Gaming veteran Ron Gilbert has stopped development of his untitled RPG project, which was once described as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park.”
During a recent interview with Ars TechniqueGilbert elaborated on various problems during production, including a small crew of three and a lack of financial support.
“I just [didn't] “You have the money or the time to make a big open world game like this,” he noted. “It’s either a passion project that you’ve spent ten years working on, or you just need a ton of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
Gilbert explained that he proposed the concept, but “the proposals that the publishers were offering were just terrible.”
“Making a pixelated old-school Zelda isn't something big and hot, so publishers are looking at us, but not from the perspective of, 'We're going to make $100 million and this is worth investing in,'” he said.
“The amount of money they were willing to put in and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense for me to do it.”
He went on to note that publishers are “very analytics-oriented,” which makes it harder to present concepts than when he started his career.
“They have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they can make, and you end up with a lot of games that look exactly like last year's games because it makes some money,” Gilbert explained.
“When we first started, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what was making the money, so there was a lot more experimentation.”
He continued, “That's why I really like the indie games market because it's free of a lot of the things that the big publishers bring to it, and there's a lot more creativity and weirdness and quirkiness.”
Gilbert untitled RPG announced for 2024and was in development for several months. It was planned to be released later that year or in early 2025.
