“Monkey Island” is loved from the first moment. Colorful graphics, Caribbean sounds, an exciting story and humor. For their birthday, some players from the very beginning look back, why they decided to postpone the game 30 years still fascinated:

For the retro nerd Pascal Parvex, it has been his favorite game from the start: ” This is my first time on a 286 he saw our neighbors until my brother died much nicer VGA version with The game is just well-rounded. The graphics are fantastic, the atmosphere is unique, and I even thought the PC beeper music was great. I particularly liked the actual island, Monkey Island: the rocks, the water, the beach, the sun and of course the loving overview map. When I was a boy, this game took a place deep in my heart. ” Axel Kothe from A dventure-Treff.de organizes an annual community meeting at Gamescom, at which game inventor Ron Gilbert has already been a guest twice: ” Directly have the intro and the first few minutes blew me away at the first game. The then fantastic VGA graphics and especially the music created such a great atmosphere for me that I was immediately drawn into the spell of the game. Later it is the humor paired with the challenging but always feasible tasks. That you always have several puzzles parallel over long stretches, the solution of which is often crazy, but makes sense within the game world logic. The perfect mix of humor, atmosphere and puzzles, which to this day belongs to the best the genre has to offer. The 90 years were the perfect time for graphic adventures, which at the time made use of the strengths of the PC platform (VGA, mouse, hard disk) and were therefore mass-compatible as graphic marvels. I’m glad the times existed, but understand why classic adventure games no longer work as AAA projects these days. Yes, it’s a shame for me that the era is over, but I’ve made my peace with it. In fact, there are so many exciting indie projects out there today that I have more adventure fodder in my Steam library than I can play. ” Pascal Welsing is a passionate adventure game player. His collection includes more as 2000 games; including more than 100 Articles about Lucasfilm Games / LucasArts: ” My name is Guybrush Threepwood and I want to be a pirate! With the sentence I was drawn into a spell right at the beginning of the game, which is due to fascination itself 30 years later. Guybrush was as clueless as I was about what it takes to become a pirate. What a great story idea. In addition, Monkey Island is fun, exciting, accessible and continuously rewards me as a gamer instead of punishing myself with the digital demise of my main character, as was more common in this type of game back then. ” Sven “sanifox” Vößing: ” Behind you, a three-headed … Oh, I suspect the saying has been overused enough for the anniversary. Still, seldom has a game managed to be quoted so often. Who would have thought that back then? That Monkey Island too 30 still triggers such reactions years later? At least not me, even if it was an absolute top game for me back then. Countless nights were spent if your parents hadn’t caught you trying to find the last answers for the sword duels in order to ultimately save the beloved Elaine. Ron Gilbert himself did not expect that his game would be preserved in the minds of the players at the time; he once told me this in an interview. There are many good games, but 30 Only a few manage to be remembered for years. ” The game is also a milestone for Carsten Borgmeier, who was then a tester of the game for the Amiga Joker magazine, among others. In retrospect, he asserts three reasons for this: the closeness of the developers to George Lucas, who also created his games like films, with a good story, a screenplay and animations (later) language. And the good German translation by Boris Schneider (-Johne). Of course, experience also helps: The makers have already developed numerous games before. The beginnings Lucasfilm Games is founded 1982 as a subsidiary of Lucasfilm. Atari helps with the start and receives lt for the license of “Star Wars” for own games. The first video games related to the “Star Wars” had already appeared at this point: Parker Brothers has acquired the rights to toys and is of the opinion that game consoles should also be included. And somehow it happens that Lucasfilm Games has been making games about all sorts of things for more than ten years. Just not to “Star Wars”.

30 years Monkey Island (29 Pictures) “The Secret of Monkey Island” in the Special Edition from 2009; here for the iPad. You can switch to the retro view at any time with a swipe – and back again.

The first game will 1985 released. It’s called “Ballblazer”, a simple futuristic sports simulation. It appears for numerous home computers such as Apple II and C 64, for the Atari game consoles 5200 and 7800 as well as for the NES from Nintendo. “Rescue on Fractalus” and “Koronis Rift” follow. There are action games with fractal graphics, in which the developers discover their preference for flight simulations: In the following years more and more sophisticated aerial battles are published; the best known is certainly “Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe”.

“The Eidolon” rounds off the early game quartet. It is an action shooter based on the fractal engine of the previous games, but puts the player in a cave labyrinth with fantasy characters.

The first adventure appears 1986, an adaptation of the feature film “Labyrinth” with Jennifer Conelly and David Bowie, the Lucas also produces. The film is not a great success. Neither does the game. But you can see where things will go in the next few years. “Labyrinth” is divided into two parts. First, the player has a text adventure in front of him: there are no graphics, only descriptions; and commands must be entered using the keyboard. After the introduction, the game turns into a graphic adventure, in which instructions are selected via a menu.

Maniac Mansion shows the way The idea of ​​not letting the player type in commands is 1987 refined with the weird “Maniac Mansion”. At the bottom of the screen is a list of verbs. They are combined with objects from the game, such as open + door. The mouse is helpful, thanks to computers like the Amiga and the Atari ST and the 1990 Windows 3.0 has also been established beyond the Apple world. The game is created by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick; for both of them their first major work.

In “Maniac Mansion” the player alternately controls the main hero and two other selectable characters; this results in different approaches. While strolling through the “crazy property” you come across the most famous puzzle in the history of adventure games: a chainsaw in a blood-splattered kitchen for which the gasoline is nowhere to be found. It is one of many “red herrings”, after an old English expression for “wrong track”, objects that you can find and take with you, but which are of no use.

Technical core of the Game is the SCUMM engine: the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. On the one hand, it serves as the basis for many other adventures and, on the other hand, allows an easier implementation of an adventure for different systems; somewhat comparable to JavaScript.

German translation “Maniac Mansion” is the first game by Lucasfilm Games to be released in German. The translation is by Boris Schneider,