They were able to strip out Turn on/Turn off and make Walk To the default action for clicking when no other verb was selected. The profusion of verbs in Maniac Mansion is streamlined in Secret of Monkey Island, from 15 down to 12 on the Amiga release, and later 9 for the PC edition. The key verb here is New Kid which switches character: an idea returned to with the more streamlined Day of the Tentacle (1993). The game was novel, even by today’s standards, in that it could be completed in different ways by using various combinations of characters who had their own skills or unique interactions with some NPCS. This way of interacting by constructing commands was modelled clearly on existing text adventure game conventions which they might have expected some of the players to already be familiar with. Maniac Mansion had the classic wall of verbs at the bottom of the screen, with fifteen verbs. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) used the SCUMM engine, which was first developed for Maniac Mansion (1987). We can see this by taking a sojourn through the history of verbs in Monkey Island.
This isn’t just a matter of user-friendliness, rather it has an interesting impact on the design space for the game’s puzzles, opening up some possibilities while closing down others. There has been a tendency over the decades for graphic adventure games to involve increasingly streamlined verb selection. There’s another Monkey Island game in the works, Return to Monkey Island and we can expect it to be a single-clicker: that is, to resolve all action through clicking on a hotspot, with no ‘look’ action or other verbs.
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