I don’t mean “how did you imagine Curse of Monkey Island”. Nor “how did you imagine MI3a”.
My question is how, in your dreams, should have been the third chapter of the story by Ron Gilbert. Feel free to express preferences about style, graphics, story, dev team ad whatsoever.
We’ll get the wonderful gem of a new Ron Gilbert’s game of the franchise, but it won’t stick to our personal dreams. So let’s keep on dreaming, and share our dreams.
I’ll start it.
In my dreams, MI3 would have been darker than MI2 (maybe less dark than MI1, though).
It would have been very long, maybe TWP size or even longer.
Music… well, wonderfully sampled, but still midi. iMuse was in my dream
Let’s get to the most difficult part. If MI3a would have been in pixel art by Mark Ferrari (wow, just like TWP, now that I think of it), my MI3 would have been hand drawn. Come on! we stared at Steve Purcell’s boxes imagining how that world would have looked to our eyes without the pixelated filter of our computers!
While we nostalgically look for pixel art today, back then we felt pixels like a restriction.
I’ve always thought that those hand drawn MI2 backgrounds were too much ahead of their time.
I liked more the pure pixel art of MI1, but I was dreaming for an amazing hand drawn MI3 in hi resolution.
When I imagine how the real Monkey Island world would look, I imagine it as a Steve Purcell cartoon.
I only have one main element that has always been in my dream for Monkey Island 3…
It’s that the game begins directly after MI2 and that you play as Guybrush as a kid still.
We see Guybrush’s parents going home with him and Chuckie, to their house, and the first “room” of the game is Guybrush’s bedroom.
I’ve always pictured this as being at daytime (so following on right from when they left the funfare), and he has some toys, a bed, a table and other stuff in his bedroom. I think Chuckie might be there too, maybe they share a room. All the initial game puzzles are in this room.
I have never imagined anything past this point, other than that we somehow get back to piratey grown-up Guybrush at some point soon.
The art I’ve always imagined as a direct continuation from MI2, with Guybrush, Chuckie and the parents looking just like they did at the end of MI2 -
Let’s see… I want islands that are even more lively than before, with NPCs that walk around, have a schedule, change mood and state, and puzzles connected to all this. (kind of like the shopkeeper in Monkey1). Good puzzles require powerful engines. I don’t want the usual “use object on object”: first you need to put a character in a certain state, and only then, use some object.
How I imagined it is basically the lists of reasons why - despite liking it and considering it a great adventure game in itself - CMI never felt right to me.
First: I imagined it started with a kid Guybrush with his parents and brother. We would have found out what happened, especially since Elaine was still out there as an adult.
Then… well, I didn’t imagine much, but for sure I wanted Elaine to hate Guybrush. Maybe fall in love with him again in the end, I don’t know, maybe jerk Guybrush would finally get back to the adorable humble inept he was in MI1.
And I don’t think we’d have gotten to know the Secret. I actually never cared about the Secret. I just wanted to know whether it’s true that LeChuck and Guybrush are brothers, if the parents are actually dead or what.
Your question has made me realize that I’ve never had any specific wish for the third chapter of the series, other than letting me live in an atmosphere similar to the one in MI2.
Back then, I was so puzzled by the MI2 ending that for thirty years I have lived in a constant “really curious to see how Ron escapes from this mess in a coherent way” sense of wonder.
Exactly like this Return to MI should have looked like – it was all there, the imagination and the technical possibilities. Ron once even stated, he could imagine a new MI like that, since the series were always a serious story wrapped in humor.