I’ve been into parodies almost as long as I’ve known any kind of stories. 1066 and All That, with its Bad Kings and its Picts living in brackets, was practically my introduction to history. As a pre-teen I loved Red Dwarf for its play on science fiction ideas as much as the bawdy humour. It didn’t take me long to take the short trip from J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey’s fantasy novels to Terry Pratchett’s take-off’s (and Piers Anthony’s — this was by no means all a good thing). And I was familiar with enough pirate stories, text adventure games and installments of King’s Quest to love The Secret of Monkey Island‘s riffs on pirates and adventure games alike.
There are different ways to do parody, though. Let’s take Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books as a prime example. They started off with irreverent twists on well-known fantasy tropes as their main point. They got much better, though, when that moved to the background and the world became more focused on taking apart the way that stories work more generally. Pratchett took the power of belief, of narrative, and exaggerated it to be a driving force in the story. The results were frequently fascinating and powerful, and I have always loved the intellectual thrill of untying puzzles of layered meanings that loop in on themselves.
So speaking of puzzles, when Discworld got a video game adaptation, what form did it take? A point and click graphic adventure, like Monkey Island! Surely no coincidence. It’s a format whose slow, detail-focused gameplay is a great delivery mechanism for comedy, for a start. More than that, though, it’s a genre which gives the time and space to build up characters and narratives, and then lends itself inherently to taking those apart.
Lots of games make you work out a particular series of actions that the creator has come up with as a solution, but few tie it as directly to the narrative as graphic adventures. Your actions tend more to the detailed mechanics than the grand sweep, but still, at best progress is a kind of collaborative narrative process between creator and player, tuned to the same wavelength. You progress the story by working out what the story is going to be. Using well-known tropes, and therefore making you think about them, is one way to increase the chances of that wavelength matching.
In The Secret of Monkey Island, that was part of cutting out the amount of explaining it had to do. For all that it dressed up in smart humour and anachronisms and poked fun at some specifics, its narrative was a quite conventional hero’s journey. Young man trains and becomes a pirate, falls in love, faces threats, goes on a strange journey, comes back to his starting point with new power in hand, kicks ass and wins the girl. Disney wouldn’t have to change much to turn it into a film.
Monkey Island 2 keeps the attitude and charming setting, which it develops with some beautiful painterly pixel art, but in story terms it’s something very different. Partly it’s because it can draw on assumed knowledge of how things work from the first game. Partly it’s because its puzzles are just more smoothly handled — the treasure hunting of its second part rewards just the right amount analysis of another story (myth?) about its discoverers; the actions of the game’s final act cleverly mirror those in its first, just with less hand-holding. Mostly, though, Monkey Island 2‘s different from its predecessor because it just isn’t playing the same game.
The Secret of Monkey Island was self-aware, but it has nothing on its sequel. Early on, Monkey Island 2 explicitly places itself as being about what happens when the story is over but you still need to generate new stories. There is no grand new adventure. It technically has a treasure hunt to act as a goal, but it keeps that pointedly vague. Most of the game plays out as a shaggy dog story told in flashback by our hero Guybrush Threepwood as he dangles over a pit awaiting rescue. In-world, the events of the first game have become a widespread, not always correct or believed, story, and Guybrush is working out how to deal with it. He directly causes the rebirth of the big bad through his resulting hubris.
That’s not the only way in which the game does down its hero. In the original, the occasional tendency to act a little dishonestly when it came to matters like safes and credit notes was about Guybrush’s worst moral flaw, and he at least had an important quest to justify the means. In Monkey Island 2, a newly cynical Guybrush lies and cheats constantly, steals a visually-impaired man’s monocle, saws off someone’s wooden leg, gets a woman falsely imprisoned, and nails a coffin salesman inside one of his products. The game helpfully keeps track of these on a regularly updated wanted poster, if you’re interested. It’s all done as comedy, but it still feels like an earlier, much more subtle take on that modern video game thing of rubbing the player’s nose in what they’re willing to do because a game guides them to.
One less obviously heavy moment that really stuck with me, and stands out even decades later, concerns Guybrush’s romantic relationship with the powerful and resourceful Governor Elaine Marley. The first game featured a neat undermining of the idea that she needed to be rescued, but concluded on a more typical romantic note. This time round, Guybrush crashes her party, in search of a treasure map piece, and is revealed to be thoroughly unwelcome.
Like almost everything in the game, it’s played for humour — the incongruity of turning up to a mansion in this historic setting to say “I’m her ex-boyfriend!”; the discovery that she named her dog after Guybrush — but humour can always be a way of making other points. The game doesn’t fill in exactly what happened, but her message comes through clearly. She hasn’t been captured by ghost pirates; no curse is keeping them apart; she just decided, as someone with her own agency, that she didn’t want to be with him. Even after a storybook ending, someone can still change her mind.
That’s not all, though. To get through the game, you have to turn the conversation with Elaine around. Say all the right things, romance sim style, and you can get to a reconciliation. Get there, and, because you’re ultimately doing this to progress the story, Guybrush asks her if it means he can have that map piece. With that, she’s off. It’s an illustration of naivety and insensitivity on the part of Guybrush as a character, but it’s also a question that it’s kind of easy to be behind as the player, which makes the result another kind of reproach. Treating people like things to be used is no way to build relationships.
The uneasiness is built on right after that trip to the Governor’s mansion when you get the means to trigger one of the game’s moments of most surreal brilliance. Guybrush gets knocked unconscious by a tree-climbing fall, the world turns red, and he gets a vision. With the game’s newfound elan in mixing the hilarious and horrifying, that vision features the return of his parents, their transformation into singing and dancing skeletons, and Guybrush getting attacked by the Guybrush from The Secret of Monkey Island. Even his former self doesn’t like what he’s becoming.
The appearance of Guybrush’s parents is also part of the lightly woven overarching meta-mystery that Monkey Island 2 ultimately turns out to have in place of a more conventional story. That approach is maybe its biggest and most contentious legacy, or rather its nihilist ending is, with its suggestion that none of the game was real. It could be a cop-out, but it’s handled so well, and makes so much sense in light of everything about the prior dismantling of mythic heroism, that it’s instead a satisfying pulling back of narrative layers.
See, the textual and meta-textual hints are all there, especially on a repeat playthrough. The world of Monkey Island was already one happy to bend realism to the services of comedy, but it goes deeper. Something very strange is going on here. There’s the suggestion that the treasure Guybrush is searching for will open the way to a new world. There’s the mechanical pump powering a waterfall, which draws the comment “what is this doing in a pirate game?” before opening the way to an electric-lit maintenance tunnel. And then, finally, once its whole shaggy dog story has finished and we’re back with dangling Guybrush and present reality, there’s a fall into the disused tunnels under a theme park, and a revelation that the game’s characters are kids playing in that park.
The game’s final section is as funny as any, but also has a sense of melancholic, creepy wrongness that’s breathtaking. You’re hunted down in this place that shouldn’t exist, but eventually makes a twisted kind of sense. There’s a moment where you take an elevator and end up in a back alley from the first game, turned into a lifeless set, that still makes my skin crawl a bit.
The final implication is that Guybrush got away with acting like the hero of a story, got away with treating all of its less important characters as things, not just because he was telling that story but because the whole place only existed for his adventure experience. It doesn’t totally take away issues with the ahistorical Caribbean setting, but it at least highlights its falseness. At the end, a story drawing on the ideas of a theme park ride turns into a story that says it was a theme park ride, and that ties the neatest and most delightful bow on its wonderful package of stories within stories.
[This piece originally appeared on AAA]