In the latest issue of the Spanish edition of RetroGamer magazine, there is a piece on Ron Gilbert. In it, the author (and Ron, I guess) wonders why his games were successful in Europe, but not so much in the US, where Sierra and Infocom dominated. The reason is pretty clear: Lucasfilm games were translated, while the others were not.

I'm sure _King's Quest II_ was an awesome game, but I will never know, because I couldn't even understand what the game wanted from me, and the mechanics were so unintuitive and unfriendly that, even after trying with a dictionary, I gave up utterly bored. (Funny anecdote about _Leisure Suit Larry_: after days of trying to bypass the age verification test, all my cousin and I could do in the actual game was to get in the bar, go to the bathroon and URINATE. That's what Sierra games were like for non-English speakers.)

Monkey Island, on the other hand, was funny, well-crafted and just difficult enough to be challenging, but, most importantly, it was in Spanish.

Game magazines did a lot to popularise it, too.