Those are not his size.
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Hey, that was just the Treasure of Mêlée Island shirt! With the Swordmaster shirt, he wanted to keep it in mint condition. I wonder if he still has it.
In my first playthrough, I “talked to” the animatronics before opening the chest, so I missed some dialogue bits. If you open the chest and then talk, you get, “It’s a good thing LeChuck didn’t get to The Secret first. I don’t think it’s his size.”
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It is a bit of a conundrum that the real secret is just the theme park deal which was the ending of MI2. Ron said no one figured it out back then, but it was the literal ending so I think we all picked up on it. I know I did and I was just a little kid. Awesome ending, I loved it.
Sure, there was ambiguity because of Chucky and Elaine, but it’s weird to pretend for 30 years that no one figured out an ending when it was fairly straightforward. The only reason people dismissed this as the real secret was because Ron told us for decades we were off-base.
A more satisfying third game probably would have posited some connection between the portal to hell from the first game and the amusement park from the second, and provided a proper resolution. That could be what Return’s final act tries to do but for me it falls short.
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Yeah, i guess I was expecting something more unexpected. So when the end only delivered the expected, it didn’t quite live up to my unexpected expectations.
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Man, it ends with Guybrush sitting alone on a bench staring in the void. That’s devastating 
What could be more powerful?
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I think the ending really works emotionally because, in a subtle way, it implies that all of Guybrush’s adventures are the fruit of his imagination. Including Boybrush and his marriage to Elaine.
I thought about it for a long time after finishing the game, and the only solution that makes sense and that includes all the theories about the “secret” without contradicting them is this: Big Whoop, the amusement park we see at the beginning, is real, it’s reality, but this reality is filtered through the memories of adult Guybrush, alone on the bench, who remembers his latest adventure with his brother Chuckie. “Return to Monkey Island” is “the memory of an imagination” of an adopted child who, as soon as he was found by his older brother Chuckie, resumed playing with him, before leaving the amusement park with his mother.
Try to think the whole game in this perspective, and everything make sense again.
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It depends… on whether you got the last key and decided to open the final chest or not 
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It amazes me that some people don’t open the chest after all the pain to get it
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I think if the chest was in the pirate world, everyone would open it, but you find it once you’re back in the amusement park and the real world with your “boring flooring inspector job” as Guybrush describes it.
It’s all fake amusement park stuff there and when you look at the chest, Guybrush says, “I should have suspected Stan’s involvement the minute I saw how cheap and gaudy this is”, so I think a lot of people assume it can’t be opened as it’s presented as just some fairground junk.
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Oh wait, so what do you have to do to get the Guybrush staring blankly thing?
I went back to a save state and opened the chest but then turned it off after I did.
open the chest, take the contents, turn off the lights and leave with Elaine.
which is THE NATURAL THING TO DO 
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The game literally just told me it was only an amusement park, none of it was real, there was no secret, it was all in my imagination, and then the chest was there with the other fake decorations. When I looked at it, Guybrush just dismissed it as Stan’s bullshit. Not sure why the natural thing would be to open it!
But back to the topic at hand, I still don’t understand why Guybrush staring off is powerful. I had been playing a game where a guy was a pirate. Then when I get to the real world, I don’t know this guy. I’ve been playing as some imaginary thing the entire time. I have no connection to this person staring off into space. For all I know, he’s a sex criminal. How is this stranger having imagined being a pirate and then coming back to the real world powerful? I just do not get this at all.
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So much of the game has had Ron and Dave comparing Guybrush’s situation to their own. He is older with past glories, just as they are older with past glories. He has unfinished business, just as they have unfinished business. Guybrush sitting on that bench is, in many ways, them sitting on the bench.
In which case… are you and I the disappointing T-shirt in the chest? Is RMI itself the disappointing T-shirt in the chest?
When Ron and Dave were in the last phases of the game’s production, and a section of fans criticised them to the extent that he shut down comments on the grumpygamer blog, was that Elaine walking with Guybrush and making him reflect on his path of destruction?
And when Elaine continues to support Guybrush afterward despite all this, and even encourages a new adventure despite knowing the ending is a carnival, is that the section of fans that stand by him regardless?
Is Monkey Island a mop tree? 
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I’m at risk of repeating myself, but… The T-shirt wasn’t disappointing to me. That’s exactly what I expected for the secret. Evidence:
Funny thing: I finished the game before my siblings started it. I wazzupped 'em a childish text: “I know the Secret of Monkey Island, and you don’t”. My brother replied “I bet it will be something stupid like the T-shirt you got after busting your ass off with the Swordmaster”.
That’s it.
The only bad thing about all of this, is that, retrospectively, we didn’t need RtMI.
It doesn’t add anything to the story. It is just a beautiful and emotional jump in the past. I can see why people would expect more, but I’m ok with it.
For many years I did not have a any clue of the fact that I might “not know” the Secret.
Only when I started reading what fans wrote on the internet I started almost convincing myself that they were right, that we were missing something, and that Ron owed us an explanation.
Well, I’m glad it was all bullshit, after all 
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Same, but I don’t think "the disappointing t-shirt implies one finds it disappointing. 
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I agree, but Frenzie has it right too. The game’s tone tells us the t-shirt is meant to be disappointing, through the shirt’s text and Boybrush’s reaction.
And I agree that I wasn’t really after a secret for all these years.
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Maybe not from Guybrush’s perspective. But as a player, that’s the McGuffin I chased the whole game. Of course I’d try to open it when the chance presents itself!
Not sure if they’d make such a last-minute addition, or if it was planned from the start. But in either case, I found it very powerful. When all those interludes played, where Elaine figures out what Guybrush had done, my first thought was “oh man, we’re in for a divorce!”. Since I wasn’t exactly sure where in the timeline RtMI falls, and I was pretty certain they weren’t married in Escape and Tales (but I might be wrong), that could have explained how things went down. So finding out she didn’t take it all too seriously, and that I was able to justify my actions came as a big relief.
That said, in one of the comment in the spoiler thread, someone noted that Elaine shows a rather motherly attitude towards Guybrush. And I think that also shows here. After all, which mother wouldn’t still love their child, even if he’s a bit of a rascal. In the ending of MI2, the mother’s name is Elaine. At the end of RtMI, Elaine leaves with Boybrush for another adventure/play she devised. I’m wondering if at that point, those two are there in reality, or just present in older Guybrush’s imagination. So is he just reminiscing about his own childhood and his mother, or is that his wife and son? Somehow, I lean more towards the former. That also poses the question: is the Scrapbook real or fake?
To me, the secret has been revealed (or confirmed), but it only raises more questions …