The Curse of Monkey Island is a point and click adventure game from LucasArts. It is the third game in the. Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell ».
Cheerfully blatant anachronisms like the grog machine and Stan the used-boat salesman are everywhere. Ron Gilbert has mentioned the grog machine as one of his great lessons in “copyrights and trademarks.” Apparently getting it to look enough like a Coke machine to make the joke work but not so much that Lucasfilm was likely to get sued was quite the exercise in triangulation. Taken apart from its immense importance as a model for future designs at Lucasfilm and elsewhere, The Secret of Monkey Island might initially seem a less than overwhelming package. It exists in very typical adventure-game territory for its era, at first glance dismayingly so. We’ve got yet another sad-sack loser of a protagonist, wandering through a comedy landscape built from pop-culture detritus, anachronisms, and meta-humor.
The whole ought to read as lazy as most such efforts. Yet two things save the day, both of which feel intrinsic to the people who wrote the game, Ron Gilbert and his two assistant writers Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. The first is the marvelously unaffected quality of the humor. The game is consistently, off-handedly funny without ever conspicuously straining to be in the manner of its peers.
Where their humor is labored, Monkey Island‘s is effortless. And then there’s the related quality of a certain sweetness about the game. Guybrush Threepwood is the ultimate innocent.
He just wants to be a Disney version of a pirate and to rescue and win the hand of the beautiful Elaine; guile is a foreign concept to him. Not only is The Secret of Monkey Island that rarest of beasts, a self-styled comedy adventure that’s genuinely, consistently funny, it’s about as likeable a game as has ever been made. This is a game where when a cannibal asks you how to “get ahead” he means no, that one’s just too much fun to spoil. The Secret of Monkey Island isn’t flashy or self-consciously spectacular in the way that so many contemporaneous Sierra adventures strained to be, but it is sophisticated in its aesthetics in a way few other games of its era can match. Still working with 16-color EGA graphics (a 256-color VGA version, from which the screenshots in this article are drawn, was released within a few months of the original), artists Steve Purcell and Mark Ferrari used their limited color palette to good effect to evoke the various moods of the various environments, while Michael Land crafted a gentle reggae-influenced soundtrack to plink away unobtrusively in the background or swell up into the foreground as circumstances dictated. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island really does feel like wandering through a delightful pirate theme park (a quality which the rather infamous ending of the sequel, which we won’t go into further in this article, would take very much to heart). Most of all, The Secret of Monkey Island thrives on its puzzle design.
The game’s plot plays out in four chapters, within each of which you have broad discretion to solve puzzles at your own pace and in your own order. (“Give the player options” is another commandment in “Why Adventure Games Suck.”) Its most famous puzzle, “insult sword-fighting,” says much about the game’s personality as a whole: instead of fighting with swords, pirates in this game like to fight via insults. You need to collect these insults and their ripostes as you explore, then apply them just right to win the “sword fight.” (Hey, anything’s better than a sharp sword in the gut, right?) The idea was born as Ron Gilbert was watching old pirate movies of the Errol Flynn stripe, and noticed that the opponents spent as much time verbally as physically assaulting one another. What with a verbal joust being far easier to implement in an adventure game than a sword-fighting engine, it didn’t take him long to run with the idea. But really the entirety of the puzzle design, top to bottom, is just superb, managing to be funny and clever and occasionally challenging without ever devolving into the random using of each object on each other object.
Throughout, attention is paid to you the player’s time and sanity in a way very few games of the era bother to do. For instance, at one point you need to follow another character through the jungle to find a secret location. Most games of the time would happily make you do this over and over, every time you want to return to said location — not least because doing so could serve to boost the length of the game at no expense. The Secret of Monkey Island only makes you do it once, then proceeds to do it for you from then on. “No point in having to solve the same puzzle over and over,” said Gilbert. Amen to that. The game’s system of nudging you on to the correct solution to many puzzles is subtle to the extent that many players never even notice it’s there — and this, it must be said, again feels like the way it ought to be.
