Cult-classic video game The Secret of Monkey Island receives a staged-adaptation at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Adam Dolan looks at the potential pitfalls of reinterpreting games for the stage.
As an avid gamer as well as a theatregoer, it was with some degree of giddy glee that I read the listing in this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival programme for a staged adaptation of cult '90s video game The Secret of Monkey Island.
It figures that the current batch of theatre-makers would be influenced by films and video games of the '90s; it's generational. This era of creatives is taking influences from the things that inspired them in their formative years, and we're the pop-culture/video-game/computerised generation.
Peter Kimball-Evans, the man responsible for bringing Monkey Island to the stage, is an animator, and graduate of UWE in Bristol, and as he tells me, was only a toddler when the game was released in 1990: “It was on an old DOS computer that gave me my first taste of Monkey Island, back when I was still an impressionable young gamer. Monkey Island, to me, has always been about the conversations. They wouldn't be half as entertaining if it weren't for the mix of exaggerated and entertaining characters.”
The game spawned four sequels and maintains the same level of popularity the series has enjoyed for over twenty years. It has a loyal following and, for the record, I proudly include myself among their number. It stood out at the time for its weird characters and Pythonesque dialogue. In addition, the fact that it's a point-and-click adventure game makes it infinitely more adaptable than an open-world game (a game with a free-roaming setting, such as Grand Theft Auto), or first-person shooter like HALO or Call of Duty. Of all the games Kimball-Evans has thought of adapting, it's these that he's left alone. “Take a look at the incredible stories that have come out of gaming in the last few years,” says Kimball-Evans: “Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock, Portal, but these games are far too action-oriented for the stage,” he says. “I believe that games like Super Mario have great potential to be turned into a kid's show. Just look at the great stock of colourful characters Mario already has, as well as the 'save the princess' storyline that could be elaborated in any number of ways.”
The other potential issue is the emphasis many games now put on customisation and reactionary storytelling. Whereas Monkey Island, an old-school classic, is a very linear and two-dimensional game (both graphically and with regards to gameplay), twenty-first century games are a lot more complex and sophisticated, the main difference being your actions directly influence the narrative. For example in modern role-playing games like Peter Molyneux's massively popular Fable trilogy, the storyline is far less rigid than was typical in the Monkey Island era of gaming. With the former you can customise the look of your character and to some degree, your surroundings. But this leaves a lot of room for interpretation – making it infinitely more difficult to adapt, as the story has an astoundingly varied number of possible outcomes.
Whether The Secret of Monkey Island the play is a success or not remains to be seen. Adapting a video game to any other format is a tricky task: just look at the countless failed filmic video game adaptations that have ended up in the bargain DVD bin. But Kimball-Evans remains optimistic: “I know there are many fans of video games out there, a lot of whom enjoy theatre. As long as this demographic exists, writers will emerge – hopefully passionate writers, who enjoy the games enough to translate the experience in a way that will entertain even the most reluctant non-gamers out there.”
I'm inclined to agree with him, and I share both his enthusiasm and optimism. Even in a worst case scenario, video game adaptations will bring a few new fans to the theatre, and widening the net can only be a positive. As Kimball-Evans predicts, maybe it'll even convince some seasoned theatre-goers to pick up an Xbox control pad. And I could always use another wing-man in Halo: Reach.
The Secret of Monkey Island is featured at the Fringe Festival on the 23rd of August
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