Ignoring any official stances on what the Secret of Monkey Island supposedly is. I'm more interested in hearing your personal interpretation. I will get the ball initially rolling.

I reckon it's filled to the brim with treasure - primarily money. That's actually it's real name "Money Island". By adding the letter K, it keeps the island seem unassuming to help better fly under the radar.

Quick your turn, I will be on guard duty keeping a lookout for three-headed monkeys for you.

I assume there are not wrong answers  . I will go with something Meta (Ron likes Meta) and say that the secret is drumroll... Ron Gilbert's dirty underpants

An all-you-can-eat banana buffet.

The Secret is an extraterrestrial energy-based parasite. It can reproduce itself in the human brain through particular wavelenghts of light - and it's embedded in the code of the game.

I will go with something Meta (Ron likes Meta)

Listen, whatever Ron feels like doing with his Facebook account is his own business.

Oh, wait a minute... you meant self-referential humour... Gotcha!

An all-you-can-eat banana buffet.

Captain LeChimp will be going absolutely ape after hearing this. He's probably setting course right now.

The Secret is an extraterrestrial energy-based parasite.

What a twist! That's even more mind-bending than an animated GIF of a tesseract!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space

As long as Monkey Island fans exist we will never stop discussing this I suppose. This neverending fan dialogue in itself is the secret.

This neverending fan dialogue in itself is the secret.

Sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I dig this interesting take, Gary.


I've come up with another original thought. What if the game titles are actually riddles for players to find by reading between the lines. The answer is linear. Discovering the SECRET makes you want to seek REVENGE because it turns out to be a CURSE. So then you ESCAPE from the island and try to warn people about your TALES of encountering this curse - but, surprise, surprise - they completely ignore you and RETURN to Monkey Island anyway. The fools.

The secret is the underground rubber chicken farm. They have to be bred somewhere.

The secret is the underground rubber chicken farm. They have to be bred somewhere.

Remember Lemonhead and the vegetarian cannibals from Monkey Island 3? Keep this discreetly between us, the latest rumour I've heard is that they are planning a massive rescue raid to free all the rubber chickens along with plans to re-home them in a delightful sanctuary.

All the rubber chickens eagerly await being adopted by a three-headed monkey. Alas, all the monkeys are napping, sated from the banana buffet. (The bulemic one had to go upLeChuck first before it could relax.) Meanwhile, the rubber chickens languish, more inert even than the monkeys, who occasionally roll over and scratch themselves in their sleep.