3 HN users recommended this documentary3 months2020–2022score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Recommended as a well-made documentary-style history that gives context around the game and inspires replays.
A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.
“Do yourself a favor and watch this wonderful video essay historique on The Monkey Island series from Ahoy” (HN, 2022)
Really looking forward to this. Back in the day I played it on my Amiga 500, but last year, after watching Retro Ahoys video [1] I got my old 486 out of the loft and bought a Roland MT-32 just to play it - highly recommended, as is the video. [1] [this video]
For those of you who are looking for some context, and have an hour to spare, Ahoy made a great documentary on YouTube about ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ that touches on this topic. [0] The source material linked in this thread looks to be more authoritative than the video, and if I remember correctly the video even gets this detail of the story wrong, but sometimes it’s nice to know the story around the story. [0] [this video]
>> tech companies in general should be doing significantly more to protect their engineers' time, and the ones that get good at this are going to have outsized impact I have just watched history of The Secret of Monkey Island ( [this video] ). What struck me was how relatively cheap it was (if I remember correctly it costed 130000$ and main team was only 3 people). I now that it was a different time, but even if You take the inflation (of money and requirements) into consideration its still a miracle. And one of the reasons given for this project success was that Schafer and the rest was left alone to do their thing - I would not say they were protected, but at least nobody important enough paid attention to them to start messing with their creative process. This is somehow consistent with my general observation - that in knowledge based work only small subset of people do the real work.
Shows small, left-alone team made Monkey Island cheaply.
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