I remember that "Ask me about Loom" pirate at the Scumm bar confusing the heck out of me when I was 6. Back in the day my brain struggled to comprehend he was pimping another real game, and I kept talking to him thinking I was missing a punchline or needed to know about this alleged game for a puzzle or something.
Likewise! I was 5 when I played Monkey Island, so when this (and even more so with the Catacomb Stump™) happened I went to my father and asked him about it. He was as puzzled as I was though!
@Ahmed Malaki It's an advertisement for another one of Lucas Films adventure games called Loom, I'd be very surprised if Monkey Island had a Doom reference considering it came out 3 years before Doom did 😄
@@Osterochse Loom's world building is on par with the monkey islands, but the game play mechanics have only rarely been repeated. Occasionally there is a puzzle game with a puzzle or two that is note/color/sound based. Over the years, the closest game I've played that used a note system was Growbot. Loom held an innocence of youth to it. I don't know if I could get through Loom again though, even if I love it.
Yeah. About a half hour in they get to the game Monkey Island and that is when I remembered the title and what this was a video about Monkey Island. Then I realized the video was 1 hour 14 minutes long.
It's difficult to describe how much Monkey Island meant to me when it released. I was 14 years old and i begged my parents to give me money to buy it. The Christmas before it, i got my very first Amiga 500 and this was the game i wanted more than anything, probably because i had played Maniac Mansion several times on the Commodore 64 a few years earlier, and that was one of the best games i had ever played. So my parents finally gave me the money, and my dad drove me 50km to the closest shop that actually sold games, back then games were not sold everywhere, actually had to go to special shops that specialized in them, and those were almost only in the big cities, and i lived way out in the "fields". I remember when we got there, big city, lot's of noise, something i rarely were used to, we ate at mcdonald's, something "fields" didn't have either, and then we walked to the store. And there it was in it's big case, on a shelf in the middle of the room, like they were saying, this is what you need to buy now, this is it! It was really special to buy that game with my own money, that might have been the first time i ever did that. Other games i either got someone else to buy or i got them as gifts for birthdays and Christmas. And then to get the box in my hands and just sense that i would boot up this game in less than an hour if i got home right away, i had this feeling of joy that i have rarely ever felt since, all the way home. When we got home, it was really hot outside, and i remember my friends wanted to do some stuff, but i said i would lock myself inside for the day and just play a new game. It ended up being one of the best gaming experiences i have ever had, and i will never forget it. And also my grand moms sister at some point came into my room and asked what i was doing, and we ended up playing large portions of the game together, it was so damn fun, we laughed at the jokes and we solved the puzzles. Took me about 3 days to beat the game, and i never played it since, but i have bought all the remaster versions and so on. But i still remember how it felt to play this game, and it was magical, it is the best point and click game i have ever played. The first game i ever buy for myself, and it's this game, i could not have been more satisfied.
FabledSomething your nostalgia and enthusiasm is mint. I was lucky we had a microton games shop in the next town (Pontefract) ... Double dragon on the spectrum +2 oh my my Little Dopper nearly exploded . 🖖🏼
Some of the best memories of my youth are my friends and I playing MI and MI2 as teenagers, working together to solve the puzzles. Nearly 30 years later we are all still friends, though separated by tie and geography we still stay in touch and make an effort to see each other if we happen to be in the same city, and yes, we always talk about the old games we played when we were young.
This video is simply outstanding. It’s not just the best content of its kind on RU-vid, it’s one of the most meticulously crafted documentaries I’ve ever seen produced for this platform. This is *too good* to be free. Writing ✔️ Research ✔️ Narration ✔️ Editing ✔️ I honestly thought your channel fell of the map entirely, but *wow.* If this is what you’ve been working on, please, don’t hesitate to take your time in the future. ...I’m seriously blown away.
I am 44 years old today, started playing computer games in 1984, adventure games quickly became my favorite genre. I played most of the games showed here ... This is the best youtube video i have ever seen.
Me and my big brother voice-acted the game while he was playing it, we had so much fun and I was so little. Now we are very distant but this memory is still precious.
He comes into our life and brings us so much joy and then he vanishes without a word for months at a time. It hurts so good and I just cant quit you Ahoy.
