…wait a second. That’s precious new information. If the MI2 ending was not Ron’s idea, this means it has nothing to do with the real secret!
basically Ron decided to stick in the whole “brothers in the real world” idea relatively late, knowing it didn’t conflict in any way with the real secret he had in mind.
And if the real secret has nothing to do with the real world and the brothers thing, it’s possible that the whole “real world” business is disposed of in the beginning, once and for all, and then the game gets back to the pirate world, to stay there until the end.
I see what you mean. Interestingly the IV and subtitle “a new hope” was only added afterwards when V / Empire Strikes Back was made upon the re-release of the first movie. Luckily there was no internet at that time. Just imagine. Or perhaps there was, but it broke down over the walls of posts written about why the first movie isn’t called Episode I? And even then- once episode 1 was made the internet was a thing and people did not really like it (or JarJar). But I digress.
We did get a MI3 in the form of CoMI. It did close the story arc. Some people like it, others didn’t.
I would also add that people’s obsession with the secret might have been reinforced by Ron himself, when he jokingly named the game “Monkey Island 3a: The Secret Reveled[sic] or your Money Back”.
In the wireframe world of Thimbleweed Park, there is a secret room where Delores plays The Secret Of Monkey Island 3a, in which she discovers the Real Secret™.
There was a discussion in the TWP blog where I proposed that Ron hadn’t planned Monkey Island as a trilogy. He denied that. According to him Monkey Island was planned as three parts from the beginning. Later Ron wrote that the ending of MI2 was created during and very late in the development process of MI2. So the MI2 ending can’t be an important part of the whole story (that Ron imagined in the 80s before he started the work on MI1).
AFAIK George Lucas planned the whole story (including parts I to VI). As he realized that the story won’t fit into one movie he broke it into parts and filmed at first part IV. The other parts were in his mind before he started with Star Wars. (But don’t ask me for a source here - that was mentioned in a documentary about Star Wars in TV.)
If you read the content of the interview with Bill Tiller, it’s pretty clear how all flowed: I was told that the ending of MI2 was originally going to be the ending of MI1. But Dave Grossman and Tim Shafer didn’t like it and talked Ron out of it. Then I heard from Larry Ahern that two to three months before MI2 was supposed to be done, an ending had still not been decided upon. And about then Ron decided to go with the amusement park ending he was originally going to use in MI1.
So basically the “It’s all a creation of a kid’s fantasy in an amusement park” was an option available for Ron since TSOMI. But was effectively resumed only a few months before completing MI2 and developed deeper in the way we all know now.
So there’s one thing we can be sure about: if the “it’s kids in an amusement park” was to be used for MI1, and even if it wasn’t but has been used in MI2… that can’t be the “real” setting. Otherwise what was going to happen in the third chapter? What could drive the plot forward?
I mean, cliffhangers work when the resolution still needs time. Imagine if “Who shot Mr. Burns” ended not with Burns getting shot, but Burns getting shot AND showing that Maggie Simpson did it, what could the second part talk about?
The fact that we were (and we are) getting a whole third game based on the premise that “now Guybrush is a kid in a theme park”, chances are that the trilogy ending is not going to be “yeah, so, he discovers that the whole initial premise was true the whole time”. That would be disappointing.
No, I haven’t seen it that way (back then). To me the glowing was just one of those fourth-wall-breaking things you’ll find at the end of a lot of movies. It was just a form of a wink/blink/nod for/to the player that Chuckie was the evil guy, tricked Guybrush successfully and that he will play the bad guy next time they play something again.
But that would be in concord to my thesis: There are other elements like the vending machine that are more important to “the secret” than the ending of MI2. But if Bill Tiller is right (see cite of Gffp above) then the ending of MI2 could be indeed important to the secret.
For reference, this is the video in which Ron explained how the ending of MI2 “hit him”:
Transcript:
Now the thing is I didn’t really have an ending for Monkey Island 2 for a long time. We were almost done with the game and I still had no ending. It’s like, I didn’t have a bad ending that I hope I make better or a mediocre ending, I just had no ending and I was starting to panic.
Now panic can be an amazing motivator. Panic and fear are often the lubrication of the creative engine. So then one morning I was laying in bed and I was just staring at the ceiling and the ending to Monkey Island 2 just hit me. Not with all the details like the Star Wars parody but the basic gist of it and it just felt absolutely perfect, it was odd and it was strange and I knew a lot of people would just hate it.
But I also knew a lot of people would love it and it just felt right. it was kind of the ending that the game was waiting for.
So the next morning I got back to the office and I sat down with Tim and Dave and Steve Purcell and we worked through all the details.
I don’t remember who came up with the Return of the Jedi parody but it was perfect and it just fit.
This is like a detective game where you have to figure out who’s telling the truth from three people whose stories don’t match -
James ‘Purple’ Hampton: “my suggestion to make it like a St. Elsewhere-like ending”
Bill Tiller: “the ending of MI2 was originally going to be the ending of MI1”
Ron: “I was just staring at the ceiling and the ending to Monkey Island 2 just hit me”
I don’t really think the three stories don’t match. They match quite well. It’s the same thing told by different people. The original ending intended by Ron for MI1 being it’s all a kid fantasy (never got its way explicitly into the first game) is resumed for MI2 but becomes a different thing. It becomes a more structured deliberate fantasy of a kid lost in an amusement park who creates a fictional world in his mind, and his parents send his older brother to look for him. And that brother Chuckie is the reference used by the kid for the evil guy, his nemesis. If you ask Bill Tiller, he will say the ending was re-used because it has the same origin, if you ask Ron he will be way more precise and tell you it’s close but something new because he developed it way more than that seminal idea.
It’s just that Ron describes it like it totally hit him from nowhere. You’d think he’d at least say that it was something that was similar to an idea they had for MI1.
“One is closer than the others… but not much.” Couldn’t be that one? It’s closer because he started from there, but then built something new from that. (Assuming they’re all always telling the truth! )
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