At the beginning of the game, you’re expected to fulfill three tasks to prove to the pirates on the island that Guybrush has what it takes to become a pirate as well. As you poke around the island, your challengers actually take note of what you’ve done, and will offer some hints based on your progress if you go back and talk to them. “We want to guide the player subtly through the game,” said Gilbert’s colleague David Fox.
“If the game works right, it should know that you’re stuck somewhere and it should give you a little help in a subtle way, so that you can solve the puzzle without feeling like it was solved for you.” In the context of 1990, the year of The Secret of Monkey Island‘s release, this was astonishingly progressive design. “As opposed,” remarked Fox wryly, “to the kind of game where the designer seems to be saying, ‘Aha! I’ve got you this time!’ and you have to spend three hours of gameplay to find some hidden object that you need to solve one puzzle.” A rare example of a game where every element complements every other element, The Secret of Monkey Island has gone down in history as one of the finest, most justly beloved graphic adventures ever made. And for any aspiring adventure designer, even today, it’s a veritable master class in how to make an adventure game that most definitively doesn’t suck. Released in October of 1990 as Lucasfilm’s second adventure of the year, The Secret of Monkey Island shared with its immediate predecessor Loom its pretend-the-player-can’t-save approach to design.
Loom, however, had been a bridge too far for many traditionalist adventure gamers. What with its aggressively minimalist interface and portentous setting and story, it felt like an adventure game filtered through the aesthetics of a European avant-garde film. But The Secret of Monkey Island was, to strain the metaphor, all Hollywood.
Whatever its innovations, it was also very much a meat-and-potatoes adventure game in the old style, complete with a menu of verbs, a comic tone, lots of object-oriented puzzles to solve, and a length more in keeping with that people had come to expect from a $40 boxed adventure game. It was thus far better equipped to deliver the gospel of “Why Adventure Games Suck” than Loom had been.
While Loom had been greeted with critical uncertainty, reviewers fell over themselves to praise The Secret of Monkey Island, which wasted no time in becoming Lucasfilm Games’s biggest hit to date. It marks an enormously important watershed in the history of Lucasfilm’s adventure games in general, the moment when they commercially and creatively came fully into their own. The classic era of Lucasfilm adventures begins in earnest with The Secret of Monkey Island, which would become nothing less than the ideal most of the games that would follow would strive, sometimes perhaps a little too self-consciously, to reach. Its commercial performance aside, The Secret of Monkey Island‘s enormous importance in the history of the art of adventure-game design in general shouldn’t be neglected. For many designers working at other companies, Ron Gilbert’s no-deaths-and-no-dead-ends approach hit home with the force of revelation.
Both Corey Cole, co-designer of the series for Sierra, and Bob Bates, co-founder of, brought up The Secret of Monkey Island unprompted in recent interviews with me as a work that made a huge impression on them. By no means would all designers push as far as Ron Gilbert had in the name of making a more playable adventure game. Corey Cole’s design partner Lori Ann Cole, for example, pronounced herself to be against “capricious” death in adventure games, but insisted that the possibility of death needed to be present to foster “personal involvement” and “an emotional stake” and to elevate the game above “mere amusement” — all of which positions strike me as perfectly reasonable for the very different sort of adventure games she and Corey were making. Still, everyone serious about the art of adventure-game design simply had to reckon with The Secret of Monkey Island, had to decide what its lessons really were and how to apply them.
The game’s impact was such that to speak of a pre- Monkey Island and post- Monkey Island era of adventure games wouldn’t be at all out of order. As the 1990s began, times were beginning to change inside Lucasfilm Games. With the fire hose of cash that had been the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises now ebbing and no new sequels in either blockbuster franchise on the horizon, Lucasfilm in general was concentrating on becoming a more commercially savvy organization.
