MORE THAN THREE DECADES SINCE CREATING A TIMELESS GOLD STANDARD FOR THE POINT-AND-CLICK ADVENTURE GENRE BEFORE SAILING ONTO NEW HORIZONS, RON GILBERT AND DAVE GROSSMAN REUNITE AND SHARE THEIR JOURNEY ON THEIR RETURN TO MONKEY ISLAND

WORDS BY ALAN WEN

» It has taken many years, but Ron Gilbert has finally made a new Monkey Island game.

» Dave Grossman has been working alongside Ron Gilbert on Return To Monkey Island.

In the book Blood, Sweat & Chrome, an oral history of more than 100 interviewees recounts the long trials and tribulations that filmmaker George Miller took to follow his post-apocalyptic movie franchise Mad Max with 2015’s critically acclaimed Fury Road, a project that had been gestating for about 20 years.

That however isn’t the story you’ll read for Return To Monkey Island, even though it’s taken more than three decades for the series’ original creator Ron Gilbert to be back at the helm. Joining him is co-designer Dave Grossman, who explains the development timeline was actually simpler. “The vision for this game came initially out of a weekend that Ron and I spent together in January of 2020, where we talked about what kinds of themes and subject matter held meaning for us, and where we could take them. It’s not a game we would have or could have made 30 years ago.”

In the past, Ron Gilbert had toyed with the idea of making another Monkey Island game before, which would always be set immediately after the end of Monkey Island 2’s still divisive conclusion, having joked in a 2002 interview with LucasArts fansite The International House Of Mojo that it would be called Monkey Island 3a: The Secret Revealed Or Your Money Back. But there was no grand design document stuck in development hell for decades.

What Dave means then is that it has required the natural passing of time for the pair to consider what Monkey Island, as well as its forever hapless yet nonetheless aged pirate Guybrush Threepwood, meant for them in the present. There’s an evident play for nostalgia and desire to recapture the glory days that’s also been inherent in other longoverdue sequels of films where the audience has also grown up with the actors and the characters they portray, be it Star Wars, Top Gun, or Clerks.