Use Questions on Developer: A Ron Gilbert Retrospective

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After Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge wrapped in 1991, Gilbert left Lucasarts to form Humongous Entertainment with colleague Shelley Day. While LucasArts would continue their adventure game efforts—sequelizing some of Gilbert's own works—Humongous set out to create similar experiences engineered towards a much younger demographic.

USgamer: So I wanted to talk a bit about your time at Humongous. Did you face any criticism for leaving LucasArts to work on kids' games? It's a market that's largely seen as "less than" in this industry.

Ron Gilbert: I don’t know that I dealt with the criticism at the time. Back in 1992, when we started Humongous Entertainment, there was no internet, and I think the internet is the thing that opens you up to understanding that people are criticizing you, and I’m sure people did criticize me, but I never heard about it because there was no way for them to criticize me except among their small group of friends…

USg: I wasn’t sure if Humongous was getting hate mail or anything like that, like, “Give us back Ron Gilbert!”

RG: Well, I mean we didn’t really get any hate mail like that. I think the thing about Humongous is we got so much mail, but it was from parents who absolutely loved what we were doing, so I think if there were [negative] letters, they were certainly drowned out by that kind of stuff... I think later on, I still to this day run into people and they’re like, “Oh man, I love [Monkey Island], why did you stop making games after that?” And they have no idea of Humongous Entertainment and all of that stuff, so I think for a lot of people it’s just forgotten. It’s not necessarily a point of anger, it’s just something they didn’t even realize, because it does seem like it was a little out of left field… although it doesn’t feel like that to me at all.

USg: What was the appeal to designing these games for kids? I’m just curious as to why you found it more rewarding at this time in your life.

RG: I found it rewarding because they were small. The thing with a game like Pajama Sam is that it's maybe a tenth the size of Monkey Island, and I found that very appealing because I could try a lot of different ideas or I could work on a lot of different things, and that was kind of fun. You know, rather than jumping into a large project that’s going to take me several years and I’m going to get to produce one thing, I could go in and do a project that was going to take nine months, and they’re just much smaller, and I found that interesting.

And I found that designing for kids very interesting because at that time—you know, the 90s, the early to mid-90s—there was this real explosion of hardware. The first 3D cards had just come out and computers were starting to get a little more sophisticated and could do some nice stuff, and everyone was just really obsessed with technology; they were obsessed with how many polygons they could have on the screen, and they were obsessed with this kind of stuff. I found the kids stuff to just be refreshing because kids don’t care about any of that stuff; I mean, all the kids cared about was “Is this an interesting story?” and “Is this an interesting character?” They did not care about anything else, and I just found that very refreshing, to be able to design something.

And you know, kids also don’t have a lot of tolerance for bullshit. And we really had to design the games and really think about the design of the games that was going to keep their interest and keep them moving forward, much more than a regular adventure game like Monkey Island; we had to deal with that stuff, but not like we did with kids. And I think that’s good. It’s good to kind of understand the flow of the game and keeping people’s interest and always leading them forward without them understanding they’re being led forward. And I think that experience of designing those games at Humongous had really informed a lot of my game design aesthetic since then.

USg: So while you were at Humongous, we kind of went through what’s commonly known as the “death of adventure games,” which is no longer a thing, thankfully—at least, I hope so. And I’m wondering, do you agree with that sentiment at all: that adventure games died from about the mid-90s to the mid-aughts?

RG: I think that adventure games “died” is a harsh way to look at it. What I think killed adventure games was Doom, and I believe Doom killed adventure games because Doom showed people this very different type of game. And it’s not that the adventure game players suddenly threw down their King’s Quests and Monkey Islands and ran over to Doom; it’s just that Doom attracted this whole other audience and this much, much larger audience. Not just adventure games, but I think the industry as a whole had changed, and it just brought in these new people and they were interested in a different type of game than what adventure games were doing.

So I don’t think the adventure games died, right? I think adventure games were still selling the same number of copies in the late 90s as the early 90s, but that’s kind of the problem, right? They were selling the same number of copies where a lot of these action games and these Doom-type games and first-person shooters and stuff; these things were pushing millions and millions of copies, and I think it made adventure games just kind of be irrelevant, rather than them killing them, because people were still making them, right? They were still happening, it’s just that nobody cared because they were such a small part of this very, very large picture now.