I stated it in another thread, but I got into Monkey Island, oddly, through Grim Fandango.
Same here, I watched my big brother play it in 1998 then I tried it out - I was 10, my first adventure game (errrm I didn't quite make it without using a walkthrough) and just was so enamoured of it that I decided I needed to play ever LucasArts game ever made. I then played Sam 'n' Max, on 8 floppy disks, in German (I don't speak German but managed to understand the gist of it). My local library in Holland a few years later had CMI and EMI so I borrowed them from there (and bought them years later), man I miss that library, they had good stuff!
I think I might have been nine when my father took me into the back of a store where he had a meeting (one of those primitive computer stores back in the late 80s that had puke green carpet and wires everywhere). He set me up with a demo of Secret of Monkey Island, and I wasn't really that interested but sooooo bored...by the end of his meeting I'd played it three times and it had changed my life.
My friend... He told me how great the games were but I didn't tried it because it sounded weird XD. After I played DOTT (Day of the tentacle) I started to believe him on what games were good. Next thing I knew, he sent me SOMI, MILR, and COMI and I played them all and loved them.
In 1991 I bought my first computer. One of the first games I bought was SoMI. My 3 year old son sat on my lap and we played it together. We loved it. We followed that with Loom and as time progressed, we played almost every adventure game in the LucasArts portfolio.
So basically... we are addicts... we want more! Thanks TellTale!
Well, I had been in love with Adventure Games for quite some time (playing LSL1 and PoliceQuest with mother), but the MI breakthrough came when I had to babysit at my parent's friends. The kids were in bed by 8 but I had been told to wait until the group returned. So I turned on my parent's friend's computer and there it was: MI2. I finished it that very night.
When I was a kid, my father bought our first family computer. Before long, I found a game called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in the 'bargain bin' ... enough to buy, so I bought the Monkey Island 1 + 2 pack from... the very same bargain bin May the banana god bless this bargain bin for centuries to come
Where can this bargain bin be found? It seems it has magical powers.
in 2001, my dad bought EMI on the ps2. i watched him play it and i thoght it was the funniest game ever. so a year later my dad bought my CMI on the pc and i loved it even more. unfortunatly, i could never play the first two games.
I'd been a fan of adventure gaming for about 2 or 3 years, after playing Simon The Sorcerer and Day Of The Tentacle, and one day my dad (who at that time worked at a second-hand electronics shop) came home with Monkey Island 1 and 2 on CD. I got into them quickly, but soon after my dad decided to upgrade the computer (wow, back in the day when we had only one PC in the house...) and the games no longer worked!
I got my own PC a few years later, but running things on DOS never worked that well. I got DOTT working on there with serious sound and music problems, but never got round to getting the Monkey Island games working on it.
But years after I discovered SCUMMVM and got back into the Monkey Island games for good! I even invested in Curse Of Monkey Island upon finishing the first two I'd waited so many years to play again (along with some other adventure games I had rarely played over the years). I think I'll be safe now that SCUMMVM is pretty much here to stay.
Around 1990, I played a demo of The Secret of Monkey island on the Passport to Adventure disk. The EGA graphics and PC speaker music seemed incredible at the time. It was years later until I got to play the full version.
Well, my story will be a lot different than others.
When "The Curse of Monkey Island" came out (1997). I was 1 year old. So ofcourse the first monkey island game for me was tales of monkey island. This june, when E3 took place. I was browsing on gamespot, looking at news etc and I saw that telltale games is making a new monkey island and lucasarts is remaking the first one. So I was thinkg "Uh, thats cool". And sent that info to a friend who is monkey island fan. He ofcourse got excited and told me to try monkey island games. I wasn't sure but decided to wait for the first chapter to come out.
So the first chapter on tales of monkey island came out and I loved it. It was funny, it was creative, it was challenging. The end left me wanting for more. So I waited for the remake to come out. Played, beat it. Loved it again. And thats how I got infected with po..I mean monkey island addiction.
*might have some spelling mistakes, english is my second language*
I went over to a friend's house and he showed me the first one on his computer. The first Monkey Island game I got was Curse of Monkey Island. I never got Escape from Monkey Island nor LeChuck's Revenge. I only recently beat the original for the first time because of the Special Edition
I bought a sound blaster equipment that came with lots of game filled with Lucas Arts Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Shockwave Assault (which i never got to run) and a Sherlock Holmes game which didnt worked. When my big brother installed the SMI 1, i was enchanted with the intro music and piratey atmosphere of the game. i played it in the mid 90's. Good memories good times.
