Starting from Last Crusade in 1989 and going all the way through to The Dig in 1997, it’s obvious that all of LucasArts’ adventure games were based on the same engine they (mostly) all use the same font and the same mouse cursor, and while the later games improved on the art and animation and experimented with the interface it never diverged so much that the game was unrecognisable as a SCUMM game. The technical advances made to allow the SCUMM engine to take advantage of better technology are also impressive. I thought Curse was a weird looking game back in 1997, but time has proven the value of its art direction. If you’ve played the previous Monkey Island games it is a bit of an adjustment to see the previously regular-sized Guybrush Threepwood transformed into a lanky giant, and the fact that everything is made out of cartoonish curves - I don’t think there’s a single straight line in the game - also takes a bit of getting used to. It remains absolutely the best-looking adventure game ever made even the modern adventure game renaissance hasn’t managed to produce anything that matches the colourful, stylised art and animation of Curse. The big irony is that now, in 2021, if you stick Curse next to any 3D game that was released in 1997, the 3D game will be a mess of jagged edges and pixelated textures while Curse hasn’t aged a single day. Said popular opinion tended to rank Curse in a distant third place behind the first two Monkey Island games, and one of the things I do definitely remember is a certain amount of griping from the gaming media that the 2D graphics made it look old-fashioned 1997 was around about the time when everything was making the jump to 3D whether it was a good idea or not, and so Curse sticking to its guns was seen by some as an unforgivably antiquated approach.
My (admittedly hazy) recollection is that this wasn’t exactly a popular opinion to have at the time.
This whole series was prompted by my booting up Curse Of Monkey Island back in October of last year, and wondering: why was Curse the last high-profile 2D point and click adventure game that LucasArts made? Was the genre an evolutionary dead-end? Was the lure of 3D graphics - which were exploding in 1997 thanks to the Voodoo accelerator card - too strong to resist? And considering Curse in particular, I wanted to get a bit more context on just why LucasArts had abandoned their previously wildly-successful genre at precisely the moment they’d managed to usher it to its apotheosis - because Curse is absolutely fantastic. And so, after a rather longer period than I anticipated, we come back to the beginning.