Your first experience with Monkey Island
 

I was born in 1983 and I grew up in the 90s with reading and seeing stuff about old adventures in the legendary PIXEL magazine back then.Stuff like this in the picture below.

I grew up and finally started playing my own adventure games a few years ago.And I always wanted to play that legendary Monkey Island game.

My first experience with these magnificent series was Tales of Monkey Island which I was playing months ago...probably last summer.I stopped at the second tale for a bit but that's not the point.

Now I am finally playing the Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition and I am loving it.I am loving this game little by little.I take screenshots of it.

As a die-hard Jack Keane fan I was MORE than satisfied with my first experience with these series,Tales of Monkey Island was and is superb for me!

And....the classics look truly amazing!Really legendary.

So what about you guys?Do you remember your first time with Lucasarts epics?

I got a hold of this amazing game some time in the early 90's, after having watched a friend play the game on his Amiga.
I was no stranger to adventure-games as I was spoon-fed the quest-games from Sierra at an early age (through my dad of... I was only 10-12 when MI was first released).

I have played all of the games, all though MI4 didn't really impress me. Guess I missed the 2D too much. Shamefully enough, I have yet to play through the Tales of Monkey Island episodes. but I will set aside a weekend shortly and buy it from Steam. I hear they come highly recommended.

To this very day, the intro-tune always put me in a good mood.

Yeah I had always heard of the humor of the Monkey Island and that it's very good to play and all.And when I started playing Tales of Monkey Island I was very happy and very well satisfied.BUT...it wasn't until the beginning of the second episode,during the sword fight with Morgana LeFay or what's her name that I really said WOW these guys are crazy!The guys who made it I mean.

I've been playing adventure games (mostly Sierra) since the 1980s but never even heard of Monkey Island until the early 2000s, a few years after graduating from college. (Probably around the same time I discovered Adventure Gamers!) Didn't play one until 2004. And then I wrote this.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, my first LucasArts experience was the summer after graduating high school, when the guy I was dating was playing Full Throttle. For some reason it turned me off... I think because of the premise I thought it was more of an action game than an adventure. Then in college I stumbled across a Mac demo for Sam & Max Hit the Road, but only really paid attention to it because the guy I was dating (different guy) had given me Surfin' the Highway for Christmas. Don't think I realized it was an adventure game, either.

Hm. At least I picked boyfriends with good taste in games.

yeah but you left em both :P

But of course... they only played LucasArts games, and I'm a Sierra girl. ;)

My first LucasArts (then Lucasfilm) adventure was "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders" when I was six or so -- a friend had it, and I went over to his house every day to play it.

The game got me hooked on the SCUMM system, and soon after finishing it, I spotted an ad in a gaming mag for an upcoming titled called "The Secret of Monkey Island." On the day it came out, my dad took me to a Soft Warehouse (now CompUSA) store in Chicago, and I got it with my allowance money. It was the first PC adventure game I ever bought, and it will always be dear to me because of that. My greatest memories from the game are the scene where you have to follow the shopkeeper to the swordmaster of Melee Island, the scene where you break into the governor's mansion, and the scene where you have to transport the grog to Otis' cell to break him out.

When I picked up the game box off the store shelf, I also remember seeing the box for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." I saved up for and bought that game a few months later. But that's a story for another time ...

My 4X CD-ROM came bundled with The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Rebel Assault, and The Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. I could never get the latter to run. Rebel Assault was fun but frustrating. The first two were the first adventure games that I played to completion. I had a number of earlier games from the genre, but I was too young and they were from a time when puzzles were a bit obtuse and interfaces weren't as friendly.

Those two games had a huge impact on me. I played them over and over and sought out more games like them for years.

My first experience was The Curse of Monkey Island around 97-98. It froze on the very first scene, I returned the game to my friend and didn't play the game for a long time after that. It is still the least favourite game in the series (not counting Tales, of course).

I first heard of Monkey Island through a review of the Curse of Monkey Island in a copy of PC Powerplay that was given to me as a Kris Kringle present during the eighth grade in 1997.

By this time I had a big affection for games that used hand drawn cel animation including adventure games like King's Quest VII, Leisure Suit Larry 7, Broken Sword and Discworld II so I was immediately interested.

I played the demo with my younger sister and we both enjoyed the game even though I didn't really like Guybrush Threepwood and saw him as a sap. I also didn't care for pirates. Nonetheless, I purchased the game shortly after because of the animation and downloaded the first two Monkey Island games via an old abandonware site.

I must admit I didn't really love this series until Tales of Monkey Island, which was an amazing game that belongs along side the first Monkey Island. Until then, I had always respectfully appreciated the series for the impact it made for the genre.

Without it, we would not have had the two superior adventure games - Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road.

I hadn't played any MI games until I bought Grim Fandango.
It came with a CD containing MI1 and MI2.

I was also a Sierra girl and hadn't played any Lucas Arts games until then and of course have been hooked since.

http://pcmuseum.ca/images/W95LucasAr...eIII-1-200.jpg

i would have been about 9 or 10 and I bought the lucas arts archives 3 with my own money. i really wanted to play full throttle and the dig so i wasn't really excited about monkey island 1 and 2 because they didn't have voice acting. But, when I did play them I they were the funniesty thing ever.

