The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the best graphic adventures ever made, and I'm not just talking about the story. Its soundtrack far exceeds other developments of the era, and over time it became a kind of benchmark for evaluating multiple sound cards, whether real or emulated. Would you like to know how it progressed? If so, then you need to see and hear what we have here for you…
The opening music in Monkey Island is impossible to confuse. Its mental presence is on par with games like Super Mario Bros., Pac-Man, Tetris, and many more. Although I must admit that almost all Lucasfilm-LucasArts games have excellent music, the Monkey Island intro sits a step above the rest. What was lacking in graphics (the 16-color version was released in October 1990) was delivered in audio support. AdLib, Sound Blaster, Roland, Gravis… that hardware was virtually out of reach in the early 90s, but things changed a bit, and today we have the possibility to appreciate its evolution.
Monkey Island on different sound cards
These two videos complement each other, but both start at the same place: the PC speaker. Despite its natural limitations, Monkey Island does a great job presenting its melody. One of the rarest versions is offered by the Creative Music System card, also known as Game Blaster or Sound Blaster 1.5. Its goal was to compete with the AdLib card based on the Yamaha YM3812 chip (OPL2), but Creative was only able to achieve this with its early Sound Blaster.
However, Monkey Island's soundtrack gains a new dimension with the help of the Roland MT-32 system. I say “system” because technically it's not a sound card, but an external MIDI synthesizer that requires additional hardware to work in PCs. That detail made it an extraordinarily expensive option (700 dollars in 1987), but it placed the quality bar at a level that the rest of the manufacturers had to reach immediately.
Unless your intention is to assemble a retro computer using period hardware, I don't think you'll have trouble playing the music of Monkey Island and other classic games (Sierra was Roland's distributor at the time) at its maximum quality settings. The heavy lifting is now done by solutions like ScummVM, DOSBox, and the MT-32 emulator called Munt. The precision in Munt's emulation is formidable, and it saves us more than 200 dollars. Which do you think sounds better? Leave a comment!