These changes inevitably affected the games division. Just about the instant that The Secret of Monkey Island was hitting store shelves, a major corporate reorganization was in progress at Lucasfilm, which saw the games division given far more resources — their personnel roll grew from about 25 to more than 100 between 1989 and 1991 — but also given much closer supervision.
They would now be expected to justify each of their projects to the accountants. This transformation of Lucasfilm Games from sideline to major profit center was by no means viewed as a comprehensively bad thing by everyone working inside the games division — it did after all lead to them finally being let loose on the Star Wars intellectual property, something they’d been wishing for for years — but it would change the character of the place and the games that came from it forever. The changes meant that the two sequels to Loom which Brian Moriarty had hoped to make would never be realized; Moriarty was instead sent off to work on a new educational-games initiative. A sequel to the big hit The Secret of Monkey Island, however, became a major priority under the new order, especially as Lucasfilm, now devoting lots of resources to and those aforementioned, had no other adventures on their calendar for 1991. Released in December of 1991, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge didn’t disappoint commercially. Benefiting from the enormous good will accrued by its predecessor, it became another bestseller, and won a number of the game-of-the-year awards that a tardy industry should have been awarding to its predecessor (inertia being the force it is, most of the awards for 1990 had gone to Sierra’s pretty but horribly designed, which served as its own argument for “why adventure games suck”). Today, the sequel remains almost as beloved as the original among hardcore Lucasfilm fans.
Personally, though, I’m not such a big fan of Monkey Island 2 as I am of its predecessor. Ron Gilbert had spent two and a half years designing, writing, and developing the first Monkey Island, alone or with others. He was given just a year for Monkey Island 2, a game that’s at least 50 percent larger, and I fancy I can see this disparity in the end result.
The writing is neither as sharp nor as sweet. For the first time in a Ron Gilbert game, some of the humor is more gross than clever — spitting, with attention to the color and consistency of your loogies, is a major puzzle mechanic — and some of the rest is weirdly mean-spirited. Guybrush Threepwood has been transformed from the gee-whiz innocent of the first game to a bit of a raging asshole, the type of guy who steals a monocle from an innocent character who can’t see a thing without it and locks another guy who didn’t do anything to him inside a coffin. I don’t know to what I should attribute the change in tone — whether to changes going on inside Lucasfilm Games at the time, to changes going on in the personal lives of Ron Gilbert and/or the other members of his writing team, to the pressure of getting a bigger game out in much less time, or simply to happenstance. I know only that it doesn’t sit that well with me.
Captured by LeChuck in Monkey Island 2. The game will arbitrarily let you use only one item you’re carrying to effect your escape, and there’s no way to know ahead of time what that item is. Guess what that means you have to do In terms of puzzle design, the sequel also marks a big step down from its predecessor. While the no-deaths-and-no-dead-ends approach to design is still present, Monkey Island 2 constantly violates another of the dicta found in Ron Gilbert’s manifesto. Arbitrary puzzles Puzzles and their solutions need to make sense. They don’t have to be obvious, just make sense. The best reaction after solving a tough puzzle should be, “Of course, why didn’t I think of that sooner!” The worst, and most often heard after being told the solution, is, “I never would have gotten that!” If the solution can only be reached by trial and error or plain luck, it’s a bad puzzle.
Monkey Island 2 is full of these sorts of, to use Ron Gilbert’s own words, “bad puzzles.” Many solutions are so outlandish that you can stumble upon them only by using every object on every other object. At one point, for instance, you’re carrying a monkey around in your inventory (don’t ask!) when you come upon a closed water valve you need to open.
Using the monkey on the valve does the trick because “monkey wrench.” Now, credit where it’s due, there’s some real wit to this. Yet it’s the sort of thing absolutely no player will ever think of on her own, especially given that the game hasn’t heretofore shown any interest in this sort of wordplay.