Me too!
Monkey Island came free with a bundle of other games when I bought my SoundBlaster sound card back in 1990-something.
Other games in the bundle included Secret Weapons of luftwaffe, shockwave, loom and sherlock holmes.
That sherlock holmes game was really hard!
A friend from my dads work, lent curse to my dad to let me try. I loved it, I think I kept on making excuses not to give the game back to the guy, I think I might have had it for over a year, but eventually I had to give it back, so I went and bought my own copy.
One day (around 1997) a friend of mine lent me full throttle. It was my first point and click and from then on i was hooked on the genre, eventually i played through all the lucasarts games.
Monkey Island is like Star Wars, something I remember from my childhood but would be unanle to say when and how I watched it for the first time. I do know my first experience with the games were watching my older brothers play (as it was with all games until I got my own computer). Probably in the early 90s.
I had just gotten my first computer in 2000 when I was 17. Immediately scoured the internet for sites relating to any of my interests, because the internet was still very new to me and I was fascinated by the seeming endlessness of it. Wound up on LucasArts' website after searching for Star Wars. There was a big advertisement for the EMI demo, which I played over and over until I bought the game. I loved the humor of EMI, and it opened a whole new world to me. I became a huge fan of not only the Monkey Island series, but the entire backlog of LucasArts games stretching back to Maniac Mansion. Monkey Island has been my personal favorite game series ever since.
My mother was huge on point-and-click adventure games and the Secret of Monkey Island was the first game I ever played. Mind you I was really little at the time and didn't really have much of an idea of what to do.
Something must have stuck though because Monkey Island is my favorite gaming series of all time. Curse is the best game in the series IMHO.
My parents must have bought Secret (the CD version) in the early nineties, when I was still very little. My siblings and I grew up on it, and, I believe, managed to work out how to beat it on our own. Revenge we managed to skip, but Curse was a gift to my mother shortly after it came out and we loved it just as much as Secret. A few years later, we got a 'Monkey Madness' CD that had the first two and the Curse demo on it (well, actually we ended up with two. One of them was glitchy or something and didn't work.) but we didn't get very far with Revenge (despite a walkthrough from a friend) before the computer was updated (and we moved countries) and they all failed to work anymore.
When we got Escape (as with them all, unsure of when) it was again a gift to my mother and we all loved it too, although some of us got stuck on that annoying Monkey Kombat puzzle. Mum never finished it.
Of course, I then discovered ScummVM last year and have been joyously replying the first three since then! I did play Escape too, as I don't have as many problems with it as others, but I acknowledge all the plot-holes and stuff that caused so much argueing over it. And the difficultly of Monkey Kombat.
Ironically Ecape. The main difficulty I found is actually the writing down of Monkey combat You can observe or write not both. Especiually with the complex grid needed.
my Dad often Bought the Bestseller Games Magazine, thats what introduced me to games like Last Crusade, Day of the Tentecle and Fate of Atlantis.
but i did lose the copy protection codes fort Fate and i couldnt play it anymore.
one sunny day i was in Graz with my Dad and i saw a game Box Called Lucas arts 10 adventures box and it had Fate in it so i forced my dad to buy it forme because i wannted to play that game again. well and along with fate i got MI1 MI2 Loom and all the other Great games...
after a while i did lose the codes for MI1 MI2 Fate and so on again^^
and one Day i found a Monky Island collection Box when i was on vacation with my school, but i dindt look inside and just bought it....when i arrived at home i realised that i now got the codes for MI1 and 2 and the game MI3....but the CDs for MI1 & 2 was missing...but i hade the Code wheels again
now i gladly dont need them anymore because we have ScummVM.
about Escape, i bought it in my local store as soon as it was released and i thionk i still have the game magazin where i did read about it the first time....i liked it but i had big problems getting it worked on my PC so i had to play it at the PC of my friend^^
the only game from the 10 adventure box i could never finish was Loom because i lost my spell codes
how i got into monkey island? back in the early nineties my dad had to purchase a pc, i think it was an 386sx, for his home office. naturally i would use it much more than he did...mostly to play games. so, a friends brother gave me a copy of monkey island 1 (english ega version). i always wondered why you had to mess with that text-file thingy to start up the game. don't worry, up until now i bought several versions of secret to make up for this.
