Grumpy Gamer

I was not a Sierra adventure fan (except Gabriel Knight), but I loved EVERY ONE of the Lucasfilm Games. Why? I think they managed perfection in these four areas:

ACCESS, FUN, CHARACTERS, DESIGN

ACCESS:
You fired up the game and could immediately start playing. Most of the games had no or very short intros or cutscenes. Lucasfilm was very strong at telling the story throughout the game. "I'm Guybrush Threepwood and I wanna be a pirate" -> There you go!

Controls were also very easy, I think they were even the first games that you could play through by only using your mouse. That's important, because you could just literally lean back and play.

FUN
Maybe it's just me (obviously not) but Gilbert's and Schafer's writing style, that's my idea of fun! Well written, perfectly executed and timed. Often with very few or no words at all. Sometimes Bernard or Guybrush just turned to you and said nothing…all said!

CHARACTERS
The teams put a lot of effort in creating unique characters. Why the hell do I know names like Guybrush, Elaine, Stan, Bernard, Hoagie, Laverne, Ben, Bobbin, Manny, Glottis; but I can hardly remember any other adventure game character names.
It's because I was emotionally bounded with them. They were mostly struggling with their environment but managed their obstacles often with unorthodox methods.

DESIGN
Especially Ron Gilbert and Hal Barwood established adventure game design that is still considered standard today. Brought to fame by Ron's article "Why…

Ron Gilbert directly addresses the use of pixel art in a blog post.

Pixel art is what they used due the time and circumstances of the original games, not because they like pixel art better than other media.

https://grumpygamer.com/when_i_made_another_monkeyisland

> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art.

> When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn't feel right. We didn't want to make a retro game. You can't read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a "throwback game". I didn't want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it's interesting, fun, and exciting. It's what the Monkey Island games have always done.

There's also a talk by (I think) Mark Ferrari, where he talks about how they hired artists for these classic pixel art games. Artists were hired on the strength of their art skills, and they had to adapt to the pixel medium in order to make those classic games. Easier to hire an artist and train them to make pixel art, rather than hire a pixel pusher and teach them to make art.

As I was confused by the quote "Ron Gilbert told me he'd never make another Monkey Island unless...", it seems to come from this:

> That quote is a reference to a manifesto Gilbert wrote in 2013 about his dreams of creating another Monkey Island game [https://grumpygamer.com/if_i_made_another_monkeyisland]. The post made clear that Monkey Island would never officially return unless Gilbert owned the series' IP. "I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own," Gilbert wrote. "Not only would I allow you to make Monkey Island fan games, but I would encourage it."

Found at https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/ron-gilbert-confirms-a-new-monkey-island-adventure-game-coming-in-2022/

To deliver a vertical slice you also create hacks left and right and they quite often then later stand in the way of actually delivering a proper product. I remember the blog post by Ron Gilbert where he presented Da Vinci's Vertical Slice [1] and it still sits with me as one of the best way to present the issues.

A vertical slice is not an MVP because people would never consider it minimally viable. It's a tiny product but it's completely polished and it's for a consumer of one: the publisher.

[1]: https://grumpygamer.com/vertical_slice/

I think it's machine translated. I can't think of another reason for writing "The adventure begins in Bar Scumm", when the bar in the game is called the Scumm Bar.

The part written by Gilbert was actually taken directly from his blog and can be found at http://grumpygamer.com/if_i_made_another_monkeyisland

EDIT: Except they randomly capitalized words, removed random parts of sentences to make them incomprehensible, and inserted the word "blackberries" in the middle of a sentence. The more I look at this article, the weirder it gets.