Monkey Island 5, will it ever happen after all the LucasArts firings?

Monkey Island 5 logo
At E3 in May 2002, LucasArts public relations manager Tom Sarris stated that “they are definitely going to make Monkey Island 5 since it is their most popular franchise. However, we shouldn’t expect it in the near future.” At the same show ex-LEC president Simon Jeffrey had this to say about a possible Monkey Island 5: “At some point in the future, there will undoubtedly be more Monkey Island games. No doubt about that.”

Later that year PC Gamer magazine asked Tom Sarris again if there are any other popular franchises that LucasArts will re-visit? To which he answered: “There’ll definitely be another Monkey Island game. You’ve seen four incredibly well-done versions of Monkey Island, and there’s an immense amount of stories that remain to be told within that series.” This lead to claims by the magazine that “The Spy’s LucasArts informers let the monkey out of the bag: there is, apparently, a fifth Monkey Island game in production. The adventure genre continues to cheat death,” cites Scummbar. Another Monkey Island fansite mentions an issue of CVG magazine, where Mr. Sarris explained the sequel possibilities in more detail. To quote him: “I’d say that they’re extremely viable properties for us to tap into in the future, in the same way that we’re doing with Sam & Max. There’s no reason why we can’t adapt those to another generation of games players. I think there are stories that still remain to be told within Monkey Island and Grim Fandango.”

The fourth and last game in the series: Escape from Monkey IslandIn 2006, LucasArts director Jim Ward jokingly added that he will make the fifth game in 2015, according to an archived Wikipedia quote. That’s the last time anyone at LucasArts ever publicly spoke about the game.

But what will happen to the series now that LucasArts fired 100 out of its 350 employees in early June 2008? It’s said it was the team that just finished Lego Indiana Jones. Later in June the company fired more of its internal developers who were work on finishing up Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. What’s even worse about this is that these key developers include several long-time members who worked on classic LucasArts titles like Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), Full Throttle (1995), and Grim Fandango (1998) according to a Joystiq source.

Unless an external studio is hired to work on Monkey Island 5, it looks like the game will not be created.