(And that’s without even beginning to consider the problems of localization to other languages than English, which tends to render a puzzle like this into a complete non sequitur.) As you get deeper into the game, there’s more and more of this sort of thing, along with pixel hunts, an infuriating maze, and puzzles that can only be solved by trying to pick up every seemingly immovable item on the screen. Monkey Island 2 at times seems like an experiment in how annoying an adventure game can be without technically violating Lucasfilm’s no-deaths-and-no-dead-ends policy. Arbitrary puzzles that can be solved only through trial and error would prove to be Lucasfilm’s Achilles heel going forward; too many of the games to come would feature puzzles designed more to create a laugh at how ridiculous they are than to be interesting or satisfying to solve.
The end result is to create a feeling in the player of playing the interface rather than participating actively in the game world. Despite my complaints, by no means was Lucasfilm’s progressive design philosophy completely abandoned for Monkey Island 2. The puzzle you need to solve to get through the swamp is a prime example. After you figure out what object to use as a paddle, the game solves the puzzle for you on each return visit. Perhaps aware that they had crossed a line in trying to make Monkey Island 2 more difficult than its predecessor, Lucasfilm added a “Lite” mode to the game which scales the complexity of the puzzle structure back dramatically. Unfortunately, most players agree that the Lite mode goes too far in the other direction, removing most of the interest from the game. Taken together, the very presence of the two modes speaks to a design that didn’t quite hit the sweet spot of the first game, and to a design team that at some intuitive level may have realized this.
Shortly after completing Monkey Island 2, Ron Gilbert left Lucasfilm Games, resulting in a long hiatus for Guybrush, Elaine, LeChuck, and company. Given my snail’s pace through history, there will thus likely be an almost equally lengthy hiatus before they’ll grace these pages again.
For now, I can only strongly encourage you to make the time to if you haven’t already. It’s as strong a comedy adventure as you’ll ever see, and as historically important an adventure game as any released since Crowther and Woods’s seminal original Adventure. While you can as you see fit, The Secret of Monkey Island is one adventure game that everybody really ought to play. It’s just that important. And even better, it’s just that good. ( Sources: the films From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years and its associated extras; the book Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution by Michael Rubin; A.C.E. Of April 1990; The Adventurer of Fall 1990, Spring 1991, and Fall 1991; Computer Gaming World of December 1990, June 1991, October 1991, November 1991, January 1992, May 1992, and November 1992; Retro Gamer 34.
Also Ron Gilbert’s blog,.). Regarding the “monkey wrench” in MI2, MI1 does have the “red herring”, which at least for me made a certain puzzle unsolvable due to the nonsensical German translation. That aside, having replayed both games shortly after beating MI5 a few years back, I found the humor and general ambience pretty juvenile. No wonder I liked it so much as a youngster, but nowadays I found MI2 to be the more palatable experience. At least this time I played the English version, so finally the herring made sense as well (and was one of the better puns in the whole game, too). While I was taken aback by the ending of MI2 back then, I’d really would love to see Ron’s version of part 3. I think it might be both shocking and brilliant.
![Patch Patch](http://www.monkeyisland.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/monkey104_235x235.png)
I loved Monkey Island 1 and 2! I especially appreciate the “don’t waste the player’s time” aspect of it. I remember when Guybrush has to paddle a boat between islands repeatedly, I almost cheered when at one point the game put up a title card “After lots more furious paddling” and moved me to my destination directly.
While 2 isn’t as appreciated, my absolute favorite thing about it was the two different puzzle modes. “Lite” simplified the puzzles, but the harder mode.actually expanded the game. with new sequences, scenes, dialogue and jokes so it was completely worthwhile to experience the game a second time. It even recognized when you tried to solve a puzzle the easy way and Guybrush would comment “I see someone’s been playing the game in LITE mode”. Monkey Island 1 is one of those adventure games that feels timeless. Every time I revisit it, it still feels pretty fresh and new, in large part to its really elegant design. While it’s harder to get a hold of these days, I recommend tracking down the EGA original version.
