The Monkey Island series is coming back this year.
Monkey Island series creator Ron Gilbert recently announced that Return to Monkey Island, the long-awaited sequel to The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, is coming in 2022.
The game is being developed by Gilbert's Terrible Toybox, Inc. in collaboration with Devolver Digital and Lucasfilm Games.
Return to Monkey Island 2 Details
According to Kotaku's report, Return to Monkey Island will ignore every game in the franchise and will act as a direct sequel to Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
LeChuck's Revenge was the last game in the series worked on by Gilbert and The Secret of Monkey Island designer Dave Grossman. Both Gilbert and Grossman teamed up and had made their careers under LucasArts.
Gilbert previously hinted at this exclusion in his 2013 blog post regarding his thoughts of making another Monkey Island game. He wrote that all games after Monkey Island 2 do not exist in his universe and that he wanted to pick up where he left off in the series.
In a separate tweet, Gilbert said he and his team in Terrible Toybox were working on the game for the past two years "in complete secrecy," which was successful due to the lack of Monkey Island news during that period.
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Dominic Armato, who lent his voice to the games' protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood, will be reprising the role in the upcoming sequel. He also expressed his excitement about being back in the game on Twitter, apologizing for "not being all over the responses" due to him working on the game at his tweet's publication.
The game's announcement trailer said that the game would be available in 2022. However, Gilbert, Devolver Digital, the game's official website, and Lucasfilm Games did not mention a specific date for the game's official launch.
The developers did not reveal anything else about the game. As such, it is still a mystery as to what platforms Return to Monkey Island can be played on and its price. However, Devolver Digital did say that more information will be revealed "further down the road," per the company's email with CNET.
Why Return to Monkey Island Is a Big Deal
The Monkey Island series is often regarded by gamers as a pioneering entry in the point-and-click adventure genre. The first two games in the series, The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, received 9.0 and 8.8 user scores on Metacritic, respectively.
According to CBR.com, the first game in the series was notable for adding a new twist to adventure games at the time. Both Gilbert and Lucasarts (Lucasfilm Games' previous name) designed the game to focus on its story and exploration instead of punishing the player for committing mistakes.
The second game took the first game's formula and made it better despite Glibert, Grossman, and video game designer Tim Schafer working on the game a month after The Secret of Monkey Island was released.
Despite the critical success of the game, Lucasarts insisted that Gilbert, Schafer, and Grossman abandoned the series due to it failing commercially at release.
Schafer told Playboy Magazine in 2007 that Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge only sold 25,000 copies, which was a quarter of what Lucasfilm expected.
Gilbert previously teased about making another Monkey Island game in 2013 through his blog post. Back then, he would only consider making one if he owned the IP.
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