Escape from Monkey Island Preview

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While the Star Wars license is the vehicle that has brought LucasArts to mainstream gamers, it's the company's pedigree of graphic adventure games that continues to impress hard-core fans. Maniac Mansion set the standard for nearly all games in the genre to follow, and LucasArts has since continually been raising the watermark for others with games like Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and of course, the Monkey Island series. Earlier this year, LucasArts revealed that it would extend the life of the Monkey Island games with Escape from Monkey Island, the fourth entry in the humorous and cleverly written series. The news came as a pleasant surprise to many adventure-game fans who had assumed Grim Fandango to be the genre's swan song. Released two years ago, Grim Fandango was legendary designer Tim Schafer's last graphic adventure game for LucasArts, and despite loads of critical acclaim (it took home our Game of the Year Award for 1998), sales of the game stalled in the US compared to blockbusters like Starcraft. Regardless, the company is hard at work on Escape from Monkey Island, which will prove to be LucasArts' culmination of graphic-adventure experience.

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Escape from Monkey Island isn't LucasArts' first 3D graphic adventure, but it is the first Monkey Island game to have that distinction. As a result, a lot of fans of the series have expressed some concern that the transition from 2D to 3D will have a negative effect on the overall appeal of the series. We recently traveled to LucasArts' San Rafael, Calif., offices to take a look at Escape from Monkey Island in its final stages of development. We spoke a bit with the game's lead designers, Sean Clarke and Mike Stemmle, whose previous work includes Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig, and Afterlife, and then sat down with the latest build of the game for about an hour. Judging from our time in front of Escape from Monkey Island, it's clear that the humorous antics and addictive gameplay formula of the series haven't been lost on this fourth installment. If anything, Escape from Monkey Island is shaping up to be the series' finest entry. Let's take a look.