Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert isn't making another entry in the series, doesn't have any plans to make another entry and isn't making plans to make another entry, but he mused out loud on his blog yesterday about how he would do it if he were developing one.
After stating and reiterating that he currently has no plans to make another Monkey Island title, Gilbert launched into a detailed 15-point breakdown of what a hypothetical sixth Monkey Island game would be and how he would go about making it.
Gilbert said he would have to own the Monkey Island intellectual property in order to begin, and promised that if he were able to secure it, he would sanction the development of Monkey Island fan games as long as their makers respected the source material.
"I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own," said Gilbert.
He would endeavor to make the game with a small team — fewer than 10 people — and would rebuild SCUMM, the scripting language that was the basis of the first three Monkey Island titles, in order to do it. SCUMM, said Gilbert, was "a language built around making adventure games and rapid iteration." That rapid iteration would be helped by the visual style of the game, which Gilbert described as an "enhanced low-res" look — "nice crisp retro art, but augmented by the hardware we have today," since Monkey Island "doesn't need 3D."
"I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own"
Gilbert would want a new Monkey Island game to play like an adventure game in the genre's '90s heyday, so it would be a "hardcore" experience with "no tutorials or hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing," he explained. "Some puzzles will be hard, but all the puzzles will be fair. It's one aspect of Monkey Island I am very proud of."
If Gilbert made this game, he would call it Monkey Island 3a. "All the games after Monkey Island 2 don't exist in my Monkey Island universe," he explained, adding that "I'd want to pick up where I left off."
This is all wishful thinking — even aside from Gilbert's lack of plans to make a new Monkey Island title, Disney, the parent company of the now-defunct LucasArts, owns the IP — but that didn't stop dozens of Monkey Island fans from commenting on Gilbert's post with some variation of "shut up and take my money."