If you know the name Ron Gilbert, it's probably due to his decades of work on classic point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, series “Monkey Island”And Thimbleweed Park. Given this pedigree, the October release of the Gilbert-designed model Death by scrolling– a roguelike-lite action-survival pseudo-shooter – may have come as a bit of a surprise.
However, in an interview from his home in New Zealand, Gilbert noted that his catalog also includes several reflex-based games:Backyard Sports Games by Humungous Entertainment And 2010s Deadly PunkFor example. And Gilbert said his current return to action-oriented game design stems from his love of modern classics such as Binding of Isaac, Nuclear ThroneAnd Dead cells.
“I mean, I'm of course best known for adventure games, and I've done other things, [but] for me it’s probably a bit of a departure,” he told Ars. “While I also enjoy playing story-driven games, that's not the only thing I enjoy, and the idea of making a game like this came about as a whim.”
Gilbert's Lost RPG
After spending years developing adventure games, in 2017 Thimbleweed Park and then 2022 Return to Monkey Island.Gilbert said that he's “thinking about something new” for his next game project. But the first “new” idea he pursued was not Death by scrollingbut what he told Ars was a “vision for such a large open-world RPG” along the lines of The Legend of Zelda.
However, after hiring an artist and designer and spending about a year developing the idea, Gilbert said he eventually realized his three-person team would never be able to realize his grand vision. “I just [didn’t] “You have the money or the time to make a big open world game like that,” he said. “You know, it's either a passion project that you've spent 10 years working on, or you just need a ton of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
And Gilbert said that getting that “ton of money” to create a top-down RPG in a reasonable time frame was more difficult than he expected. After taking the project to the industry, he discovered that “the deals that publishers were offering were just terrible,” something he blames largely on the genre he was focusing on.
