Legendary game designer and programmer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island) has revealed that one of his exciting upcoming projects has been canceled in part because investors didn't come to the table to fund the project.
Conversation with Ars TechnicaGilbert said the game was intended to be a “big open-world RPG” in the vein of The Legend of Zelda. Gilbert worked on the project with two other people—an artist and a designer—for about a year before Gilbert realized it wasn't going to happen.
“I just [didn't] Do you have the money or time to make a big open world game like that,” he said. “You know, it’s either a passion project that you spent 10 years on or you just need a ton of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
Gilbert previously described his new project as “Classic Zelda, Diablo and Thimbleweed Park” and many people were excited to see what it might look like. This is not happening now.
'Terrible' publishing deals
Gilbert said he pitched the project to people in the industry, but found that “the proposals that the publishers were offering were just terrible.”
The game Gilbert envisioned was “not that popular,” he said, so potential publishers weren't investing in it. “The amount of money they were willing to put in and the deals they were offering made absolutely no sense for me to do it,” he explained.
Gilbert financed 2017 Thimbleweed Park on Kickstarter, raising over $600,000. Gilbert also secured private investment to complete the project.
The industry veteran noted that publishers today can be “very analytics-driven” and have developed their own formulas to “try to figure out how much money they can make.” The result of this, Gilbert noted, is that publishers take less risk and, in turn, the games they release often look the same.
“You end up [getting] there are a lot of games that look exactly the same as last year's games because that's what makes money,” he said. “When we first started, we couldn't do it because we didn't know what was making that money… I think that's why I really like the indie game market because it's kind of free of a lot of the things that the big publishers bring to it, and there's a lot more creativity and you know, weirdness and quirkiness.”
Gilbert's latest game is Death by Scrolling, an action game released at the end of October this year. Previously, he collaborated with Devolver on the film Return to Monkey Island.
