Guybrush Threepwood has a nasty tendency to be a bit of a pillock at times.
In the beginning, Lucasarts Gaming Division produced a graphic adventure game, which was hailed as one of the greatest and funniest ever written, and Guybrush was a young man desperate to become a pirate and sail the seven seas. And he puzzled, sword-fought, rowed, walked, followed and laughed his way to victory and met the one true love of his life, Elaine, and killed his one true nemesis, LeChuck.
All good games get sequels, and when LeChuck is reincarnated as a ghost Guybrush got his second outing. For a change the sequel was also hailed as the greatest, funniest graphical adventure game ever written, and Guybrush once again set off, only now he was searching for the great treasure of Big Whoop. And it was funny, and it still is good, and it is, in some ways, better than the second sequel.
By this time Lucasarts were, and are, heralded as the creators of the definitive Graphic Adventure game, as Sam 'n Max, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango are all testament to, but the Monkey Island series has always been the most popular, but when the creator and genius behind the games, Ron Gilbert, split to make a new company Cavedog, everybody assumed that Monkey Island would never be as good again. In a way they were right.
The third Monkey Island game was a game made from putting the ideas from the other two games into a large pot and picking at random. The sword-fighting from the first game returned, along with people from the second, including people with fruit for heads, and the characters were as I for one had imagined them to sound, but there wasn't much new, and it was generally thought that the Adventure game, as of this and Grim Fandango, was dead.
Speculation has always been rife for MI4, and I was always going to put it in preview on my website if it was officially announced, but for a company whose films are announced 6 years in advance, they still deny games existence up to 2 weeks before they are released. Ron Gilbert, creator of MI1 & 2 has an idea for another story, and has said that he would make another MI if he could buy the rights from Lucasarts. Recently increasing evidence has been found to suggest that the game *was* in fact in development, and the final straw came when I saw it listed in PC Gamer UK's Games 2000 feature. As far as I can gather, MI4 is on it's way. Bow before it, for we are surly not worthy.