I love the style of his videos and he has a badass voice. Reminds me of an old school History Channel documentary. (Before the History Channel turned into reality TV)
Believe or not, I am one of the guys who really died "accidentally" in MI. I was too stupid to find the solution in the drowning scene. And yes, I had no savegame at that time... So it was a restart for me. Still love it, though. ;)
@@freggittlegamint2830 Yes its sad that point n click adventure games are no longer backed by major developers because if there was a monkey island sequel on Xbox,windows store or android and it cost $20 I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for a professional game that can be played on places without internet.
How could you possibly have no save game at that point, that’s about an hour into the gameplay at least. And that’s assuming you solved all the puzzles immediately.
@@thefonzkiss To be more precise: I was lazy and always saved over one default savegame. Then it took me too long to figure this scene out (I think I also let the game run, probably to get some lunch). As I wasn't able to solve that scene anymore and the (German) manual stated that dying isn't really possible in Lucasfilm Games, I wasn't thinking much when I overwrote my default savegame to continue this "puzzle" later. From there on, I was shit out of luck and it took my several hours to figure out, that the manual and the game actually lied to me.
I love how you don't just talk about the one game on which you base your video on, but you also cover other games in the genre and how they were influenced and kickstarted by Monkey Island, as well as the devs' career paths and so on. You go into so much detail that it'd be worth watching 3 hours of this ;).
Three years and I still watch this video all the time. Monkey Island's soundtrack is so amazing, that note at 0:04 is nothing short of bonechillingly magical. It's simple, three notes, and manages to convey the sense of coming adventure. An hour long tribute to point-click adventures, and Monkey Island itself. If the RU-vid community gave awards, your videos would win every single damn one for quality. Thank you for making this.
Hearing the Monkey Island theme song at the beginning of this video almost got some tears rolling. No other game has left a lasting impression on me as the monkey island games have (though with Day of the tentacle and Sam & Max as close runner-ups). It brought me right back to a place and a time that is gone for good, but the memories these tunes bring back are fantastic. Thank you so much for this revisit into my childhood and thank you for an awesome channel!
Yeah, I felt the same, dude!! The Monkey Island series will always have a special place in my heart. One that's impossible to relate to someone who wasn't there in the 90s, struggling to get through the impossible puzzles, with that soothing island music repeating in the background...
Thank you Ahoy, for talking at length about the perilous story of adventure games. Especially I'm glad that you brought up the European pocket of adventure games with things like The Longest Journey and Syberia especially. They are truly unique. I'm also saying this as someone who got into adventure games with Monkey Island 4. Although people usually dismiss it, it was a fascinating game to me, and it still is to this day.
Mate, I can't say how amazed I am at your work, you do all of this stuff alone? This is insane, the quality is top notch and the voice work and soundtrack is incredible! I don't know how many nights you spend up, or how many hours you take away from your normal life to do this stuff but whatever you're doing I just have to say thanks for the effort, I just need to let you know your work doesn't go unappreciated.
Came back to this documentary after Return To Monkey Island got announced. Love both this documentary and the game franchise, and I hope Stuart was as excited to see the announcement as I was.
@@Waluigi666 Wow...glad I hopped off that ship after completing the first season of walking dead! Because if puzzles took a backseat AFTERWARDS, that does not bode well, they were already far too simplistic to the point where I cannot recall anything about them! Were there ever puzzles?
To me Monkey Island has the greatest game intro ever. The slow, mysterious start with the long chord over the Lucasfilm logo, and the theme song starting with a view of the Mêlée island, the village lights and the lookout... it still gives me chills. And that's all we need at that point IMO: just a distant view of the island to make us intrigued to find out more, as the theme song plays, also being kind of an overview of what this world is and how it feels.
