I love a good story. Stories are the fabric of our lives; we're telling them constantly to each other and ourselves. We live in a time when we can enjoy good stories in many different ways; there's books, films, plays, television series... and games.
source: YouTube
I am old enough to have lived a period in computer gaming when adventures were the most successful games on the market. In the years before 3D computer graphics and 3D acceleration, most games took players by the hand and led them through a imaginary world full of people to meet and mysteries to solve. The very first adventure games were quite literally stories told in text on screen, with players having to type simple commands, like "take key" or "look north," after which the result of those actions were printed to screen. These games could sometimes be frustrating due to the text parsers limited scope of commands it could interpret. Adventure games took flight for real with the advent of graphical adventure games. I've played dozens of them, among which almost all "Quest" games from Sierra Entertainment, like King's Quest, Police Quest and Space Quest. But I most enjoyed the adventure games from Lucasfilm Games, later known as Lucas Arts.
Where Sierra's games told good stories, they were always quite serious and dry. Also you could sometimes get stuck in those games without an opportunity to correct your mistake if you didn't save your game often enough. If you forgot to pick up, or completely missed an item in the beginning of the game, restarting the whole thing was your only option. The Lucasfilm games were completely different; not only did they make interacting with the game world much more intuitive with their SCUMM system, they also endowed most of their games with a particular kind of humor, the kind that's remembered even now, decades later. SCUMM stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion" and was first developed for their 1987 graphic adventure Maniac Mansion, but was refined for Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island; the latter was published in 1990 and is the most memorable and enjoyable graphic adventure games I've ever played.
I recently stumbled across a YouTube video that took me back to those times and that game. It's a "making of" documentary containing interviews with the crew that made the first Monkey Island game, and listening to them we learn a lot about how such a cult classic is made. For one, the developers were given complete freedom; there was no CEO overseeing the whole process. It was just a small group of people who wanted to make a fun game as best they could. And what they wanted more than anything, was to tell a good story. The video ends with Mark Ferrari, the game's lead graphical artist, explaining why the game is so successful and still played today:
... those were games that were about storytelling. Beyond their gifts as artist, programmer, designer and administrator, which were all considerable, they were gifted story-tellers, and the reason these games are classics, more than anything about the SCUMM engine or the look of the art or any of the rest of that, the reason they're classics is because their exercise in storytelling was so good, so that when somebody sat down to play these games, they were involved in discovering strange places, meeting interesting people, engaging in relationships, solving puzzles and mysteries, discovering... It was a giant cavalcade of mental and emotional creative exercise. When those games were replaced by first person shooters, all that narrative went away, and for years and years all you... Then it was all about autonomic response and dopamine loops. It was all about developing muscular and nervous thumb-twitches as you ran down an endless, visually interesting, but airless and repetitive hallway, kicking, punching, stabbing, blowing up and knifing whatever you encountered along the way. And there was often some little story attached to the beginning and the end to frame this somehow, but there was none of the same kind of exercise. It wasn't because those games were too slick technologically that people got bored with them, it wasn't because they were produced after the innocent age and they were all the same, it was because they weren't doing the thing... They weren't doing the thing with your brain and your creativity that adventure games had done before. They weren't storytelling games. People don't understand that their entire existence is storytelling. But it is. And that, once you understand that, a whole lot of other things fall into place in very different ways than they do for people who think it's all about some objective or mechanical aspect or approach... It's The Secret of Monkey Island!
I couldn't agree more! I've recently bought special editions of all four Monkey Island games, which were released from 2009 onward with enhanced graphics and interfaces. You can buy them as a bundle for only 20.82 Euros on Steam, right here. I hope you enjoy the video!
The Making of Monkey Island (30th Anniversary Documentary)
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!
Recent articles you might be interested in:
| Latest article >>>>>>>>>>> | Underground Sabertooth |
|---|---|
| Proving God | Banksters Paradise |
| Follow The Whale? | Evolved Morality |
| Apple's Capitalism | Meritocratic Blind Spot |
Thanks for stopping by and reading. If you really liked this content, if you disagree (or if you do agree), please leave a comment. Of course, upvotes, follows, resteems are all greatly appreciated, but nothing brings me and you more growth than sharing our ideas.