Ironically Ecape. The main difficulty I found is actually the writing down of Monkey combat You can observe or write not both. Especiually with the complex grid needed.
i found that difficult too...until i realized, that the spacebar works during combat. so, you can pause whenever you like and write everything down..
Secret was the first game i bought with my own money. I played it on my dad's Mac IIsi, and i just had an amazing time with it. I mostly wanted it for its cool box art, but the game itself converted me to an absolute lucasarts fanboy overnight.
The caribbean, the ocean, voodoo, the sense of uneasy safety (you know you're safe but you're near constantly surrounded by danger), and most of all the big beautiful maps when you move around islands, those are definitely the things that made me fall in love with the series. It's just a really appealing place to spend my time.
I think it was '92 or so for me. My dad had just built a new computer, and im not sure which component came with it - the soundblaster card or the CD Rom, but one had a nice little pack of adventure games on CDs, including Secret of Monkey Island. We didnt play it immediately, because we had some other interests at first - like spending days playing Wolf 3D, but when we eventually got around to popping in the CD a few months later, we were immediately hooked.
I can remember coming home from elementary school, doing my homework, and waiting for my daddio to come home from work so we could sit at the computer and try to figure out the puzzles together. We must have spent months playing the game - an hour or so every day, never once using any sort of hint guide or walkthrough. SoMI easily provided me with the longest and most memorable gaming experience ever - and being one of my first PC games to play through certainly helps it stand out, but what makes it even better is all the in-jokes i can share with my dad now, and still get huge laughs out of it.
LeChuck's Revenge actually came out while we were still playing through Secret, and totally flew under our radar. In the mid and late 90s i was all about going to the mall every week and popping into the Software Etc. just to look around and see if there was anything that caught my eye - i didnt read many magazines or read much online yet, so when i walked in one day and saw "Curse of Monkey Island" i nearly shit myself. Here was what i thought was a direct sequel to a game i played about six years prior and to that point had been one of my favorite games. I only had about $40 on me at the time, so i couldnt bring it home with me, so i did the next best thing and bought a PC Gamer with it on a demo disc, and when i showed my dad, he was almost as excited as i was.
A few days later from poking around online i found out about LeChuck's Revenge, so i ordered LCR and CMI at the same time. I played CMI first, because i really loved Murray so much, but went back and beat LCR a little later. I had a blast, but this time around my dad didnt join in - he was in a job where he was traveling a lot and i was older and had my own computer anyway, but it would have been nice to share the experience.
I heard about EMI in my PC Gamer subscription, and bought it on day one. My dad had just bought a computer that was about twenty times better than mine, so it gave me a great excuse to install it on his. He ended up walking in right as it finished installing and i just launched it, and he was about to angrily yell at me for using his computer without his permission, until he saw guybrush. He proceeded to pull up the spare chair and we did the same thing we had done with the first game over the next few weeks with EMI, except i wasnt coming home from elementary school, it was high school - and i wasnt doing homework, i was talking on AIM trying to score. EMI may not have been the best in the series, but it was still good fun - i've got back and played all the others but EMI, but my dad and i still regularly make, "Quack... Quack... Mooo!" jokes, so it obviously was worth the time we spent playing it.
Maybe thats more than anyone really needs to know, but i just wanted to show how important Monkey Island has been to me, its a cornerstone of my life, been there on so many occasions making me laugh, and i think it really shaped who i am. Honestly, when the news came out that there were sequels and a remake, i actually got a tear in my eye. And it wasnt because i was in pain from shitting a brick, it was because i felt like i had been reunited with a long lost love! I mean, either these new Telltale versions are incredibly easily, or my mind has been warped so much by playing Monkey Island games that i just function on the same level of strangeness that the puzzles are usually on - thats gotta be worth something, right?
I hadn't pre-ordered a game since Duke Nukem Forever, but i ordered the whole Tales series basically the second it was announced - that shows you how much i love Monkey Island. Not to mention, i also bought the Special Edition on both Steam and Xbox 360.
I had a Commodore 64 for a long time. A nice machine. When the '90s came my parents decided they will buy me a new computer. I wanted an Amiga. I got the PC, mostly because my parents were offered a great deal - an almost-new 386DX with 2MB of RAM and 120 MB HDD. In 1990 this was the **it, trust me.