Yeah...I feel like it kinda needs a different title or something...? For a video titled "The Secret of Monkey Island" and running at over an hour long, only the first 36 minutes or so are on topic. And about half of that is lead-up to the game, which is interesting and fair enough, but the other half is frankly just kind of a standard overview of the game and how it was made(it improves the SCUMM engine, refined the genre by removing deaths and game-ending puzzle mistakes, implemented a unique sense of humor, the guy.brush story, etc). Then, when it starts to look like an overview of Monkey Island a a series, it just sort of rushes past MI2(perhaps the most well-crafted game in the entire series) in 3 minutes(?!!!) with an even more surface-level analysis(innovative music system, the artstyle shift). And then it spends a MINUTE on Curse of Monkey Island that boils down to "it existed." You know, the game in the series which introduced Dominic Armato's iconic voice for Guybrush, leaned even harder into the more cartoony visuals of MI2, introduced Murray, implemented that ship-fighting idea from MI1, and overall had such a strong pull on the series' aesthetics both visually and in terms of audio that it's influences can be seen in the remakes they made of the original games(up to and including getting the voice established in Curse dub the lines of those games)? I usually really quite enjoy these videos, but this was a bit of a disappointment. I was hoping for an in-depth video on the behind-the-scenes of the creation of Secret; or at least a decently detailed overview on the core titles in the series up to Curse. It's a good video for what it is, but honestly it needed either focus or a different introduction and title. This is more about adventure games as a genre, than Monkey Island.
This is the style of Ahoy. I love how he provides relevant information to it, rather than just the game specifically. Because some people like to ask questions like "What happened to Tim Schafer?" Well we know what he did.
While other channels are expanding their videos in parts, you're uploading the whole thing in one video. Respect! You care more about the art rather than making money/views.
That's one of the beautiful things about what Ahoy does: He does focus on the titular games of these documentary videos, but he then goes on to illustrate how pivotal said games were in their respective genre. That and how previous games led to the eventual inspiration and development of the central subject matter.
and I just bought the monkey island collection to play the 50th time last week then this came out couple days ago ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sahskKAxSCY.html
King's Quest, "set in the fairytale kingdom of Daventry..." - ah, yes, ye olde Daventry, on the A45 trail between the ancient cities of Coventry and Northampton.
I don't think Daventry from King's Quest has anything in common with the real one except the name, which I'm pretty sure Roberta Williams picked just because she liked the sound of it.
“Telltale has proven that there is still a market for adventure games.” Cut to maybe a few months after this video came out, when it’s suddenly revealed that literally only one of Telltale’s games after TWD season 1 ever made a profit, followed immediately by the studio shutting down, and announcements from other studios, that their telltale-esque games have actually been failing as well. God, I’ve never seen a video with a positive ending note, be so thoroughly and viscously slammed into the ground by reality.
While you're right about Telltale's fate, it DID prove there is a market, as you can now see hundreds of point-and-click adventures all over Steam, lots of them with pretty high quality - and having profits.
Back when TellTale first began restarting the Point-N-Click Adventure genre with Sam & Max, Strongbad, Puzzle Adventure, etc., the general emphasis was that each series had a unique visual style and tone. Then, they made The Walking Dead and all of their games after that had the same damn art style, on top of having the same gameplay formula. Most of their stuff became licensed properties, and they flooded their own market with derivative bubbling slop that few wanted and less asked for, like Game of Thrones, Back to the Future and Minecraft: Story Mode. It's kind of funny, but Hidden Object games are the new PNC adventure games. They evolved from being just hidden object games, and (attempting to stay relevant) took on inventories, puzzles, dialog options and the other adventure game trademarks, while the HO part is just for acquiring certain key objects to progress in those puzzles.
I've never heard of this channel but thankfully this popped up in my recommendations because i love monkey island. I Just wanted to say this video was absolutely fantastic and definitely will be back for more of your videos.
I second Colt's statement, They're amazing! Ahoy's POLYBIUS video is great too, It's now his most viewed, even passing the id software documentary trilogy.
And now we know what the secret is. and it 100% explains what the ending of 2 was in a couple of ways both in cannon and in meaning. I for one am fully satisfied especially after reading their letter at the end in the scrapbook.
I got chills from the title screen music and it's literally the first time I've ever heard it. I only ever get chills from nostalgic things. I don't have words.
