#The secret of monkey island midi how to#
#The secret of monkey island midi code#

#The secret of monkey island midi how to#

In fact, there were several pieces within this soundtrack that I would use as my go-to examples of how to write music for games I can’t think of a single piece of music that captured the personality of its target as well as the theme for villainous ghost pirate LeChuck, for example. That’s not to say that the original score of Monkey Island wasn’t fantastic – it really was. However, there was one area of the game that was improved to such an extent it actually made earlier LucasArts games difficult to return to: the music. The plot was barmier, the world was richer and more detailed, and the player’s inventory now used nifty little pictures instead of words to represent the items you were carrying. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge improved over the original in every way. They wouldn’t know a good story even if they paid 50 bucks for it My parents had created some pretty impressive egg hunts over the course of my childhood, but that year my main preoccupation was winning a digital spitting contest (sorry, mum). Hurrah!ĭue to my familiarity with LucasArts’ style of thinking, I played through the sequel in an even shorter amount of time than I did the original, burning through the entire experience over the course of one Easter weekend. Thankfully the logistics were a lot easier by then: my grandparents had donated their ageing 286 to us, and I had enough of my own money to buy my own legitimate copy. So when I learned there was a sequel, I simply had to have it. The hype turned out to be well-deserved, though – I was in awe from its opening shot (a panoramic view of the constantly-nocturnal island of Melee, underscored by the game’s theme), and I finished it in double-quick time – even if the relationship with the friend who’d lent it to me had become somewhat strained by my attempts to use him as a primitive form of GameFAQs (I was probably an obnoxious child)! Of course, having put so much effort in to acquiring it, the Secret of Monkey Island had a lot to live up to.

#The secret of monkey island midi code#

Having endlessly badgered a friend for a dodgy copy (sorry, LucasArts…), I had to convince my dad to spend one of his lunch hours photocopying the code wheel before spending a week practically living with my grandparents in order to complete it (thanks to them owning a 286 – relatively mighty for its day). So hooked, in fact, that I channelled every effort into obtaining it. The screenshots may have been from the original 15-colour EGA version of the game, but it still looked so much more advanced than anything I’d played on my dad’s PC-1512.

Having first caught site of in an old issue of CVG, the game became somewhat of an obsession. Though I have happy memories of the likes of Loom, Day of the Tentacle and the Indiana Jones series, the Monkey Island games were my LucasArts titles of choice. I don’t think this is particularly surprising, either with oddball puzzles that were always only just on the solvable side of insane a mature sense of humour and, most importantly for this piece, well-executed scores that would represent everything that the industry would later describe as “cinematic” I think these games were always destined to make a bit of an impression.