I got a few games with it, too. Tetris, Prince of Persia and The Secret of Monkey Island. I didn't play the last one at first because it required a mouse, and the disk holding the driver got a CRC error. I didn't mind, because I didn't know how to use the strange device anyway.
After beating my best time for the Prince for the 10th time I decided I'll check out this Monkey Island whatchamacallit. To my surprise, it wasn't a pltformer but an "adventure" game. It reminded me of some of the text adventures from C64 I played from time to time (but never beat). It was awkward to play it with the keyboard, but managable. Once I solved the ingenious find-the-Swordmaster puzzle I was hooked.
From that time on I think I bought every point-and-click adventure I could get my hands on. I even infected my friends with the adventure game virus so they would also buy the games and we could share hints or solve them together. In those internetless days it was not uncommon to get stuck for days or weeks on a certain puzzle and instead on discussing stuff on forums we would sometimes gather in the local pizzeria and try to solve things out.
The arrival of MI2 was a true event, mostly because by that time we realized that LucasArts were the only company who knew how to make an adventure game. Seriously, you could play only so many Sierra "Quest" games before getting seriously burned out on lousy puzzle design and constant restarts. Oh, and I LOVED the MI2 ending, although hardly anyone else did.
MI3 came out while I was already in college. I liked it, but wasn't terribly thrilled about it. They off-handedly resolved the shocker MI2 ending, did away with most of the darker Burtonesque undertones and permanently sealed the series in a Saturday cartoon land. But it was still enjoyable, to an extent. It was blatantly obvious that Gilbert wasn't in on it and that the *real* secret of MI was permanently lost. Oh well.
MI4.. oh boy. I could forgive MI3 for killing a bunch of stuff which made MI1 and 2 great, because it still held a significant amount of respect for the franchise. But MI4 was truly horrible. The "chase off the tourists" plotline, blatant disregard for continuity, making the "Secret" turning out to be a "giant mechanical monkey", morphing Herman into Elaine's father (did they even play the first game in the series??), trying to be cute with that Monkey Combat bit.. ugh. Truly a trainwreck of the series. Good thing it didn't really happen.
The Tales.. enjoying it so far. As long as it keeps ignoring MI4, as it seems to (silently) do so far.
first time i ever heard about monkey island was in 1990 i think or it might have been 91... it was in a magazine called "amiga format" or something, that my uncle would bring from his work. (he worked at a computer store at the time)
so, on one of the pages was a small black and white screen shot from TSOMI with a short discription next to it. i think it was a comercial for a mail order where you could order a bunch of demos or whatever. anyway, i would read the description and look at the picture and i had allready decided that this game looked awsome. (i was about 8 or 9 years at the time, and had a vivid imagination...)
some weeks later, i wen't by my uncles computer store as it was on my way from school, and there it was! the coolest looking cover art i had ever seen! after seeing the box art for TSOMI i got even more excited about the game. Offcourse i didn't have any money to actually buy the game, but for a week or so i would go, on the way back from school, to that store and just look at the box art and imagine how awsome the game had to be...
so days went by, and then later on, a friend of mine had managed to get a pirated version for amiga (not nice, i know.. but we were broke kids, and we really wanted to play MI!) and a badly xeroxed code wheel. i was ecstatic! we would play it for days and days. it was everything i hoped for and then some!
it was a great time.
later on, im not sure if it was 92 or 93 it was atleast a year or so after MILCR was released i found and ad in, again "amiga format" where you could mailorder MILCR, i scraped together what i haved and actually managed to save some cash til i finally had enough to order it. That was the only original game i ever bought for the Amiga im affraid to say. but it was well worth it! 11 floppies! hehe.
well, yea.. so offcourse i played TCOMI when that was out, wich i also really loved.
but at the time EFMI came out, i played it for 4 minutes and decided i didnt like the controls or the graphics... i actually didnt try it again til early this year, just to see if i missed out on something. i played all the way til AFTER the monkey kombat, but for some reason i never finished it... its the only MI game i never finished... but personly, i don't like that game much at all...
but its good to have monkey island back, setting things straight again!
I got into MI in 1997 when my uncle bought me the LucasArts Archives Vol.3 for Christmas. It featured The Dig, Full Throttle, Afterlife, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Monkey Island Madness, and the LucasArts Super Sampler Vol. 2
Monkey Island Madness featured SoMI and MI2: Lechuck's Revenge, the Super Sampler had a demo if CoMI.
