J Nash

I was cuffed about a bit by reader Roy Nesbit of Crewe (S Campbell) for this uncontroversially logical recognition that the games - linear narratives planned from the beginning as companion chapters of the same story, written by the same author and comprising a single, complete adventure - were in effect a pair of halves.

In terms of rigging the chart, "Monkey Island 1 & 2" was no more cheating than Stuart and Mark Ramshaw collaboratively awarding Kick Off 2 zero points apiece in the first Top 100 as a specific tactic to prevent the otherwise clean-sweeping football disaster from becoming the inaugural AP Top 100 Top Game. They similarly spotted an impending injustice and corrected it.

The problem was that PC Gamer read this AP Top 100 and totally misunderstood the concept. Their next few years' PCG Top 100s featured anything up to 125 games, including some of the worst ever, as they arbitrarily compiled unalike sequels into single entries. Eventually the only way out of their colossal self-created blurry swampland was to tear it all up and start again from scratch.

This tangentially inept perversion of my meaningfully sensible decision about the The Secrets Of Monkey Island completely overshadowed the original idea of strict fairness to the commercial splitting of a single game, which is probably just as well because I came up with it on the spot to stop anyone forcing one or the other of the Monkeys out of the running.