Prologue
I was born in 1984. My gaming memories start in the early 90s. When it comes to consoles, I remember the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis most vividly during that time period. However, I was never allowed to own any of those consoles. The first console we were actually allowed to buy was the Nintendo 64. My mother thought that owning a console would be a bad influence on us and take up too much of our time. She did, however, allow us to rent a console from Blockbuster Video sometimes (I can still remember the smell of the rental case). Before the era of games being tied to your username, video stores allowed you to rent a console for a week. You would have to put down a deposit of the total cost of the console that you would get back when you brought the console back a week later. This meant that renting a console was pretty expensive, and we didn't rent one very often. Because of the high cost of renting a console, most of my console gaming time during this period was done at a friend's house. My first experience with almost bare female anatomy was when my friend showed me Duke Nukem 3D at his house. So, that may not have worked out exactly the way my mother wanted.
I can't have a console, but you didn't say anything about COMPUTERS
I wasn't allowed to own a console, but my father was a computer programmer at a large insurance company at the time. This meant that we always had a PC when I was growing up, because he needed one for work. The first computer I can remember only had a 5 1/2" floppy and CGA graphics with Windows 3.1. When my dad wasn't busy using his PC for work, he would let me use it. Being a young kid who didn't care about work or programming yet, I used it for... GAMING! The first game remember was QBASIC Gorillas. A game where two players threw bananas at each other as giant Gorillas on top of different sized skyscrapers. You would have to choose an angle and velocity for your gorilla to throw and the banana would arc towards the other player and leave a satisfying crater in any building it hit. The goal was to hit the other player with your banana. It was a simple game, but my brother and I had a lot of fun playing it together.
QBASIC Gorillas -
My other favorite game from around that time was Street Rod. A game where you would buy classic cars from the classifieds in a newspaper, fix them up with peformance parts, and then race for money or pink slips on the street. I was terrible at it, but seeing all the different cars and getting to pretend to fix them was so much fun to young me. This was also the era when anti-piracy meant turning to a specific page in the manual and entering a word from that page that the game is asking for. Ah, simpler times.
Street Rod -
Those are probably the two games I remember the most vividly from that time period. There were others such as Commander Keen, Spider-Man, and Zaxxon, but my memories of those games are more fuzzy.
A new era-
After a while, that PC was getting old and in need of replacing. Around this time, all new computers were coming with a new portable storage medium. The CD-ROM. Game developers were eager to utilize this new technology, and what better way than full motion video! There were a lot of bad games during this time period that were just for showing off what a CD-ROM can do. There were a few gems during that era as well. Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Megarace are probably the two I remember the best. I believe both games came bundled with the PC my father purchased.
Star Wars: Rebel Assault -
Megarace -
I started getting interested in point and click adventure games about now. This was also the heyday of point and click adventure games, in my opinion. Lucasarts made A LOT of really good point and click adventure games. My favorite of all their games was the Monkey Island series. There was just something really special about those games. The music, the grapics, the humor, the setting. I loved it all. The games follow the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood as he tries to become a famous pirate. They are all very light hearted, and just fun from beginning to end. The first two games in the series were fairly standard when it comes to graphics and sound. There was background music, but there were no voices and it was all text based. They were both very good, but they followed the standard formula that Lucasarts used when it came to point and click adventure games. The next game was truely different.
The Curse of Monkey Island
The Curse of Monkey Island was a big departure from the first two games in terms of graphics and sound. The pixelated characters and computer generated sound were replaced by real music and full motion animation. I was enamored from the very first scene. Here was my favorite seris in the style of Saturday morning cartoons I watched every week. I could actually see facial features and hear the character's voices!
Curse of Monkey Island Intro -
In the Curse of Monkey Island Guybrush is trying to save his fiance, Elaine Marley, after she is transformed into a golden statue when Guybrush tries to propose to her using a cursed ring. Of course Guybrush's nemesis, LeChuck, is involved and the game follows Guybrush as he sails the seas and pun's his way through his quest.
In previous games, navigation and interaction were handled with the standard text buttons located at the bottom of the screen that were common in most adventure games back then. Navigation was done by moving the cursor and clicking where you wanted your character to move. Interaction was done using a series of words at the bottom of the screen. You would click on what you wanted to do, open for example, and then click on who or what you wanted to apply that interaction to. Lucasarts always included funny responses if you tried to do something such as open a person or give a door. The funny responses to incorrect interactions was always one of my favorite things about these games.
The Monkey Island interaction menu
In the Curse of Monkey Island, interaction was similar in that you were still pointing and clicking, but the interaction menus were much less immersion breaking. Now the interaction menu was a nifty looking pirate coin, and you would click on parts of the coin to select your interaction. The hand to pick things up, the parrot to talk to people, the skull to look etc. This in and of itself felt so much better to me than the previous two games.
Curse of Monkey Island Interaction Coin
Previous Monkey Island games had music, and while it was good music, it was still just fairly low quality MIDI. The Curse of Monkey Island had MUCH better music. I still get the theme song stuck in my head sometimes.
The biggest change, however, was the animation. It wasn't quite TV quality at the resolutions games ran at back then, but it was a huge leap over the last two Monkey Island games. Guybrush was no longer pixelated with intersperced high detail static shots. Now Guybrush was a full blown cartoon character! As were all the other characters. It was amazing to see the world of Monkey Island so well flushed out and vibrant. I felt like I was playing a TV show.
Not only were the graphics and animation better, but now every character had an audible voice. Guybrush was voiced by Domnic Armato perfectly. Somehow, all the characters sounded just like I had imagined them in my head. Even the less important characters were full of charm and well voiced.
To me, it felt like the perfect package. Everything just came together so well to create a game that was perfect for young M0nkz. I probably played through The Curse of Monkey Island 5 or 6 times before putting it away. It became my "comfort game" in a way. I would always go back to it when I was feeling down, or couldn't come up with another game to play.
To be honest with you, I don't fully remember every scene of The Curse of Monkey Island. It was my favorite game, but it has been a while since I played through it. What I remember most is the experience. The way playing the game made me feel. How it was like escaping to a show on TV for a while, and getting to be my favorite video game character with an actual voice. I don't get as enthralled with games as I used to, and maybe that is part of the reason I look back on The Curse of Monkey Island so fondly. It was during a time when a new game felt like entering a whole new world and there were new possiblities and scenarios to be explored. Now games feel less new, less exciting in a way. Don't get me wrong, I still love gaming, but I just don't get that same "new" excited feeling anymore. I sometimes wish I could go back to that time, but I'll always have the memory of those feelings.
What game do you look back on from your childhood the most?
