36 years later, The Secret of Monkey Island’s combat is still unrivalled

I was seven when I first played The Secret of Monkey Island. I have fond memories sitting with my dad at the family computer, as I clicked around the screen, exploring Melee Island with Guybrush Threepwood, trying my hardest to solve the puzzles, but ultimately deferring to the adult in the room every time I got stuck. Which happened pretty often. “Back in the day, we completed it without the internet,” he loves to remind me whenever the game comes up in conversation. “We’d go to the pub once a week and talk about how much progress we’d made.”

Heartwarming tales of old aside, one of my favorite mechanics was always the game’s satirical take on combat. You’re a pirate, so of course you have a cutlass, but Monkey Island is a family-friendly game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Rather than swinging a sharp blade towards your foe, you instead try to draw blood from their ego via clever comebacks to their insults.

Combat encounters are started in a similar manner to Pokémon battles, although The Secret of Monkey Island came first (1990). As you travel across Melee Island, using the game’s topographical view of the jungle, the sprite of another pirate may cross paths with you. If it does, an insult-and-comeback fight ensues.

I was just a wee nipper back then, so even though I chuckled at “too bad no one’s ever heard of you at all” as a retort to “I’ve heard you are a contemptible sneak,” it was only because I knew it was supposed to be funny. I was only seven; I’d never heard the word ‘contemptible’ before, nor did I understand why implying no one had heard of my opponent was necessarily a bad thing. The same goes for hemorrhoids, trying to understand how a dog could have taught a human anything, and why Guybrush would offer to share his diapers even if he did wear them.

In an interview with Retro Gamer magazine, later republished on GamesRadar, creator Ron Gilbert explained that the insult sword fighting was born from an aversion to mechanics that rely on fast reflexes, because adventure games are all about logic. This meant “the sword fighting became puzzle-solving.” It was also inspired by old pirate movies, where Gilbert observed they spent more time talking to each other and throwing insults back and forth than they did actually fighting.

I think it’s fair to say that if The Secret of Monkey Island had used some form of rudimentary combat system where the player had to coordinate stabs and blocks, the game wouldn’t hold up anywhere near as well as it does today. The insult-comeback dialogue mechanic means the game has aged far better than it otherwise would have, and it remains one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time. How appropriate, you fight like a cow!