Every Lucasarts Adventure Game: Ranked Worst To Best

At the end of The Secret of Monkey Island, pirate-wannabe protagonist Guybrush Threepwood muses - to the utter confusion of belle Elaine - "never pay $20 for a video game". It's an immortal line that encapsulates the brilliant, dry wit of Ron Gilbert's masterpiece, self-deprecatingly underestimating the impact the title had on the entire genre.

Monkey Island was a watershed for adventure games. Gilbert, learning from his mistakes in Maniac Mansion, decided point 'n' clicks should no longer actively punish players, laughing at their unpredictable failures, but instead immerse them in thoughtful, rewarding worlds where the only barrier for progress was their own patience. Death was a thing of a past - save for one extremely obscure Easter egg - and it wasn't possible to reach Act V, only to find the game was unwinnable because you hadn't nabbed a chicken egg in Act II.

But it wasn't just a philosophical triumph. Unlikely hero Guybrush Threepwood's inexplicable desire to become a pirate captured many a player's imagination, the majority accustomed to playing the role of unidentifiable action heroes. Monkey Island is utterly transportative in a way today's more technically striking pirate sims aren't: you can practically feel the humidity of the Caribbean night, taste the bitter grog. And in a game where brains won over brawn, it made perfect sense that the key to winning swordfights was not the thrusts themselves, but the razor-sharp insults between them.

The Secret of Monkey Island is Lucasarts' most loved adventure game, then, and one of their finest. But it's the lesser noggin of the company's three-headed monkey of perfection.