Dominic Armato, voice of Guybrush Threepwood, has always loved LucasArts’ adventure games, but there’s one he still can’t get into: ‘I get 10 minutes in and I’m like, oh, this is tedious, man’

Dominic Armato is adventure game royalty, but an early adventure game experience almost killed his enthusiasm for videogames: “The one that really sticks in my head is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” he says. “It was just evil. I was a kid, and I’m trying to play this game that’s one of the most difficult text adventure games ever written … It’s not a happy memory. It’s a miracle that I stuck with videogames at all.”

Yet persist with games Armato did, becoming an avid fan of the point ‘n’ click adventures designed by LucasArts. This led Armato to audition for and be cast as mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood for 1997’s The Curse of Monkey Island. It’s a role he would reprise for every subsequent Monkey Island game, including the remakes of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2, as well as 2022’s excellent Return to Monkey Island.

Alongside Monkey Island Armato has appeared in games like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. He’s also an experienced dining critic, running his own food blog Skillet Doux until 2015, before working as a food writer for The Arizona Republic and the Phoenix New Times.

Armato is currently working on a new project, while also pondering a potential return to voice acting. “I’m trying to start doing voiceover for games again, so we’ll see if I’m successful in that,” he says. But he took a break from reviewing restaurants to show me around the grog-spattered tavern of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I am currently playing Chants of Sennaar. I’ve been doing a lot of flying, so I’ve been wearing out the Steam Deck lately. I was actually trying to start Silksong, but I screwed up and forgot to start it up once before I got on the plane, so I couldn’t run it. I was like “Oh, crap, I gotta play something else!” So I picked up Chants of Sennaar instead and I got hooked into that.

I’m enjoying that one an awful lot. I dig those slow-paced puzzle games that have an idea. You get a little bit of a world. You get a little bit of a story in there. It’s kind of atmospheric, and there’s some good [mysteries] in there, and you can just live in them and solve puzzles for a while.

I very much enjoy that genre. I’m not really a genre gamer in general. I tend to pick and choose the real shining examples of each genre. But I would probably be lying if I didn’t say I was maybe a little more drawn to that kind of game a lot of the time.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I just finished replaying Control in preparation for the new one.

I’ll play anything Remedy. I love Remedy so, so much, and with the new one coming out, I wanted to go back and replay the first one again. So now I’m primed and ready.

The feel of that game is so great. It’s so unashamedly Twin Peaks meets X-Files meets brutalist architecture, which was weirdly right in my wheelhouse. I like all brutalist architecture, so I’m just happy walking through that space.

I’ve always enjoyed [Remedy’s] games, but I really got obsessive about it with the last few installations. I loved Max Payne, I really enjoyed the original Alan Wake, and I certainly would have always said I liked their games. But those last two were absolutely phenomenal.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

That is Maniac Mansion.

I don’t mean to front here, because while I am an old school LucasArts fan big time—and I was even before I got to work with them—I’ve got to be honest, I’m still not clicking with Maniac. Every once in a while I will pick it up. I’ll give it another shot and I get 10 minutes in and I’m like “Oh, this is tedious, man”.

Maybe it’s that old Hitchhiker’s feeling again, where at some point I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall … I realise it’s this important, seminal game in the LucasArts universe, and so much came out of that. But it has yet to click with me, and yet I still leave it on there because I feel compelled. It’s like when you’ve got some food that just doesn’t quite sit right with you, and you think ‘I’m just gonna keep trying it, and maybe one day it will reveal its beauty to me’

You can see the genesis, the root of that style. But it’s in a phase of development where it is interesting, but it hasn’t quite yet become entertaining. That’s where it is for me. I find it fascinating, especially from a historical standpoint, but it’s not quite entertaining for me yet.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I have potentially two here. Steam will tell you it’s Red Dead Redemption 2 at 289.8 hours, which mostly makes sense because that was my COVID lockdown game. In a bit of fortuitous timing, in the fall of 2019 I had this moment where I thought “You know what? My kids are pretty much grown up now. I have time for videogames now. I can maybe actually justify having a gaming rig again. I always was a PC gamer and switched to console when I had little kids.”

