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RetroAhoy: The Secret of Monkey Island

RetroAhoy: The Secret of Monkey Island on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2020–2022.

Ahoy

documentary · evergreen

Open on YouTube

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as a well-made documentary-style history that gives context around the game and inspires replays.

people recommended it
3
separate months
3
strong recommendations
2
discussed on HN
2020–2022
“Do yourself a favor and watch this wonderful video essay historique on The Monkey Island series from Ahoy”
— FireInsight, Sep 2022, in ““Return to Monkey Island” is out today”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

FireInsightSep 2022Strongly recommends

Do yourself a favor and watch this wonderful video essay historique on The Monkey Island series from Ahoy; ▶ this video

in ““Return to Monkey Island” is out today” · View on HN

nicktApr 2022Strongly recommends

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

in “Return to Monkey Island – Coming 2022” · View on HN

TimSchumannNov 2020Recommends

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

in “Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction” · View on HN

v-erneFeb 2022Cites it

>> 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.

in “Ask HN: What are your contrarian views?” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Game history & retro gamingGaming culture & analysismonkey islandlucasartsadventure gamesretro gaminggame development history