Isn't it amazing though? Monkey Island is just about the only song I've ever heard that actually sounded decent with the IBM PC Speaker. Ironically, it's still my favorite version of the theme. It's probably because it's the best Speaker version of any song I've ever heard. The IBM Speaker version of Maniac Mansion's theme, on the other hand, isn't exactly the most pleasant theme I've experienced... It's the high-pitched parts that are so agonizing. 😂
To anyone wanting to play the original Monkey Island, the version I highly, *strongly* recommend playing is “The Secret of Monkey Island: Ultimate Talkie Edition”. Basically, it’s a fan-made upgrade to the original DOS game (specifically the “latest” edition (which is also part of the Special Edition) that was released on CD-ROM, which brought the SCUMM engine version to about on-par with Monkey Island 2’s) that not only adds in the voice-acting from the Special Edition, but also other enhancements as well! Things like fixing bugs and unintentional dead ends (not the “whoops, looks like I can’t go further from here, guess I’ll turn around and try something else” kind, but the “whoops, looks like I accidentally screwed up and locked myself in a dead-game, guess I’ll have to either load a previous save or restart my entire adventure” kind), adding in additional SFX from the Special Edition as well as voice-acting, and even restoration of things from earlier versions that were removed in later ones, such as the Spiffy closeup that was originally cut but was still shown on the back of the box, and even the infamous “Stump Joke”. All of this, plus the ability to play with either MT-32, General MIDI or even Adlib music (though the Adlib music is not the same one found in the original but instead an entirely redone ost based off of the MT-32 music), and you pretty much have the best version of Monkey Island 1 out there, bar none. You will need a copy of the Special Edition installed in order to build the game, as the builder takes the voice-acting and SFX directly from the SE’s files. But other than that, you’re pretty much golden!
The Talkie Edition is great, I played through it the other month, but I also paired it with a brand new mod that re-does the music in the style of MI3. They don't always play nicely with each other, but together it's the best way to play a nice updated version of the game with original graphics and modern updates.
Yeh ultimate talkie version is the defintive version of monkey island for sure. It's great something good came out of the otherwise crummy special edition!
Thanks for the nostalgia trip. MI 1 & 2 were extremely satisfying games. I sometimes look up and play the theme song just to take me back to that magical feeling I had when playing them as a kid.
The main theme is incredible, i heard the music way before i could play monkey island and was always thinking that this was great music. And playing the game makes the music even better.
The original Secret of Monkey Island art style was by far the best. The exaggerated cell-shaded cartoon look of later Monkey Island games was hideous. The remastered/HD versions went in the wrong direction. At the same time Day of the Tentacle's cartoony look actually kinda worked.
WHOA, I was just watching this as a huge fan of the series... but that is totally me playing the flute in the background music at 1:10:00! haha. So weird, I did not expect that. I played it almost 20 years ago for a very dedicated fan of Peter McConnell. We also did a piece from Indy: FoA. Great little documentary, I appreciate the love that went into it. #monkey-island on DALnet for lyfe
Heh, that's pretty neat. Just to let you know, occasionally I will throw on the soundtrack just to listen to it. I love the music almost most of all. Keep kicking ass!!
@@jesusasecas ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_fj5pIpjS14.html ..I have it saved but just search Monkey Island Soundtrack and it'll pop up. They all have really good soundtracks.
@@tomfoolery4598 thanks, but I meant the Sarah B cover where she plays the flute. It's from the Monkey Island 2 "Underground Tunnels" theme, but the cover sounds lovely.
3:53 Never knew the Kingdom of Daventry was a thing. Here in England Daventry is a real place, and it's famous for knife crime and honestly this shouldn't have cracked me up as much as it has.
I've heard about this game, and have kind of always known that it's an amazing classic. But since I'm from a non-English speaking country, and most of kids and teens at the time (who were the target audience) definitely didn't speak English at that age (not good enough to play a text-based adventure at least), it was never really that popular here and so it didn't really stick in the local gamer culture. What an amazing eye-opening documentary, and what a gem of a game! Great work, Ahoy. I gotta check it out.
I am happy I got to play it back in the day when I was a kid. The feeling of playing Monkey Island blind before the internet, before the reputation, was magical.
it's insane how often I find myself coming back and watching your documentaries in full, I regularly tell people; "I don't watch movies/tv because its a waste of time" but your videos are one of the few exceptions I give to myself. I don't know if it's the dialogue you provide, the soundtrack, your visuals, or something else. Either way, I am more than happy to wait as long as it takes for any new doc to release, as each time I know they'll be an absolute treat.