So I built a big badass gaming PC right at the end of 2019. Three months later, it was like, “Well, OK then.” I got the 32:9 monitor. I went huge with the whole thing. So basically, me for the lockdown, we’re stuck in the house, and RDR2 was every day. Most of that 300 hours wasn’t even playing the game. I would just get on a horse and ride.

Now, that’s what Steam will tell you. But I am quite confident that I put far more hours into Thief: The Dark Project.

I played that game in an absolutely obsessive fashion, where I’d spend 15-20 hours completing a level. It should have gone through at least one full day/night cycle, but it’s [always] nighttime in the game, and my rule was always that I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I had knocked out every single enemy on the level and stacked them all in one corner. Then I could explore and find absolutely everything without worrying about getting caught.

I played recently and I hadn’t picked it up in a while—it had probably been like five or six years—and it comes back right away. The little leans, the half-creep across hard floors, the jerky thing you do to move across [metal] floors without making any noise.

It’s getting a little old and creaky, and it’s not quite as immersive as it used to be, but it’s still close enough … even today, I can’t think of any game that has nailed 3D sound in the way Thief did. Maybe there’s some [games] I haven’t played, but I remember walking to some room and hid[ing] behind the bar, and you can hear exactly where the guard goes walking around the corner. You don’t even need to see any of it to understand what’s going on.

So that’s one of my all-timers, and I’m absolutely certain that I put more time into that.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This is a weird one. You know when you have those bizarre little time-waster games that you don’t have to put any brain power into whatsoever? Forbidden Island. It’s just some dumb port of a tabletop game, and that’s my “Oh I’m gonna sit down and have my lunch and I’ll tap this on the side”. So that’s the one I think, I don’t know what I’d do without that.

It’s a great co-op tabletop game. When I play it on the PC, I just play all the characters myself. You know how that is. For my dad, it was Solitaire. Whatever Solitaire game was being sold on the computer, he’d take a break for a few minutes and play Solitaire. And that’s like my thing. [To] rest my brain for a minute, I’ll just play one game of Forbidden Island, and it takes 10 minutes and then I’ll move on.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

This is really bizarre, but it’s a little utility called Klack, and it’s one of those ones that pipes in mechanical keyboard noises when you’re typing on a laptop PC.

I spent a number of years as a dining critic, and I wrote a lot and I missed the noise of a keyboard. I installed this app on my laptop so that I would have little mechanical keyboard noises as I type, and I swear to God it helps me write. I don’t know why. It makes no sense whatsoever, but my writing flows easier when I’ve got that clackety clackety clack mechanical keyboard noise.

There was one point, not too long ago, where I turned it off for some reason, and then I went through a period of two or three weeks where I just felt like, “Man, I’m having a really hard time. The words aren’t flowing. I’m really having a hard time writing this month.” And then, all of a sudden, I realised, “Oh shit! I turned off Klack!” And it all started going out again.

It’s the dumbest thing in the world, but I swear to God it works.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

Extremely, and it really stresses me out when it’s not. In real life, I tend to inspire a lot of clutter, but digitally I run a tight ship. On my gaming PC, the only thing that will be on my desktop is something game related, or my notes on that game, or my spreadsheet for that game, and that’s it. Then as soon as I finish that game, I’ll get rid of those, stick them in the archive, and start the next one. On a work machine, it’s whatever I’m working on that day, as that’s it.

[With] my files, I start with the six-digit date code—that’s year, month, day—so they all autosort. [I have] every single photograph for the dining criticism work I do. I still have, photographed, every single menu, every single dish I’ve eaten for the past 15 years. I have the spreadsheet that has notes on every single restaurant dish I’ve eaten over the last 15 years … I’m up to 23,569 restaurant dishes right now. And actually, I’m running a little behind. I haven’t updated it in a couple of weeks.