In December 1989, a paper journal for game designers printed an essay with a title that insulted the genre its author worked in. The journal was the Journal of Computer Game Design, the printed companion to the Computer Game Developers Conference. The essay was called "Why Adventure Games Suck." The author was Ron Gilbert, who was twenty-five, and who worked at Lucasfilm Games.
Gilbert had been born on January 1, 1964, and he came to games through programming. In 1985 he and the artist Gary Winnick started on an original game at Lucasfilm Games. According to the usual account, Gilbert decided it should be a graphic adventure after watching a cousin play Sierra's King's Quest over a Christmas visit. The game became Maniac Mansion, released in 1987, and it ran on a scripting system Gilbert built for it, called SCUMM, short for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. Players picked a verb from a list on the screen and clicked an object. Nobody had to type and hope.
Maniac Mansion was also a game in which a player could die, and in which a player could get stuck. Use an item the wrong way, or do things in the wrong order, and the game became impossible to finish without telling you so. Gilbert later called those features design flaws. The essay of 1989 is where he wrote the opposite down as rules.
Two of them are short enough to quote. "Danger is inherent in drama, but danger should be survivable if the player is clever." And: "Puzzles and their solutions need to make sense." He added that a puzzle which can only be solved by trial and error, or by luck, is a bad puzzle. He also wrote that a player should never be required to pick up an item that is needed later, unless she can return for it.
Then he went and built the game that obeyed them. The Secret of Monkey Island took about two and a half years to design, write and finish. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman helped write it, and work stopped for more than six months while the team made the game of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It came out in October 1990. The player could not die, whatever she tried, and could not make the game unwinnable. A pirate comedy about a hapless young man named Guybrush Threepwood turned out to be the clearest picture of what the essay had asked for.
The sequel arrived in 1991 and ended on a cliffhanger that Gilbert did not resolve for a very long time. He left LucasArts in 1992 and spent the following decades on other projects, including children's adventure games at Humongous Entertainment and, in 2017, Thimbleweed Park, a new adventure made in the old style. Through all of it, one thing stayed unanswered: the secret of Monkey Island. By his own later account he had thought of it in 1988, before the first game existed.
In September 2022, Return to Monkey Island was released. Weeks later, in an interview with the BBC, Gilbert said what the secret had been. "It was that Guybrush was just in a giant amusement park." He explained that the idea had been dropped early in the first game's development, though traces of it remain in that game, such as the grog machine and the stands.
Players did not agree about the answer. Some reviewers called the ending a fitting end to Guybrush's search. Others said it flattened a mystery that had been more fun unsolved. Gilbert had written, in 1989, that a game should never punish a player who was curious. Thirty-three years later he had kept a promise to that player, and some of them found they would have preferred the wait.
The essay says danger should be survivable. It says nothing about how long a person may be kept waiting at a door that has been promised. Somewhere in your own life there is a door you said you would open. How long do you think you are allowed to leave someone standing at it?