Monkey See, Monkey Doo
Over Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2, Ron Gilbert developed an elaborate series of puzzle charts, showing how the various strands linked together.
In 1989, as he got to work on The Secret Of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert published a ‘manifesto’ called ‘Why Adventure Games Suck’. The piece drew attention to what the genre was doing wrong, taking particular exception to arbitrary puzzle designs. Although The Secret Of Monkey Island was the ‘proof’ of the manifesto, Ron laughs, “It wasn’t like I finished the game, went home, opened up the manifesto and went, ‘Well, let’s see how I did today.’”
Ron believed there were too many redundant deaths and dead ends in adventure games. “One of the things that really bugged me – not just about the Sierra games, but adventure games in general, the text adventures and everything else – was that you could forget to solve a puzzle early on in the game and be completely screwed five or six hours later.” Right at the end of Sierra’s King’s Quest V, if you didn’t have a piece of cheese in your inventory, you would die and lose the game. To get that oh‐so‐important cheese, you had to get captured, then spot an incredibly obscure mouse hole, and then think to use a hook on it (which you need to have picked up earlier in the game).