I played it in 1992 when it came out on CD-ROM. Bearing in mind at the time, it wasn’t like there were a bunch of 30-40 year olds waiting to play these games, I never saw any adults playing them, just kids. It was often only like 2-3 other kids at school that might have played the same specific games as you, and you might talk about some puzzles that you couldn’t get past.
Also because they were often solitary experiences for people and you couldn’t instantly look up stuff in the game, and they took time to beat, you might not even remember the part someone else was stuck on or was referencing. I remember other kids thinking the game was a really good game and very funny, but not really talking about anything specific other than that. In contrast I remember kids talking about Day of the Tentacles puzzles quite a lot, because of the novelty of the time travel.
I don’t think that many people at the time even thought about the word “secret”, as it was just part of the game title, it didn’t really mean anything, you just played the game and saw where it went. It was also self-evident that the big thing you found was the monkey head leading to an underground ghost cavern place. Then the game wrapped up so straightforwardly and satisfyingly and there wasn’t anything in the game that suggested you had missed out on some big secret.
As well, at the time there were a lot of parody things going on, like Sierra’s Space Quest series, and movies like the Naked Gun movies, Hot Shots, Space Balls, etc., so having stuff like a vending machine and Stan and all these out of place things, just fit with the comedy aspects of the game, it wasn’t like, “oh, this stuff must all have some sort of deep meaning”, it was just a really fun game.
I’m sure Ron Gilbert very early on designed MI1 in terms of Guybrush imagining a world. It’s really easy to look at Mêlée Island as a small town (with a PTA and Chamber of Commerce). And it’s easy to look at Monkey Iskand as some woods to play in.
But that imaginary world isn’t specifically connected to Monkey Island itself, is it? The part specifically connected to Monkey Island itself is the secret that Herman, his Captain, and LeChuck sailed to find. Estevan at the Scumm Bar is convinced LeChuck learned the Secret. And LeChuck, for his part, transformed into a ghost pirate and now commands an undead crew in a manner strikingly similar to that design document’s macguffin plot.
In summary: maybe this WAS always meant to be Calvin and Hobbes playacting, but that doesn’t mean “the Secret” was that they were children playacting.
Put another way: imagine that you are young, and you just set up a secret fort in the woods. You tell your friends that you have a secret fort in the woods. In this situation, if your friends actually ask what’s so “secret” about your fort, the secret to your fort is NOT that the fort isn’t real and that you’re just a kid playing. The secret is that your fort cannot be found, or maybe that touching the fort gives you superpowers for 10 seconds.
I had no idea of what the secret was, but I was pretty sure that it had to do with the island itself.
The document mentioned by @BaronGrackle was written when Ron was still under the big influence of “On Stranger Tides”. It’s more than clear that the secret was related to a feature of the island: a small opening in the earth.
In “On Stranger Tides”, the special place is the fountain of youth, that exists in Florida.
I’m not sure I understand the question. I understand that Ron revealed in RtMI the original secret: people playing in a pirate-themed amusement park. It is the original secret because Ron and the plate say so.
The story of Monkey Island was formed over time, passing through many phases. The document cited by BaronGrackle is only the first, embryonic version of the story and contains many elements that never became reality in the game.
A second document tells a story much more similar to MI1, but it too contains elements that were dropped.
Ron probably varied a lot of things over time, including what the secret was. At an early stage, influenced greatly by On Stranger Tides, the secret was associated strongly with an idea from the book.
Later, influenced more by the “Pirated of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland, Ron preferred the idea that Guybrush’s events were a figment of someone’s imagination.
Curiously, both the idea taken from On Stranger Tides and the idea taken from Disneyland are associated with Florida.
It’s nice overall, but I think Ron was more influenced by DisneyLAND in California. The California original ride has more content, including an opening section that passes by a restaurant and a bayou shack with an old man lounging outside and someone else playing a banjo inside, before physically descending into the pirate scenes, and ending the ride by ascending to where you started… the implication being (according to Disneyhead bloggers and youtubers) that you’re possibly following the shack man’s memories or imaginings, or even just looking backward through time.
That sounds familiar to me.
EDIT: Maybe someday I’ll make my pilgrimage to Disneyland for the first time, stand by Lafitte’s Anchor, and tell a passerby that anchors were originally invented to grapple enemy ships.
But also, I suppose that old document describes “The Secret of the Crack located at Monkey Island”, as opposed to “The Secret of Monkey Island” (and the universe)!
(The sense of the question was: “you just said the secret is something about the island itself, but “people playing in a pirate-themed amusement park” is not something exclusively about the island, but it’s something about the whole monkey island world.”)
unrelated question: so , to be clear, what part of the secret had not been already revealed in MI2? the fact that none of the kids in the end of MI2 was Guybrush?
Or maybe the fact that in the depth of Monkey Island there’s a door that leads to the amusement park (door to another world)?
Going off the plaque, where Ron specifically says that “The Original Secret” is “a pirate adventure park” - MI2 already revealed that, though I guess it wasn’t confirmed fully. In MI2, it was still open to interpretation that it was all a spell by LeChuck. RtMI confirms that it definitely is a pirate adventure park and that it wasn’t just a spell by LeChuck.
Also there is the technicality that Guybrush was a flooring inspector and not a kid, but that’s not really a part of the secret that is described on the plaque.
Also with it being “a pirate adventure park”, it kind of means everything else (Herman’s voyage, the secret being on the island, the crevice, etc. etc.) is all just the imaginations of the flooring inspector, Guybrush. Some of it may be based on things he’s seen in the adventure park, but also could just as easily be entirely in his imagination.
On the topic of MI2… I feel like the MI6 Prelude would indicate that, at the MI2 post credits scene with Elaine worrying about a curse from LeChuck, Elaine was still a peer for Guybrush and LeChuck who would have still been “playing the game”, similar to Chucky imagining lightning eyes.
Does the ending of MI6 invalidate the idea that Elaine would have been a peer of the two boys?
One more layer! In MI2, get a library card with Guybrush’s name on it, and the conversation with the barkeep reveals that Guybrush is a FICTIONAL NAME!
So if we assume that all fourth-wall jokes are really storytelling elements, then Guybrush actually is a fictional name.
Meaning: Guybrush the flooring inspector also doesn’t exist. He was probably made up by some other person. Probably a guy named Ron. But I think Ron exists.
(This also explains how the Dead For Real ending can possibly happen, since Guybrush the flooring inspector was always just a fictional character.)
They are secret pirates. They can’t tell their kids that they go around looting and pillaging (and maybe worse), so they make up the amusement park as a cover. That’s why Elaine tells about the new map with a wisper.
No, I said that I was sure that it was so, I was convinced of that. But now that I have a plaque that explicitly tells me otherwise, it’s clear that it isn’t.
I’m a big fan of the whole hypothesis that Guybrush has serious issues at distinguishing fantasy and reality. It’s my impression that in this game Elaine acts as a nurse/caretaker.
It would be cool to have a sequel where his nurse takes him to another location in the real world and then it slowly starts morphing back into the Monkey Island world using elements of the new real world location.
I love this theory as well.
I feel like Ron feared that people would be mad if there was a definitive answer, and that’s why he made the ending so open to interpretation.
worst secret ever, -1000000/10