While the VGA version isn’t bad at all, I think that Purcell’s portraits and backgrounds in EGA look far better and have a bit more character. Monkey Island 2 might not be as elegant, but the iMuse system – specifically in Woodtick – is cool as heck.
The way that the music segues as you approach each area is a real neat piece of programming. I don’t think the remaster of 2 (even with the midi music) has this, as there was no easy way to do it with the orchestrated music.
The original Monkey Island is a strong contender for being my favourite game of all time, certainly as a one-off experience. I never liked MI2. It felt to me like it had been made by a different team. The puzzles didn’t work, the dynamic between Guybrush and Elaine was all wrong, the ending was irksome.
And it felt like it was essentially ignored by all subsequent installments. The Highlander 2 of the franchise (albeit well-reviewed at the time). I hated that monkey wrench puzzle in MI2. In particular it wasn’t likely to occur to people from the UK (where the term isn’t used), and I also remember there being an item at the junk store on Phatt Island that looked like it would be a perfect fit for the valve, butwasn’t. I really don’t understand why the game got the high scores that it did.
It’s actually interesting to compare the “get ahead” puzzle with the “monkey wrench” puzzle. While the former might be subtle, it can be reasonably expected to be solved by means other than brute force; I did solve this one on my own in a flash of insight, and, let me tell you, it felt really good.;) The latter, though, is something nobody would ever just think of unprompted. The.only. way to solve it is by brute force. The difference is that the vital clue is given to you in the case of “get ahead” — you see the phrase in question right there on the screen — while you’re expected to divine the solution of “monkey wrench” out of whole cloth. The latter puzzle, in other words, is a read-the-author’s-mind puzzle.
Only the possibility of lawnmowering through all objects makes it soluble at all. Thank God Monkey Island 2 wasn’t a text adventure! Of course, both puzzles do present a challenge to localization teams. It sounds as if the Spanish team at least may have wound up making a better puzzle out of the monkey wrench. To be fair, the monkey’s arms and hands in the graphical representation in the inventory resemble a wrench if I remember correctly, but yeah, that one’s a little heavy; I think Ron Gilbert has said somewhere that he regrets this puzzle.
Apart from that I’m quite shocked by the amount of negative feedback here, I never would have guessed! I knew that the ending pissed of a lot of people, but in my recollection the game is so brilliant, takes everything that made MI so great and expands on it. I always thought everybody agreed that Mi2 was even better than the first one. I stand corrected, wow! Btw Thimbleweed Park is coming out on the 30th! If nobody else will stand up for Monkey Island 2, then I suppose I will have to. I played it before the first game, and when playing predecessor later I found everything a little weaker there: from graphics and music to atmosphere and humor.
Everything in the first game felt a little more childlike and less cool and to the teenager I was. In particular the innocent Guybrush of the first game is a lot less fun than the cruel and bratty character of the second, and gives the whole game a more mature tone. More Simpsons than Duck Tales. I had a lot less problem with the monkey wrench puzzle than the herring one, and I absolutely loved the ending of MI2.
![Patch Patch](http://www.planete-aventure.net/images/news/monkeyb5.jpg)
The suggestion that the entirety of the game (and the first) was really some kids playing in a theme park, that was just genius and explained a lot. I completely agree with you Petter. Although Jimmy is doing a fantastic job at describing the merits of the first Monkey Island, he’s being too negative about the second.
The comparison between the game size and the time required to complete their development is, for instance, absolutely unfair. It doesn’t keep into consideration the much larger team deployed for Monkey Island 2, as well as the fact that the basic ambiance and characters for the series had already been developed. Frankly I think it’s quite silly to compare them. Would you ever compare Terminator 1 to Terminator 2? Both in Monkey Island and Terminator there was a considerable improvement in the domain of graphics and sounds (special FX) and a much larger story. But the story doesn’t stand flawlessly on its legs, as anyone who tried to play MI2 first or watch T2 first. The parallels don’t stop there.
