BEST SWORD-FIGHTING INSULTS You fight like a dairy farmer! How appropriate! You fight like a cow! Soon you’ll be wearing my sword like a shish kebab! First you better stop waving it about like a feather duster. There are no words for how disgusting you are. Yes there are. You just never learned them.
TALK TO… RON GILBERT 19 The Secret of Monkey Island Year: 1990 Platform: Various Previous position: 33 ■
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So what made you want to make an adventure game about pirates? At the time fantasy adventures, such as King's Quest, were very popular, but because I've never been much of a fantasy fan myself. I wanted to do something different, something more based on reality. Although the pirates in Monkey Island aren't really the slimy 17th century bandits of the high seas that they were, they're more a mix of swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies and the Disneyland Pirates Of The Caribbean theme park ride. That was one of my favourite rides at Disneyland as a kid, getting on that little boat and being taken on your own pirate adventure, but I always
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also wanted to get off the boat and wander around those big pirate ships and interact with the characters. But, to me, making Monkey Island wasn’t actually about making a realistic pirate game, it was about making a game that played on all the clichés of movies such as Treasure Island and Captain Blood.
doling out information to you as the player. We wanted characters that you could get to know and understand, and that’s just down to good writing. Where Stan came from was that during the [production of the] first Monkey Island I bought a car. And I remember going to the car dealer and he wouldn’t let me leave!
One of the things that made the games great were the memorable characters like the bumbling Guybrush Threepwood, the undead pirate LeChuck, Governor Marley, and, our favourite, Stan the UsedShip Salesman. Was it fun fleshing these characters out for players? Well, at the time, a lot of computer game characters were like cardboard cut-outs that spoke in weird halfsentences because they were just
How did the idea for insult swordfighting originate? I watched lots of old pirate movies for the first Monkey Island, and one thing that stood out was that while they were fighting they always taunted each other with insults. I knew we needed sword-fighting in a game about pirates but because I didn’t want to introduce any action gameplay the old movies provided the perfect solution.