A few years later I found a copy of the Monkey Island Bounty Pack at a GAME shop while I was visiting England, and picked it up because it had a full copy of CoMI.
My uncle bought CMI for me 11 years ago. He thought LeChuck looked awesome as a villain on the cover and heard about all the awards it received, so he got it for me. Loved the series ever since.
I got a demo disk of Secret of Monkey Island with a box of floppy disks and I enjoyed the demo so much I had to get the game. That started my interest with adventure games.
i've always liked pirates. Then one time in a shop i discovered EfMI... yeah this was my first game and it took me probably about 8 years to complete it i'm not joking. It was in german and i wasn+t so good at german back then... therefor i couldn win the insult arm wrestling. A few years then have passed by and i was watching german tv. I could speak perfectly german so i decidec to give it a go again. I came all the way to monkey island but i just couldn't complete it. For a 12 year old it was kinda hard to do all the puzzles. Last week i bought the english version and i've completed it . And today i've completed CoMI. I'll try to find some more MI games now
My first was Curse. Dad had the demo on a CD he had that came with a magazine. (EDIT: Pretty certain it was PC User.) Of course I couldn't make anything happen, and Wally kept pretending to be a hard arse. But I loved it none the less and made Daddy buy me the full version. *angel face*
Comments
"Oh sure. Walk to the sun."
one of the funniest lines from anything, anywhere.
Then a woodchuck wouldn't chuck wood but would punch someone (possibly)
Same here, I watched my big brother play it in 1998 then I tried it out - I was 10, my first adventure game (errrm I didn't quite make it without using a walkthrough) and just was so enamoured of it that I decided I needed to play ever LucasArts game ever made. I then played Sam 'n' Max, on 8 floppy disks, in German (I don't speak German but managed to understand the gist of it). My local library in Holland a few years later had CMI and EMI so I borrowed them from there (and bought them years later), man I miss that library, they had good stuff!
I am, but my booty isn't very phatt at all
"The third shadow is nigh" indeed.
So basically... we are addicts... we want more! Thanks TellTale!
Where can this bargain bin be found? It seems it has magical powers.
I got my own PC a few years later, but running things on DOS never worked that well. I got DOTT working on there with serious sound and music problems, but never got round to getting the Monkey Island games working on it.
But years after I discovered SCUMMVM and got back into the Monkey Island games for good! I even invested in Curse Of Monkey Island upon finishing the first two I'd waited so many years to play again (along with some other adventure games I had rarely played over the years). I think I'll be safe now that SCUMMVM is pretty much here to stay.
When "The Curse of Monkey Island" came out (1997). I was 1 year old. So ofcourse the first monkey island game for me was tales of monkey island. This june, when E3 took place. I was browsing on gamespot, looking at news etc and I saw that telltale games is making a new monkey island and lucasarts is remaking the first one. So I was thinkg "Uh, thats cool". And sent that info to a friend who is monkey island fan. He ofcourse got excited and told me to try monkey island games. I wasn't sure but decided to wait for the first chapter to come out.
So the first chapter on tales of monkey island came out and I loved it. It was funny, it was creative, it was challenging. The end left me wanting for more. So I waited for the remake to come out. Played, beat it. Loved it again. And thats how I got infected with po..I mean monkey island addiction.
*might have some spelling mistakes, english is my second language*
Me too!
Monkey Island came free with a bundle of other games when I bought my SoundBlaster sound card back in 1990-something.
Other games in the bundle included Secret Weapons of luftwaffe, shockwave, loom and sherlock holmes.
That sherlock holmes game was really hard!
Something must have stuck though because Monkey Island is my favorite gaming series of all time. Curse is the best game in the series IMHO.
When we got Escape (as with them all, unsure of when) it was again a gift to my mother and we all loved it too, although some of us got stuck on that annoying Monkey Kombat puzzle. Mum never finished it.