Even though MI1 was released in 1990, it /feels/ like a product of the 80s, whereas both MI2, like T2 -just one year later- embody the “badassitude” of the 90s. I just think they should be both revered, but for different reasons.
When my birthday rolled around in 1990 I would have been 14. I remember going to Eggehead Software (the brick and mortar predecessor of Newegg) and seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Monkey Island sitting on the shelf. I had just enough birthday cash to buy one so I went for the name recognition of Indiana Jones. Months later flush with Christmas cash I went back to Egghead and picked up Monkey Island.
I remember on the bus ride home looking at the Pirate Wheel (copy protection) and already beginning to think I had made a mistake going for Indiana Jones months earlier. It has been years since I played Money Island but I still remember all the jokes including disk 22. Monkey Island 2 was a good game but there are parts that to this day I dread (if this is 6 and this is 9 what is this I’m looking directly at you). Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I’ve never played Monkey Island, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. I’ll definitely have to give it a try now! That said, this is the first place I’ve seen people criticize MI2.
Lots of people seem to prefer it to the original. “inertia being the force it is, most of the awards for 1990 had gone to Sierra’s pretty but horribly designed King’s Quest V, which served as its own argument for ‘why adventure games suck'” Just out of curiosity, have you only played King’s Quest 1, 4, and 5?
Well, I’ve played the first six to completion and dabbled with the 7th. The usual reason people give for liking 6 is the writing. It has more developed dialogue than the other games, but my main objection to it is that, for various reasons, it feels out of place in the King’s Quest series (although 7 and 8 are, if anything, much worse offenders in that regard). Having said that, my only major objection to its game play is its point-and-click interface.
There is at least one death without warning, and there are some ways to make it unwinnable, but nothing really bad IMHO. 5 is much worse in that regard.
Interestingly, 7 makes it impossible to render the game unwinnable, and death is always easily undone, but almost everyone agrees it’s bad. Speaking of Sierra games, you might be interested in Police Quest 2 and Quest for Glory 4. PQ2 is much better regarded than the first and with good reason, and QFG4 manages to recapture the feeling of being on your own like in the original. The only two major problems with it its bugginess, and sometimes everything you can do is listed out for you. As fun as those games were, Lucas Arts basically destroyed the whole genre by dumbing it down to the extreme. In every other single genre dying or losing is part of the game and what makes everything a challenge. But in Adventure games it’s “bad” if you can die or make a mistakei never understood this weird logic, it would be like having Godmode in First Person Shooters or an Autopilot in racing games.
It just makes no sense and it was the beginning of the end for challenging games, it continued on with making games linear, easy, dumb and simple. A shame, really. I think MI2 was treated a bit unfairly. It has the monkey wrench puzzle and the pick-up-dog puzzles that are unfair. But where it’s good, it’s better than MI1.
In particular it has a few puzzles so good that you could base a degree thesis on them. “Stick leaflet with Kate’s face on the wanted poster in order to have her jailed” is arguably the best puzzle of all times. “Saw the peg leg of the sleeping pirate because you guess that the woodcutter will be called to fix it” is impressive.
“Blow the horn in the location of the spitting contest” is total genius. It’s a matter of being totally logical, totally fair, and yet not too easy, and funny. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, which took guests through a whole pirate adventure in fifteen minutes, climaxing in a cannon duel between two ships. Just to note, there is no duel between two ships in the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean ride. There is a scene towards the beginning of the ride where a ship fires its cannons at a fort, but its climax involves pirates pillaging a town then shooting pistols at each other from either side of the ride canal. Also, I believe you may have misspelled “Disneyfied” as “Disnefied.” It certainly rolls off the tongue easier, but the dictionary (and Wikipedia, for that matter) has it with a Y (as a form of the word “Disneyfication.”) One other note.
