Now, in the era of fast Internet and capacious media, the problem of space occupied by games is not as acute as in the last century, when developers had only a few free kilobytes or megabytes at their disposal. For example, to squeeze The Secret of Monkey Island in the Procrustean bed of floppy disks, the screenwriter of the quest Tim Shafer (Tim Schafer) had to get rid of 25% of the dialogue.
About the creation of “Monkey Island” Shafer told in the podcast of the screenwriter Alana Pierce (Alanah Pearce). As the developer recalls, the adventure had to fit on five floppy disks. To fit within the limitation, Shafer and was forced to shorten game texts.
According to the author Monkey Island, he did not immediately decide which parts of the script would be better to go through with scissors. Valuable advice helped game designer Hal Barwood (Hal Barwood), who then, in the late 1980s, worked on the quest Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis:
[Он сказал мне:] “It’s hard. But imagine that your script is like a web and some of its threads are hanging out. If you cut them off, the web won’t get weaker. It will become more stable because other threads will take on more weight. The web will become stronger, more stable and resilient.
Apparently, the hint had a positive effect on creativity Shafer – in particular, last year Psychonauts 2to which the famous developer had a hand, was praised just for the talentedly written dialogues and jokes.
As for Monkey Islandthen the series is still alive: in 2022 on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch starts Return to Monkey Island – a new adventure game that will act as a sequel to the second Monkey Island.
