Monkey Island
I don’t know how many times I heard the words “Are you experienced?” before I even cottoned on to the mere fact that it was a common saying or phrase of some sort, let alone the name of a canonical Jimi Hendrix album. Bloody hell. At least I realised the question was rhetorical.
There are three principal reasons why I am forever missing out on other peoples’ pop-cultural references. First is my habitual shunning of anything that other folks like enough to talk constantly about. “It’s becoming popular?” said Isaiah Berlin, “It must be in 
decline.” Second of all is my unwillingness to admit to lacking any kind of contextualising knowledge or, indeed, any knowledge of any variety which is clearly possessed by my interlocuter. Thirdly, my growing resignation to the fact that other people talk rubbish, and my complete lack of surprise or interest at being unable to decipher their seemingly random babblings. No, hold on, I’m not finished yet. Fourth: why should I have to know who Rob Schneider is when no-one I speak to knows who directed City Lights? And eleventh: even if I DO know who Rob Schneider is, do I want to be dragged into the macabre life-in-death of his admirers by admitting as much?
Pop-cultural references are the Masonic handshakes and red ribbons of the initiated. They are also what I fall back on instead of proper conversation when I am lazy or bored or see no advantage in expending fresh material on the current audience. They are the stock footage in an Ed Wood movie, convincing and contextless tanks and gazelles dragged down by the surrounding dreck. Somewhat less honourably, they are ways of amusing myself at the expense of oblivious others. Seinfeld, Frasier, Futurama, all are grist to the mill of my desire to derive enjoyment from even the most unpromising of circumstances; but old habits die hard, and of all my conversational crutches it is perhaps Monkey Island on which I fall back most often, a battered veteran bouncing back onto the trusted ringside ropes.
To return to Isiah Berlin and the inversely proportionate relationship between something’s popularity and its worthiness. Truer now than ever, now that anything which so much as breaks even at the box-office is automatically fast-tracked for three sequels and a spin-off show. Every last drop of affection, and every last penny it equates to, is shaken from us as from an upside-down piggy bank, and all in the guarantee that every 
Little Mermaid movie will be still worse than the last. But computer games are different. They have to go on trying to get better. It’s no good trying to sell us a Super Mario game that’s graphically (or anywise) inferior to the first one; it won’t take, fellows! And this, I think, is why the most iconic and long-lived fictional creations of the last two decades have been characters from video games.
Take the Monkey Island games, for instance. I was 10 when the first one was released, 20 when the fourth and so far final installment came to pass. These games signpost the intellectual stages of my growing up as surely as the diaries of Adrian Mole. None of which really tells anyone why they should play the games if they haven’t already, but I’m not sure that I can.
Remember the Mega-CD, when Full Motion Video in video games first became a plausible reality? There was a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers game at the time which was paradigmatic in its attempt to arbitrarily shoehorn FMV into video gaming. It was basically a murky, grainy episode of Power Rangers randomly interrupted by cues to hit A, or X, or Z NOW in order to continue: it was, to all intents and purposes, like watching a faulty DVD. And there’s an extent to which Monkey Island was like that. The reward for solving a puzzle was not a whole exciting new gaming experience but another piece of slightly interactive dialogue and a cut-scene or two. A new map and a piece of music. Which you had to cycle through about eleven floppy discs to get. But it was real. It was actual. You’d never been to these places before. And it was so good that I’m too embarrassed to tell you how good it all was.