 640X480, a lot of that detail holds up really nicely", Ahern explains. "So we did pencil drawings, and scanned those into Photoshop where we colored them to give them a watercolory look. It's turned out really nicely". The result is a richly-textured, lavish game that looks more like an animated feature film than the LucasArts adventures you remember, but Ahern was keen to avoid  a clichéd visual style. "I always said through the development of the game, if people tell us it looks like Disney, we've failed", se says.
        "What the technology has really freed us up to do is much more elaborate animations, gestural things", says Ahern. "In the four or five adventures I've worked on, I've learned what's important to bring this characters to life. So I took everything that was left on my list from the last couples of games I worked on and bumped all that up to the top of the list for Monkey 3. Every time we get to the end of the project, we look at that extra stuff and say 'well this stuff isn't crucial, we can ship the game without it', but then we end up kicking ourselves afterwards for leaving that stuff out. In Day Of Tentacle, there were a lot of cool idle animations, like Bernard scratching his butt, which we managed by staying late the last couple of weeks of the project - there was no budget, but we wanted that stuff in there."
        The new look to the characters may come as a surprise to Monkey Island pursuits, who probably didn't expect a stylistic
 shift as radical as this. "We got a lot of flack around here because people have certain idea of what Guybrush looks like, and sometimes that's based on the old box cover paintings", says Ahern. "But we wanted to see the look of the game evolve". Ackley agrees. "People's first reaction when they saw the new look for Guybrush was 'hey, I thought we was supposed to be some young, strapping, heroic guy!' But what I really like about Guybrush now is that his appearance matches the character. He can still appear rugged and pirate-like when he wants, but it's also believable when he's tripping over his own feet. Ultimately, we wanted to stay true to the characters, so we wanted Guybrush to be a geek, and Elaine to be the badass. She kicks major butt in the opening scene".
 

The Story

        So, what's the story? The curse refers to LeChuck's treasure horde, which comes with some seriously bad mojo attached. When Guybrush is stupid enough to steal a diamond ring from the treasure and give it to Elaine as a token of his affection, it turns her into a gold statue - which is promptly stolen because, hey, you can't leave a chunck of solid gold unattended on an island filled with pirates for very long. From then on, it's up to Guybrush to get her back - and settle yet another score with LeChuck, who's now a very unpleasant demon with flaming beard.
        The game breaks down to around 80 or 90 locations divided between two major islands. That's around the same size as Monkey 2, but as Jonathan Ackley points out, Curse actually plays a lot differently because of a more non-linear approach to the storyline and quest structure. "It's probably the most non-linear of the three games. I think everybody's favorite part of Monkey 1 was the first island where there's so much to do, and even if you get stuck, there's always something new to explore", he says. "We really liked that structure. If you're playing a game for 30 to 40 hours and you get stuck, you don't want to get bored. If that happens, often players think 'Damn, I'm stuck, and I've seen everything there is to see... aaaaand I'm gonna go play Interstate ´76 because I know I can always blow something up. So in Monkey 3, every room, every object, is highly interactive. There are a lot of games where you'll find a room, and its whole purpose for existing is to hold the sponge. It's a beautifully painted room, but the only thing you can interactive with is the sponge on the floor", he says. "My whole philosophy for adventure game design is, look at everything, touch everything, have a response for everything, even if it's just  rock. We've been very lucky because the two programmers on the team besides myself are absolutely hilarious. I said to them, go crazy. Bill Tiller (the background artist) is drawing these incredibly detailed rooms with all these objects, so write something funny for everything". Ackley is equally adamant about the type of puzzles you'll encounter in Monkey 3 - and the type you definitely won't. "We have fundamental design philosophy against hunt-the-pixel puzzles", he says. "We hate that - when I play an adventure game, that makes me more angry than anything. Some publishers call that 'gameplay value' - it adds three hours to your 'gameplay experience' because you can't find the freaking penny you need. We're not into that. We'd rather let you have the freaking item and get on with it. In Monkey, the objects are easy to find - the trick is how to use them".
 

The Interface

        The user interface, too, has come on quite a bit since of days of Monkey Island 2. Back in 1992, LucasArts' rudimentary SCUMM game engine required the player to choose actions from a list of verbs and inventory objects in a panel that occupied the bottom third of the screen. Anyone who's played Sam & Max Hit the Road or The Dig knows that SCUMM has come on a long way since then, and the latest variant, as seen in Curse, operates along very similar lines as the one used in Full Throttle. A click of the mouse brings up a "verb coin" - a golden doubloon embossed with icons of the various actions available to Guybrush. The basic actions are Use, Pick Up, Examine, and Talk To, with three more inventive oral additions - Bite, Suck, and Taste. The inventory is stored conveniently off-screen in a pirate's treasure chest that can be summoned by a right-click. The removal of the old space-hogging command panel combined with the new high-res graphics allows for much more detailed environments, and much larger characters - Guybrush is now twice as tall as he was in Monkey Island 2 (must be an adolescent growth spurt). Look out, too, for another game feature also borrowed from Full Throttle - arcade sequences that punctuate the adventuring and give the player a bit of light relief. "We wanted Guybrush to actually do some pirating", says Ahern. "the first two games really didn't have a lot of that". Hence, one of the very first things the player gets to do in the game is commandeer a pirate cannon and blow up some enemy ships. But unlike Full Throttle, there are only two major arcade sections, and they're not compulsory, since LucasArts is only too aware that many die-hard adventurers don't appreciate having their puzzle-solving constantly interrupted by twitch games. "We know that adventure game purists don't want to get stuck in hard arcade sequences", says Ackley, "but they're just so freaking fun! So they're in there, but you can play them at two levels of difficulty. There's Regular Difficulty, and there's Incredibly,  Ludicrously Easy. If you can't finish the arcade games on the  Incredibly,  Ludicrously Easy level, you must be really, really bad". Ahren and Ackley's team has been working away on The Curse Of Monkey Island since the start of 1996 - after three months in pre-production, work on the game began in May.