Of course, I then discovered ScummVM last year and have been joyously replying the first three since then! I did play Escape too, as I don't have as many problems with it as others, but I acknowledge all the plot-holes and stuff that caused so much argueing over it. And the difficultly of Monkey Kombat.
but i did lose the copy protection codes fort Fate and i couldnt play it anymore.
one sunny day i was in Graz with my Dad and i saw a game Box Called Lucas arts 10 adventures box and it had Fate in it so i forced my dad to buy it forme because i wannted to play that game again. well and along with fate i got MI1 MI2 Loom and all the other Great games...
after a while i did lose the codes for MI1 MI2 Fate and so on again^^
and one Day i found a Monky Island collection Box when i was on vacation with my school, but i dindt look inside and just bought it....when i arrived at home i realised that i now got the codes for MI1 and 2 and the game MI3....but the CDs for MI1 & 2 was missing...but i hade the Code wheels again
now i gladly dont need them anymore because we have ScummVM.
about Escape, i bought it in my local store as soon as it was released and i thionk i still have the game magazin where i did read about it the first time....i liked it but i had big problems getting it worked on my PC so i had to play it at the PC of my friend^^
the only game from the 10 adventure box i could never finish was Loom because i lost my spell codes
i found that difficult too...until i realized, that the spacebar works during combat. so, you can pause whenever you like and write everything down..
Played COMI first, then MI2, then MI1.
The caribbean, the ocean, voodoo, the sense of uneasy safety (you know you're safe but you're near constantly surrounded by danger), and most of all the big beautiful maps when you move around islands, those are definitely the things that made me fall in love with the series. It's just a really appealing place to spend my time.
I can remember coming home from elementary school, doing my homework, and waiting for my daddio to come home from work so we could sit at the computer and try to figure out the puzzles together. We must have spent months playing the game - an hour or so every day, never once using any sort of hint guide or walkthrough. SoMI easily provided me with the longest and most memorable gaming experience ever - and being one of my first PC games to play through certainly helps it stand out, but what makes it even better is all the in-jokes i can share with my dad now, and still get huge laughs out of it.
LeChuck's Revenge actually came out while we were still playing through Secret, and totally flew under our radar. In the mid and late 90s i was all about going to the mall every week and popping into the Software Etc. just to look around and see if there was anything that caught my eye - i didnt read many magazines or read much online yet, so when i walked in one day and saw "Curse of Monkey Island" i nearly shit myself. Here was what i thought was a direct sequel to a game i played about six years prior and to that point had been one of my favorite games. I only had about $40 on me at the time, so i couldnt bring it home with me, so i did the next best thing and bought a PC Gamer with it on a demo disc, and when i showed my dad, he was almost as excited as i was.
A few days later from poking around online i found out about LeChuck's Revenge, so i ordered LCR and CMI at the same time. I played CMI first, because i really loved Murray so much, but went back and beat LCR a little later. I had a blast, but this time around my dad didnt join in - he was in a job where he was traveling a lot and i was older and had my own computer anyway, but it would have been nice to share the experience.
I heard about EMI in my PC Gamer subscription, and bought it on day one. My dad had just bought a computer that was about twenty times better than mine, so it gave me a great excuse to install it on his. He ended up walking in right as it finished installing and i just launched it, and he was about to angrily yell at me for using his computer without his permission, until he saw guybrush. He proceeded to pull up the spare chair and we did the same thing we had done with the first game over the next few weeks with EMI, except i wasnt coming home from elementary school, it was high school - and i wasnt doing homework, i was talking on AIM trying to score. EMI may not have been the best in the series, but it was still good fun - i've got back and played all the others but EMI, but my dad and i still regularly make, "Quack... Quack... Mooo!" jokes, so it obviously was worth the time we spent playing it.
Maybe thats more than anyone really needs to know, but i just wanted to show how important Monkey Island has been to me, its a cornerstone of my life, been there on so many occasions making me laugh, and i think it really shaped who i am. Honestly, when the news came out that there were sequels and a remake, i actually got a tear in my eye. And it wasnt because i was in pain from shitting a brick, it was because i felt like i had been reunited with a long lost love! I mean, either these new Telltale versions are incredibly easily, or my mind has been warped so much by playing Monkey Island games that i just function on the same level of strangeness that the puzzles are usually on - thats gotta be worth something, right?
I hadn't pre-ordered a game since Duke Nukem Forever, but i ordered the whole Tales series basically the second it was announced - that shows you how much i love Monkey Island. Not to mention, i also bought the Special Edition on both Steam and Xbox 360.
