The Secret of Monkey Island
"The Secret of Monkey Island" ultimately cost $200,000 to produce, and was developed over nine months.
The Secret of Monkey Island
"The Secret of Monkey Island" was the fifth Lucasfilm Games project powered by the SCUMM engine, originally developed for "Maniac Mansion". The company had gradually modified the engine since its creation. For "Maniac Mansion", the developers hard coded verb commands in the SCUMM scripting language. These commands become more abstract in subsequent versions of the engine. The developers carried over the practice of referring to individual segments of the gameworld as "rooms", even though the areas in "Monkey Island" were outdoors. The game uses the same version of the engine used in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", with minor changes. A dialog tree was added, which facilitated conversation options and the sword-fighting puzzles. The developers removed the "What is" option (an input command that describes an on-screen object to the player) in favor of allowing the player to simply highlight the object with the mouse cursor. The game's improved interface became the standard for the company's later titles. The game also introduced logical verb shortcuts, which could be performed with the mouse; for example, clicking on a character defaults to the "talk" action, the most obvious action in the situation. SCUMM's visuals were updated for the game—the original EGA version had a 320x200 pixel resolution rendered in 16 colors. According to artist Steve Purcell, that became a major limitation for the art team; due to a low number of "ghastly" colors, they often chose bizarre tones for backgrounds. They chose black and white for Guybrush's outfit for the same reason. The VGA version of the game later corrected these issues by implementing 256 color support, which allowed for more advanced background and character art. The VGA (and other platform releases) removed the infamous "stump joke" from the game, which was a joke in the EGA version in which the player would examine a tree stump in the forest. Guybrush would exclaim that there is an opening to a system of catacombs and attempt to enter, but this would result in a message stating the player needed to insert disc 22, then 36, then 114 in order to continue. The joke resulted in numerous calls to the LucasArts hotline asking about missing discs. As a result, the joke was removed from later editions and is a mentioned as a conversation option for the LucasArts Hint Hotline in the sequel.