In a world where content creators are all about chasing the latest trend to get the views, it is great to see such original and unique content being made and with such detail too. As a kid growing up in the 90s, video games were always a part of my life, but point and clicks were a bit too complex for my age at the time and I just passed on them, This video has been a great education on what I missed and definitely has given me the incentive to go back and try out all of this classics that I missed.
My wife grew up loving the King’s Quest games because that’s what her dad played back in the day. I got a hold of KQ5 and had a little nostalgic throwback for her one weekend. Very quickly I realized how annoying Sierra’s game design was with all the death traps, dead ends, having to save everywhere (only could have 12 save files in total). We ultimately gave up when we made it into some witch’s forest but lacked an important item from 30 minutes ago leading to a very hard dead end. I wish I had known about the Secret of Monkey Island sooner. I’ll bet she’d like that one better.
Wow, you've surpassed yourself on this one! I was looking forward to an episode on Monkey Island/DotT, and it's your longest yet! Amazing work, I'm blown away by the amount of data collected and how you manage to retrieve some information that is actually quite hard to find (like the early artworks from Monkey Island, especially animated step by step). The Monkey Island series is truly what inspired me to become a game designer (as you can probably guess from my avatar, which is a nod to the Lucas Arts logo) and I still play these games almost 30 years later with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid. Definitely a documentary worth sharing, thanks!
Wait..... TELLTALE MADE A BONE GAME BASED ON THE BOOKS!?!? I loved those comic books as a kid! Heck, I still love the Bone books! How did I not know about the game!?
So fun to watch this, a real life friend worked on the SFX for Lucasfilm (mostly games including monkey island but some of the movies) and some of the stories he told from that era was cool and in the context of this video, so much cooler. An excellent human being up to the point of his passing and his love for creating games was unmatched.
Another excellent Ahoy video. Although you have made a mistake in 1:04:22 . The Games of Thrones game you have showed is not the one from Telltale Games.
Woah. A video supposedly about Monkey Island, that touches around 70% of the games that defined me as a human being. The whole evolution of the genre, from the text games, early Sierra pearls, to the PSOne/PS2 era atmospheric point-and-clicks and all the recent stuff that I have been missing within the kickstarter-based world. Surely, the nostalgic value is might be dominant in me here, but this is easily one of the best researched, thought out, produced and explained documentaries I've seen on RU-vid. Thank you for your hard work on this incredible video, both from current me, and a younger version of me, whose life was based upon books, stories and these magnificent games.
In the time of our new Monkey Island, I finally sat down to watch this oft-recommended documentary, and I have to say thanks for such a well-produced piece of work.
This is quickly becoming my favorite channel. The number of ads break is more than tolerable, i have watched videos of this length with easily 3X the ads. (Subscribed&liked)
I've got such fond memories of this game. I'll never forget the part where you've got to take the talking head to the lava, so you can threaten to drop kick him into it if he doesn't tell you what you need to know. The humor was just pure gold, truly a classic for the ages.
Aha! I was watching some of your older videos the other day and figured you must have been working on another long documentary. This is such a pleasant surprise! Absolutely wonderful as always; your content is some of the best on RU-vid.
I ADORED Grim Fandango growing up. Peter McConnell’s soundtrack was mind blowing to me as a kid who had never really considered that jazz had anything to offer me. I loved the style, the characters, the story was so fun, and the soundtrack has had so much influence on my music taste. To this day, all of my playlists have at least one Grim Fandango or Peter McConnell song, usually more.
I know you won't notice this comment, but I just want to say that this is one of my favorite videos on youtube! I love the Monkey Island series and your in depth cover on point and click adventure games just always makes me excited (even though it's my 13th time watching).
When I was a kid I bought this game and instantly fell in love. I played it non stop and while in school it was all I thought about. Eventually i got stuck many times however, so I called the Lucas Arts tip line that was on the box, I called a few times and ran up a small bill and my mom got the phone bill and thought I was calling some adult number, LOL. I had to explain it was a game tip line and she said I wasn't allowed to call it any more. I did however reach the end and went on to play Day of the Tentacle and other Lucas Arts games. :)
