Return to Monkey Island won’t “invalidate the canon” of the latter-timeline games, says Ron Gilbert

Ron Gilbert & Dave Grossman have spoken on how Return to Monkey Island will fit into the long-running adventure series’ timeline.

The two were chatting in an extensive interview with Adventure Gamers, where they revealed some more details on the adventure. As revealed in the announcement, the game will take place between Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge & Escape from Monkey Island. They’re the second and third entries in the series’ five-game timeline. At the time, the announcement didn’t make clear if it’d be throwing out the established series canon, akin to horror movie series Halloween’s 2018 reboot.

However, it seems this isn’t necessarily the case as Gilbert reveals. “We very purposefully don’t do anything to invalidate any of the canon that’s happened in those games. We’re not saying any of those things didn’t happen, we don’t talk down to them at all. We embrace a lot of the things we liked in those games. So we were very, very careful about that.”

As Dave Grossman expanded upon, the pair have done their best to adhere to series canon, with two caveats. “It’s actually kind of hard to keep track of everything that’s canon, and some of these other games don’t even agree with each other. So a little bit of paradox is necessary and probably healthy for us as creators and as human beings.”

“And the other caveat is that too much canon can get in the way of the story you’re trying to tell, so we decided that we would adhere to canon unless it was going to get in the way, and we would ignore some minor details if we needed to.”

One thing Gilbert was sure about was starting the new game where the second ended, in the Amusement Park. “I don’t want to go into all the details of it, but we do start there, and then it takes lots of weird twists and turns that you would expect from us.” Hopefully then, we’ll find out where it goes when Return to Monkey Island releases later this year.