The search for the Secret of Monkey Island 2022 / hints, conspiracy thoeries, assumptions, clues

Adventure/Lucasfilm Games
41

Someone in a Monkey Island discord linked this: Aric’s World

Reading the three early documents on Monkey Island? I’m pretty convinced that, whatever the Secret of Monkey Island is nowadays, it was originally meant as the hellgate and accompanying undead resurrection. Note that the concept of a “secret of Monkey Island” seems to exist before the game had anachronisms as a running gag.

“The secret was unknown, but legends value it as priceless.”

“A bizarre glowing crack which sits exactly where the map says the treasure should be.”

“That crack descends to a place at the center of the earth, the name of which changes from religion to religion, from faith to faith. Most pirates call it Hell.”

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42

Ron writes on twitter:

13,000+ lines of dialog just went to be mastered. Of those 13,000+ lines there was only one we missed in recording. GUYBRUSH: “And the secret is [REDACTED]”

Oh well. Next game I guess.

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43

Thimbleweed Park was about the same amount of lines.

44

Nah. That line wasn’t recorded simply because Ron should have killed anyone who was involved in the recording. That’s why that specific line was recorded in a sekrit location, using Ron’s mobile. And then, well, Dominic Armato had to be killed, obviously. So chances are we’ll have that line in the game.

45

Noah Falstein’s interview with Cressup:

Q: Are we any closer to finding out the secret of Monkey Island in this game?

A: Okay, here’s some interesting, provocative thing. I was working with Ron when he was working on the very first Monkey Island, the Secret of Monkey Island and I know what he had in mind for the secret way back then and it has a significant bearing on what you see in this next game. That’s as far as I’ll go. So, whether you get closer to it or not, closeness is a very subjective thing. There’s a lot about storytelling that will be up to the individual taste of a user.

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46

Oooh… :neutral_face:

I have no idea what he is referring to, but I find this statement intriguing.

I wonder if he is able to make the connection between Ron’s original idea and the new game just observing what has been publicly disclosed about RtMI.

Edit: well no, I have my idea, actually. I think it’s related to the old “coming to age” trope. Back then, Ron was young and so it was Guybrush. Now that Ron has aged, I also expect to get a more mature Guybrush.

47

“The Secret of Monkey Island is like a grain of sand floating in a bowl of rose petals. If you remove the sand, you will destroy the stillness and beauty of the water.”

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48

He is talking like he knows what RTMI will show.

Also, he could never say that by just looking at what has been publicly disclosed.(because that’s basically nothing)

This could mean that the secret was a vague and not completely defined idea; and in RtMI the details have been completely defined. But the core idea is intact.

49

Yes, now I have watched a bit of that interview and he says that he has playtested the game.

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50

Reading through that old post…

The Secret of Monkey Island, LeChuck’s Revenge, and the Curse of Monkey Island quite possibly all refer to the same thing.

If hellgate: It is a Secret hellgate that LeChuck traps Guybrush in for Revenge as part of an elaborate Curse, all on Monkey Island.

If boy’s imagination: The Secret is that nothing is real, and Chucky’s apparent Revenge attempts are just him trying to get you back to your parents, and the Curse is that this fantasy cannot be real.

51

who would talk like this, if Ron had simply implemented the secret he had in mind back then?
he would have simply said “I know what he had in mind back then, and he implemented this very well.”

Instead, he said the original secret has a bearing on what we’ll see. It’s like the original secret influenced what we’ll see, but what we’ll see is not exactly the original secret. I’m curious how this can be. Either the secret was a vary vague thing, or …?

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52

He would never reveal what Ron did, so he intentionally chose more ambiguous words.

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53

Tami Borowick, programmer on Monkey Island 2, also knows the Secret.

I do know the secret to Monkey Island, but if I told you, a wild troop of three-headed monkeys would chase me down and hang me by my littlest toenails over a totally indigestible vat of grog. Thankfully, players never die in Lucasfilm games. :slight_smile:

I wonder if that will be talked about in a new interview with her on Wednesday.

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54

We all know the secret TO monkey island, if we read the recipe.

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55

image
image449×611 72.9 KB

(Source)

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56

Well, here is what GPT-3 can say about the secret:

There is no clear answer to what the secret of Monkey Island is, as there are many possible interpretations. Ron Gilbert, the creator of the Monkey Island games, has stated in interviews that the secret of the island is meant to be open to interpretation and that there is no one correct answer. Many of the characters in the games express their own theories on what the secret may be, but none of them are ever confirmed or refuted. It is up to the player to decide what the secret of Monkey Island is, if there even is one.

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57

Who or what is GPT-3?

Edit: ok, I’ve seen the other thread :slight_smile:

(Just in time, as I was jumping out the window)

58

Ron hasn’t actually said it’s open to interpretation, has he?

59

I think that he never explicitly said that, but I don’t remember very well all the things he said about that ending in that PAX Australia speech…

It’s highly likely that that statement was created by the AI. For sure, the web is full of people’s opinions about the open-endedness of that ending.

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60

I have to resume this thread. This thing is a bit too spoilery and it comes from the latest Ars Technica article (which is a GREAT interview!)

I have blurred things from a certain point on…

IT’S freakin’ EXCITING for me! :smile:

AT: How long has this idea of having players try to discover the secret been in your mind?

RG: I think that’s a relatively new idea. The Secret of Monkey Island was the title of the first game, but we never really explored the title literally. At one moment [in development], there was a huge kind of a backstory, and there was actually a secret. As we started developing the game, though, that just kind of fell away, and we really just stopped paying attention to it. Going back to it, it is a piece of unfinished business for a lot of players, you know. It’s called The Secret of Monkey Island. What’s the damned secret?! It’s also, for us, interesting to revisit and go, you know, we’re actually going to tell people what the secret of Monkey Island is in this game.

AT: As a creator and writer, is that actually an interesting question to answer?

RG: Yeah, it is.

AT: What’s changed to make that so?

RG: It wasn’t a priority. Not because it wasn’t interesting. It’s just other things became higher priorities as we told the story, and we stopped. In this case, enough years have passed, and enough people have asked the question that it felt like… we did have a conversation early on in the [Return to Monkey Island] design phase about, are we going to reveal the secret? In some of the early designs, it was, Guybrush doesn’t find the secret. But that just felt hollow at some point. If we’re gonna do the thing, he needs to truly find the secret. The real secret, as it was envisioned, you know, back in 1990. So that became a very interesting creative thing to do, is to go, how are we going to do that?

AT: So you’ve known the secret all along, then.

RG: Yep.

AT: Have you told anyone this? I think I missed this memo.

RG: Very few people.

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