The Secret of Monkey Island

Lucasfilm Games worked on the SCUMM engine: commands are chosen from a list of verbs at the bottom of the screen and combined with an object or a character. The rules here are gentler than was customary. Dying is almost impossible, and the playthrough can't be driven into a state with no way out. For a genre where death from a wrong click and an item lost for good were considered normal, this changed the attitude to experimenting: trying absurd combinations became safe, and humor went from decoration to a way of guiding the player.

Sword duels are settled with words. The winner is not the one who presses faster but the one who finds the right reply to an insult, meaning the combat system is built entirely on memorizing lines and paying attention to what others say. The release was on floppy disks in sixteen EGA colors, and a version with a 256-color palette appeared later. The set of rules laid down here became the reference point for the adventure games of the nineties.