The Monkey Island SCUMM Bar: The Secret of Monkey Island Versions

The OG: 16 colors, MIDI music, and includes the infamous stump joke (as do all floppy versions). The Atari ST version looks identical. For slower EGA machines, animations and music would be removed.

32 colors and MOD music. A CDTV version was in development—allegedly completed—but was never released.

256 colors and MIDI music.

256 colors and CD-ROM Red Book music. Icon inventory akin to Monkey Island 2 added. Stan’s shipyard has music, and previously quiet locations have sound ambiance. Stump joke was removed. There are also some smaller bugs with the Mêlée clock, cannibal dialogue, etc., which were later fixed in ScummVM. Have a look at some other, weirder differences.

The FM Towns version looks the same but has butter-smooth scrolling.

There is a surprising amount of differences between the floppy and CD version. Notice how Smirk’s cigar doesn’t emit smoke, for example. There are also brightness differences, which experts have described as: MI1 doesn’t have dynamic lighting but it does change the brightness of sprites on a per scene basis to suit the scene. The CD edition of course missed this, in a long line of re-release fuck ups.

Perhaps the oddest difference: After rebounding from the rubber trees on Monkey Island, Guybrush says Rubber tree. in the floppy edition. In the CD-ROM version: Rubber tree! Visual proof here.

View the main differences.

For the PC, Mac, iOS, PSN, and Xbox. 1080i HD graphics, re-recorded music. Voices. The infamous Spiffy close-up appears in game.

As the demo has blocked off areas and different puzzles—more in the screenshots section—the EGA version is basically its own mini game. For example, there’s a wall in the middle of the Scumm Bar.

Just like the EGA demo, but with 32 colors.

Feel free to view a video off all the demo differences.

This is basically a mix between the Amiga version (visual) and CD-ROM edition (music). There are also some console-y variations to make text look more legible on a TV set. Additionally, the drowning scene has been removed—wait ten minutes and Guybrush will automatically climb up to the dock. The Sierra screen after falling down the cliff was removed, as were the codas showing the fates of Stan and Guybrush’s crew.

You could play the EGA version on a CGA PC. It looked… not great.

A bit of a bizarro version that features the CD-ROM interface and lacks “dynamic” lighting. The music is available in three (janky) qualities. Yet, the graphics are anti-aliased, which makes them somewhat distinct from the other versions.