Comedy "Secrets" from THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND

So, with our new project goal of "trying to create a prototype where comedy is an essential game mechanic," the team did a lot of investigation into the history of games, looking for examples where comedy was the most successful. This brought me back to a game from my childhood that I remembered being extremely funny (and upon playing it again, I found it still holds up), which was Lucasarts' THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND. Partly the brainchild of industry legend Tim Schafer, the team on MONKEY ISLAND took what could have easily been a standard "point and click" adventure game, and turned it into something quite a bit more memorable by lacing the entire experience with ripe, unexpected comedy.


Most of the comedy with MONKEY ISLAND is indeed a direct result of the writing, but its strength comes from the fact that the game’s writers accepted that most players will tend to make silly, unpredictable decisions in games, just to see what will often happen. This required a lot of guesswork on the writers' part in guessing the player's emotional state, and how that is likely to influence their moves and motivations. Schafer himself said it best:

• "To me, since so many of the players' possible moves are ridiculous, it only makes sense that the game's reactions are ridiculous. If the player chooses to ask the same question of a character over and over, eventually, that guy's gotta say, 'What, are you deaf?' "

The one truly innovative comedic game mechanic within MONKEY ISLAND is the “insult sword fighting” battles that you can get your character in. Rather than taking direct control of your character during swordfights with other pirates, you are instead giving the option to throw “insults” or “comebacks” at the other pirate, causing him to lose morale in the fight. Only certain insults will work against others, as you fight various pirates, you pick up new taunts as you go, finding out which ones work with which by trial and error, as you build yourself up toward a swordfight with “the Master Swordsman.” Schafer comments:

• "My first thought was, 'Are you crazy? Not let the player control the sword? They can only control the witty one-liners between the action? The players are going to hate that! They're going to want to control the sword!' But soon it became clear that it was a great idea, and I was wrong to assume so little of the player. I learned that people actually want to be surprised. They want to try something new, as long as it's entertaining. And the insults were funny and so it worked!"

MONKEY ISLAND was mainly successful as a game, because it was the product of a lot of talented people that were unafraid to do something crazy within the adventure genre. I think if we are equally unafraid about our prototype, then we can potentially mine a brand new comedy mechanic as ingenious as "insult sword fighting."


Tim Schafer quotes pulled from Gamespot's "A Brief History of Video Game Humor" article:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6114407/p-2.html