That huge project InstantAction has been working on since the arrival of their new CEO Louis Castle back in July of last year has finally surfaced. Right now, within your browser, you can play The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition.
The Secret of Monkey Island:SE powered by InstantAction
Pressing Play Demo will give you 20 free minutes of Monkey Island goodness, along with the option to purchase the full game for $9.99. However, don’t be surprised if you can’t play instantly. I and a number of other users were prompted to download the latest version of Java before playing (some actually during gameplay), along with InsantAction’s own plug-in. The demo comes in at 2.5 GB and automatically installs to your C: drive, though you’ll be playing within a matter of seconds thanks to InstantAction’s ‘chunking’ feature, which only downloads the files necessary to start playing. The rest downloads as you play.
While it’d be great if they allowed us to choose which drive to install to, I’m sure most of you will have plenty of room since 2.5 GB isn’t a whole lot these days. Currently only Windows users can enjoy the game, though InstantAction is planning Mac support, along with an offline client so you won’t need a constant internet connection to play.
After 2 months of downtime, it’s nice to finally see some action from the company. Though the initial launch was a bit shaky (the game didn’t actually, you know, work on the main site for a while), it appears to be an overall success. Their latest podcast summarizes things nicely, while teasing us about a new publisher that recently signed on with the company. There’s no word yet as to when the games that were previously on site will be back up.