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/6976/si9413055.jpg

This is an excerpt from a local gaming magazine with Monkey Island walkthrough, which was several pages long. I was reading it like some kind of an adventure novel, at a time while i even didn't have a computer. I remember how stunned i was at the complexity of all the things you need to do in it. In a way, it was my first acknowledgement of adventure games, even though Monkey Island wasn't my first adventure.

I was also born in 1983 but I played my first Lucas adventures (Loom and MI1) around the time they were released, early 90s. (I know the first titles were actually late 80s.)

They certainly had a huge impact on my interest in (adventure) gaming.

Technically they were Lucasfilm games, they didn't change names until 1993. :)

I don't think it was my first Lucasfilm game, but I played the Amiga version of MI in 1991.

Dial-a-pirate and all.

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/6...mbmi1amiga.jpg

i remember playing the first Monkey Island when i was in middle school or secondary school, so it must have been in '90 or '91. I was known as Monkey Island Marc cos i talked about it so much at the time :D

I love the MI series. I got my Dad to buy me Monkey Island 2 for a Christmas present but my parents (Christian) objected to the voodoo cover and my Mom convinced him to take it back -- but not before I snuck into their room, borrowed the game, made copies of the disks and replaced it. Then I had the best gaming experience of my life! Haha! They still don't know about that!

My first experience with Monkey Island came relatively late. I got my first PC in 1993 when I was 12 years old. My dad somehow got his hands on a few illegally copied floppy disks that introduced me to the first Larry game, the first Space Quest, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (the non-talkie version on five floppies), etc.
I still don't know how he got them in a time when we were one of the first of all our friends and family with a PC, years before we had any access to the internet.
I immediately fell in love with the adventure genre. In part because of the first Larry game (I was twelve, pubescent and horny), but most of all because of Fate of Atlantis. I took a liking to those LucasArts-style adventure games, and that love boomed in 1995 when I got my first CD-ROM player.

The second I had that CD-ROM player I bought some games for it, most notably a box set with Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (talkie version) and an X-Wing/TIE fighter Star Wars game that didn't interest me in the slightest (*). I also got my hands on a demo for The Dig, which became a "day one" purchase upon its release.

By 1996 a lot of my friends had a PC as well, and adventure games were highly popular among us all. Lots of games got lended out and traded along. It's how I got to play the first two Simon games, The 7th Guest, King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, Zork Nemesis, Phantasmagoria and others.
One of my classmates had the first two Monkey Island games as well, and he had planned on lending them to me (like he did with the Simon-games), but he wanted to finish them himself first, and there was another classmate that had asked them first, so I was to await my turn. At the end of that school year I switched schools, however, and partly lost contact with those former classmates. Because of that, I didn't get to play those Monkey Island games after all, and it took until 1999 before I finally got to 'experience' them.

Meanwhile, for some reason, I had completely missed the release of Curse of Monkey Island in 1997 despite remaining an avid adventure gamer. I hadn't missed Grim Fandango's release, though. That was another "day one" purchase.

Anyway, in 1999 I met another adventure gamer who quickly lent me his copies of all three Monkey Island games as well as Loom. This stunned me, because I was only aware of TWO Monkey Island games back then.

When I finally got around to playing them, they quickly joined the ranks of my favourite adventure games - I really was (and still am) a LucasArts-aficionado. The blind lookout in The Secret of Monkey Island made sure that I'd immediately like the game, and the "deadly piranha poodles", their disclaimer, and Guybrush's "silent" break-in of the governor's mansion cemented it as one of the funniest experiences of my life.
The second Monkey Island was "more of the same", which was awesome, and the third became my favourite game of all time. I still often quote the game, occasionally sing the "A Pirate I Was Meant to Be" song, and I still have very fond memories of Murray!

After having finally played the Monkey Island games, (and in the meantime getting access to the internet and thus remaining up-to-date on new releases) it's needless to say that Escape from Monkey Island was another "day one" purchase... And it didn't disappoint. While not of the same quality as the first three installments, EfMI was still a great and funny game.

I haven't played the Tales of Monkey Island yet, but I have purchased them, and they're on my list of games to play. They're not too far on that list either, so in a few months time I'll finally get around to them... :D





(*) Edit: I just recognised the box for those LucasArts games as being "The LucasArts Archives vol. I" (and that Star Wars game was apparently Rebel Assault). That box didn't include Full Throttle, so that must have been a separate purchase. Yeah, my memory is a bit fuzzy about that, apparently. Buying at the same time does not equal buying in the same box set... :D





Yikes, I wrote another long piece of text... :frown:

For the ADD-people among you, I'll give the tl;dr-version:
"Got into adventure gaming in 1993; learned about the Monkey Island games in 1996; finally got to play them in 1999."
:D

No I think I like the long version mate!

I first played Monkey Island at a friend's house, around the release. I was SO envious that he had it.

Eventually I got to borrow it, and had a blast. I also remember that a "bad-boy" in the neighborhood got Monkey Island 2. I didn't really know this guy, but still me and a friend rang his doorbell and asked if we could borrow MI2. Needless to say, he slammed the door in our faces, lol.

Luckily my birthday was not long after, so I got it then. Ah, the memories.