Return to Monkey Island: Joke 18 Years in the Making Turned Out to be True
Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman talked about the upcoming game in the Monkey Island series and shared some screenshots.
April Fools' Day is a great opportunity to make a joke or conceal the truth. The creator of the Monkey Island series Ron Gilbert always called his blog April Fools’ joke-free, but this year, he announced the sequel to the famous point-and-click games on April 1, saying:
"For 18 years the Grumpy Gamer blog has been April Fools' day free because it's a stupid tradition.
So to mix things up a little I'm taking this opportunity to announce I've decided to make another Monkey Island."
Soon after, the developer confirmed that the announcement was not a joke: Return to Monkey Island will be coming in 2022.
"When this project came about, I realized that because of the duration of the development and when we started it, April 1st would fall around the time we needed to announce," Gilbert told The Verge. "That’s the point I said, “We need to do this. We need to announce this on April Fools’.” It just felt it was a joke 18 years in the making."
Together with Dave Grossman, Gilbert returned to work on the popular franchise and explained that the game's development started when the opportunity arose and the timing was right.
In the new installment, the creators tried to appeal to both fans of the series and the people new to the game, so if it's your first time playing it – don't worry about some jokes 'going over your head.'
The original game The Secret of Monkey Island came out in 1990, and the developers had to make sure the new game still holds that classic feeling but is modern at the same time. Gilbert said they had to think about what makes point-and-click games fun and make sure it's not just nostalgia.
"Basically, any element of the game has to either be supporting the gameplay or the story and hopefully both. Anything that wasn’t — that was dragging either of those things back — we tried to identify and rethink it and redesign it," added Grossman.
One of the most apparent details seen in the trailer is the art style, which is very different from the original pixel art. Gilbert described the new look as 'modern.'
"Ultimately, we thought that we just had a lot more freedom and flexibility to not make it a pixel art game. I think people are going to be very happy with the art once they see it and once they see it moving and the animation."
Return to Monkey Island returns not only the characters – like Guybrush Threepwood, LeChuck, Murray the Demonic Talking Skull, Elaine Marley, and more – but also the composers and some voice actors.
"We’ve tried to get a lot of the returning voice actors, wherever we could. Some of the roles were voiced by several people in different games, but we did try to go back to the original people as much as we could."
Unfortunately, LeChuck's voice actor Earl Boen couldn't join the production but gave the developers their blessing to recast the role.
The creators didn't offer too much information about the upcoming game, but they said it will "pick up where Monkey Island 2 ended." It is a different game with a different world though.
"Canon can sometimes get in the way of telling a good story, and that’s never a battle you want to lose. So whenever there was something that didn’t quite fit, we just ignored it conveniently."
Return to Monkey Island is set to be released in 2022, so stay tuned. Check out the full interviews here and here and don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
