I felt so isolated-it's weird to have an interest you can't really share with your friends-but now I love the idea that other kids were feeling the same way, sneaking off to a quiet area in their house to call the hint line, heart pounding. Sometimes I think about myself playing Monkey Island at a time in my life when I knew only one other person who loved games. Only nowadays, I just google a walkthrough. The beauty of the game is that it's so complicated that it never really gets boring, and I still always get stumped. I still play Monkey Island and its sequel, LeChuck's Revenge, regularly, at least once a year. Eventually I could just fly through the intro section, the confident caller who knows the extension number they need. Never for longer than a couple of seconds, but enough that I had to pay my parents back in installments (to their credit, they were really nice about it). I wish I could say that I only ever called the hint line once-that it was enough and I used my own guile and wisdom to complete the game. "If you need help with the first part of the game…" You sounded so bored, but of course you had the luxury of being bored-you knew all the answers. Finally you sighed, "Monkey Island," and I pressed the number. My hands were shaking as I dialled the number, then a recorded voice played down the phone, "Welcome to the helpline for LucasArts games." You started reeling off names of games, and OH MY GOD THERE WERE SO MANY GAMES. She had two daughters, one a teen, the other not far off, and this was the golden age of the landline-can you blame her? The telephone bill that my mum had begun going through with a highlighter, asking my sister and I to explain the numbers she didn't recognize. But it was a premium number, and I knew it would show up on the telephone bill. I stared at it, I couldn't believe it-this would make everything so much easier. And there it was, at the back of the installation booklet, written very small: your telephone number. It was after one such occasion I started rifling through the box the game had come in, desperate now, hoping maybe there would be some sort of cheat sheet. The solution would always be something that worked because of a pun, or was the punch line to a joke-something I would never have been able to work out for myself.īut sometimes even he couldn't remember the solution. Inevitably, I would just keep trudging around the forest until the next time I was sat in my parents' friends' study, when I could quiz their son on what to do next.
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