I got a few games with it, too. Tetris, Prince of Persia and The Secret of Monkey Island. I didn't play the last one at first because it required a mouse, and the disk holding the driver got a CRC error. I didn't mind, because I didn't know how to use the strange device anyway.
After beating my best time for the Prince for the 10th time I decided I'll check out this Monkey Island whatchamacallit. To my surprise, it wasn't a pltformer but an "adventure" game. It reminded me of some of the text adventures from C64 I played from time to time (but never beat). It was awkward to play it with the keyboard, but managable. Once I solved the ingenious find-the-Swordmaster puzzle I was hooked.
From that time on I think I bought every point-and-click adventure I could get my hands on. I even infected my friends with the adventure game virus so they would also buy the games and we could share hints or solve them together. In those internetless days it was not uncommon to get stuck for days or weeks on a certain puzzle and instead on discussing stuff on forums we would sometimes gather in the local pizzeria and try to solve things out.
The arrival of MI2 was a true event, mostly because by that time we realized that LucasArts were the only company who knew how to make an adventure game. Seriously, you could play only so many Sierra "Quest" games before getting seriously burned out on lousy puzzle design and constant restarts. Oh, and I LOVED the MI2 ending, although hardly anyone else did.
MI3 came out while I was already in college. I liked it, but wasn't terribly thrilled about it. They off-handedly resolved the shocker MI2 ending, did away with most of the darker Burtonesque undertones and permanently sealed the series in a Saturday cartoon land. But it was still enjoyable, to an extent. It was blatantly obvious that Gilbert wasn't in on it and that the *real* secret of MI was permanently lost. Oh well.
MI4.. oh boy. I could forgive MI3 for killing a bunch of stuff which made MI1 and 2 great, because it still held a significant amount of respect for the franchise. But MI4 was truly horrible. The "chase off the tourists" plotline, blatant disregard for continuity, making the "Secret" turning out to be a "giant mechanical monkey", morphing Herman into Elaine's father (did they even play the first game in the series??), trying to be cute with that Monkey Combat bit.. ugh. Truly a trainwreck of the series. Good thing it didn't really happen.
The Tales.. enjoying it so far. As long as it keeps ignoring MI4, as it seems to (silently) do so far.
Btw, what was the question again?
first time i ever heard about monkey island was in 1990 i think or it might have been 91... it was in a magazine called "amiga format" or something, that my uncle would bring from his work. (he worked at a computer store at the time)
so, on one of the pages was a small black and white screen shot from TSOMI with a short discription next to it. i think it was a comercial for a mail order where you could order a bunch of demos or whatever. anyway, i would read the description and look at the picture and i had allready decided that this game looked awsome. (i was about 8 or 9 years at the time, and had a vivid imagination...)
some weeks later, i wen't by my uncles computer store as it was on my way from school, and there it was! the coolest looking cover art i had ever seen! after seeing the box art for TSOMI i got even more excited about the game. Offcourse i didn't have any money to actually buy the game, but for a week or so i would go, on the way back from school, to that store and just look at the box art and imagine how awsome the game had to be...
so days went by, and then later on, a friend of mine had managed to get a pirated version for amiga (not nice, i know.. but we were broke kids, and we really wanted to play MI!) and a badly xeroxed code wheel. i was ecstatic! we would play it for days and days. it was everything i hoped for and then some!
it was a great time.
later on, im not sure if it was 92 or 93 it was atleast a year or so after MILCR was released i found and ad in, again "amiga format" where you could mailorder MILCR, i scraped together what i haved and actually managed to save some cash til i finally had enough to order it. That was the only original game i ever bought for the Amiga im affraid to say. but it was well worth it! 11 floppies! hehe.
well, yea.. so offcourse i played TCOMI when that was out, wich i also really loved.
but at the time EFMI came out, i played it for 4 minutes and decided i didnt like the controls or the graphics... i actually didnt try it again til early this year, just to see if i missed out on something. i played all the way til AFTER the monkey kombat, but for some reason i never finished it... its the only MI game i never finished... but personly, i don't like that game much at all...
but its good to have monkey island back, setting things straight again!
looking farward to episode 3!
I'm sorry lol
Monkey Island Madness featured SoMI and MI2: Lechuck's Revenge, the Super Sampler had a demo if CoMI.
A few years later I found a copy of the Monkey Island Bounty Pack at a GAME shop while I was visiting England, and picked it up because it had a full copy of CoMI.