Ranticlimax: The Curse of Monkey Island

Of all the things that a game can get wrong, the ending is often the most frustrating, particularly when the rest of the game has been extremely good. It’s like following a map to buried treasure, only to find someone got to the X before you. Or like buying a parrot then, after years of patient training, finding out that it’s not the kind that can talk. Or sawing off your own leg and replacing it with a peg-leg, moments before discovering that you can’t think of any more piratey analogies to shoehorn into the intro of your Negative Gamer column.

In this new column I will be looking at such endings, exploring where and why they weren’t satisfying and perhaps in some cases suggesting how they could have been so much better. First off, a game in a series very close to my heart: The Curse of Monkey Island.

Released by LucasArts in 1997, The Curse of Monkey Island was the third game in the Monkey Island series and the first to be made without the involvement of the series’ original creator, Ron Gilbert. This, and a six year gap since the previous game meant that a lot of people had their doubts as to whether anyone could pull it off. A lot has changed since the days of 320×200 resolution graphics and MIDI scores: not only was the series getting a brand new and initially controversial look but we would be hearing the voices of the characters for the first time. Everything from the voice of Guybrush Threepwood to the colour of his hair was to be the subject of intense scrutiny, so it’s a testament to how much care was taken with the game that it was embraced almost completely by the vigilant, slightly stuck-in-their-ways fanbase.

In an adventure game, story and characters are almost everything. You can have all the good inventory puzzles in the world and if there’s not enough motivation in the story for the player to get through them, it’s for nothing. Conversely, with a great plot filled with character, a few duff puzzles can be surprisingly easy to forgive. In such story-driven games, it seems particularly important that we are delivered a satisfying dénouement; something meaty enough to serve as both a reward for our puzzle-solving prowess and a proper resolution to all the plot that has come before.

With all that in mind, let me now describe the ending cinematic of The Curse of Monkey Island: there’s an explosion, some ice falls on the main bad guy, LeChuck, and then some people wave as our hero Guybrush and love interest Elaine sail off into the sunset, just married (oh, and Murray the Skull vows to return). Fin. Now, you may be thinking that I’m skimping on some details but bear in mind that all of this happens in merely one minute and two seconds before the credits roll. Thirty of those seconds are the waving and sailing bit. I’m not joking: look!

Some of you may have noticed that in the end sequence to a game in a series that prides itself on its sharp dialogue, precisely no words are spoken until the last fifteen seconds. It’s almost as if the team were aware that the ending was woefully inadequate and so, as a desperate afterthought, cut out and shifted one of Murray’s lines to the end to make it seem marginally better. To say that this was something of a let down would be an understatement, particularly when the ending of Monkey Island 2 blew my ten year old mind so hard that I’ve never truly recovered.

Unlike so many of these cases, we do actually have a fairly reliable account of what went wrong. In a Mixnmojo.com interview with Jonathan Ackley, Co-Project Leader, he states:

We had a big battle cutscene at the end planned, and we cut it for budget reasons. We knew we could do two big scenes, and we picked the shipwreck in the middle of the game. Probably not the best choice, but it had this great Kilt joke we wanted. Truth is, we probably could have done the ending. I think management expected us to go over budget as it was our first project as producers so I think they probably had some secret budget for overages hidden somewhere that would have allowed us to do the scene. But staying on budget was very important to Larry and I so we made the decision to lose the scene. From a story-telling point of view, it was the less important scene. From a pure drama point of view, it was probably more important.

This refreshingly frank explanation puts things into perspective, somewhat, when you realise that it all came down to a budget and a difficult decision of what to cut and that there were arguments on both sides. Turns out that this game-making is a complicated business –who would have thought?

Budgets and decision making aside, what Ackley and Ahern failed to calculate when making that decision is that storytelling isn’t simply about getting from plot point A to plot point B, it’s about reincorporation and resolution, especially at the end. Skimping on those duties meant that Curse of Monkey Island‘s failed to build enough momentum to trip that switch in the brain which tells us ‘Relax now, it’s over.’ For that satisfaction, I would have given up a kilt joke a dozen times over.