Didn’t Lucasfilm Games rename itself LucasArts during that massive restructuring in 1991? (It even says “LucasArts” on the MI2 cover you used in your article.) It just seemed odd you didn’t mention it, as you were sure to footnote the Activision/Mediagenic name change when discussing that period. Just wondered if it was something you overlooked. I, too, thought MI2 wasn’t nearly as good as the first one. I think the spitting puzzle kind of half turned me off to it.
I am very surprised and delighted that a lot of you guys also didn’t care for it as much. Most people I’ve talked to preferred it to the first one. They did have a leap in technology and had their first scanned in (I think hand painted) background art. And the whole iMuse thing. It was also a little more non-linear where you could travel to the different islands. I say a little only because you could do the three trials in nearly any order in the first one.
But the second feels like it’s more non-linear. That said, I still prefer the first. The one I played was the vga version on cd-rom with redbook audio — to this day I still prefer that cd audio to all the MI theme songs in all the games (be it midi, or what-have-you). First off, I got linked to one of your posts from somewhere random and ended up enthralled.
Great job on writing so well on both the games and business side of an industry I had only passing familiarity with! Even though I disagree with your overall appraisal of MI2, I do agree with your point as far as the bad puzzles go. One of the funniest moments in gaming for teenage-me was when Guybrush’s parents show up, turn to skeletons, and start singing. But this was totally undercut by what I saw as an illogical use of the information in the song (I recall it being used to escape LeChuck’s dungeon, but you have to only use the first body part of each line or something). You also mentioned the death gag in MI1, but I think the one in MI2 outdoes it.
After dying it cuts to you hanging next to Elaine, who doesn’t believe your story, it then takes you back to where you were just before it happened. Very fair, and funny in execution.
Bonjour Tout le monde. Et oui on parle et ecrit aussi en francais a Telltale:).
Desole pour l'accentuation et les fautes d'orthographes mais on n'a pas encore la version word en francais ni le clavier, mais c'est en route. Pour tous les fancais de metropole, ou voisins ou d'amerique du nord ou tout simplement des francophiles on aimerait bien savoire si vous aimeriez des versions localise en voix de nos jeux. Traditionellement on localise en francais que lorsque les jeux sont vendus en retail par nos partenaires, maintenant on veut rendre la meme faveure en digital des le premier lancement.
Allez y, deballer tout et dites nous ce que vous pensez Merci encore et a bientot AB. From what I can gather, he said he realizes the game has errors in spelling in French subtitles and that he wants to know if there is interest in vocal localization for digital release. That's not quite right. He's saying that Telltale would like French-speaking (and French culture-loving) people's opinion regarding potential French dubbing of Telltale's games. He's adding that the games are usually translated into French when they're distributed by Telltale's partners and they would like to make the French translation (dub) a reality directly from Telltale (and as early as the original digital release) from now on.
He also apologized for the lack of accents and spelling mistakes (in his post, not in the game ) but Telltale doesn't have a French keyboard or the French version of Word yet (they're coming, though). Bienvenue, ABlan! Hi, first of all, thanks for taking into consideration what the french speakers would like.
I think that the 'french people' around here aren't exactly the audience you're trying to reach though, since most of them can speak english, or understand it enough to play adventure games. Though, I think everyone would agree that for the average french gamer, an adventure game really needs to be dubbed. Not only is it painful to read subtitles while playing this kind of game (actually since I'm fluent, I never use them because I find it irritating), that requires to have a look on the animations and the characters, while enjoying the scenes.
But once again, it's only if you can guarantee some quality in the process. If you have any doubt, you shouldn't try it. Because a bad localization is probably worst than anything, and people would just end up using the original audio (like most germans do with BTTF). As for Monkey Island and Back to the Future, those are famous licences, and I think that securing the 'main' heroes' voice actors is probably the key here. Even though you should try to find the right persons to take care of the translations, to make sure there's no mistake and that it's well done. Those guys took care of the 'Runaway' adventure games, and their work was pleased by all the gamers and critics, for the heart they put into the translation (jokes, dubbing process etc.).