Guybrush Threepwood says “Rubber tree.” in one release of The Secret of Monkey Island and “Rubber tree!” in another, and that single punctuation mark is one of dozens of differences a fan archive has catalogued across the game’s many editions. The Monkey Island SCUMM Bar, a fan site running since 1996, now keeps a side-by-side guide to every version of the 1990 classic, from the 16-color original to the hand-painted 2009 remake.
The guide matters because The Secret of Monkey Island was never one fixed game. Lucasfilm Games released it on floppy disk in October 1990, put out a 256-color edition that December, moved it to CD-ROM in 1992 and then let a different studio remake it 19 years later. Each port was built for different hardware, and each changed something.
The versions, one by one
- EGA (1990): the original, with 16 colors and MIDI music. The Atari ST release looks the same. Slow PCs dropped animations and music.
- CGA: technically the EGA game running on an older graphics card. The archive’s verdict is that it “looked… not great.”
- Amiga: 32 colors and tracker-style MOD music. A CDTV edition was reportedly finished but never shipped.
- VGA floppy: 256 colors with MIDI.
- VGA CD-ROM and FM Towns (1992): CD-quality music, an icon-based inventory borrowed from the sequel, new background sound. The Japanese FM Towns edition adds very smooth scrolling.
- Sega CD: Amiga-style art with the CD soundtrack, larger text for TV screens, and a few cuts, including the drowning gag and the closing scenes showing what happened to Stan and the crew.
- Mac: the CD interface with anti-aliased, softened graphics and music in three quality settings.
- Special Edition (2009): redrawn high-definition art, re-recorded music and full voice acting, for PC, Mac, iOS, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
The archive also lists the EGA and Amiga demos separately, because the demo blocks off areas and uses different puzzles, to the point of putting a wall in the middle of the SCUMM Bar.
The strangest gap: floppy versus CD
The most surprising finding is how much changed between the VGA floppy and the CD release, which most players assume are the same game. On CD, Captain Smirk’s cigar no longer smokes. Sprite brightness, which the floppy version adjusted scene by scene to suit the lighting, stays flat. And the famous stump joke is gone.
That joke is a small piece of game history. In the EGA version, examining a tree stump in the forest led to a message asking the player to insert disk 22, then 36, then 114, disks that never existed. According to the game’s Wikipedia entry, so many players phoned the LucasArts hint hotline about the missing disks that the gag was removed and later mocked in the sequel.
Why the series keeps getting compared
Ron Gilbert conceived the game in 1988 and designed it with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. It cost about $200,000 and took nine months, and it introduced insult sword fighting and a near-total absence of player deaths. Five sequels followed, ending with Return to Monkey Island in 2022, so every new entry sends players back to the original, and back to the question of which version to play.
The answer depends on what you value. The Special Edition lets players switch between new and classic art at the press of a button, which makes it the easiest way in today. Purists tend to prefer the VGA floppy or CD art, and only the EGA disks keep the stump joke. Remakes of old favorites are selling well this month, too: the Ocarina of Time remake sold 5.2 million copies in four days, and Tony Hawk revisited his own past when he recreated a Pro Skater 3 level in Los Angeles.
The SCUMM Bar says sibling guides for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and Escape from Monkey Island are already up, with more games still to be added.
Further reading
Image: Georgina Goodlander, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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