Use Questions on Developer: A Ron Gilbert Retrospective

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Though Ron Gilbert never stopped making games, for many of his fans, the late-aughts represented a return to form for the former LucasArts designer. After more than a decade working on games rarely covered by mainstream outlets, Gilbert's name started popping up again—and not always alongside the projects we'd come to expect from him.

USgamer: So you popped up on the radar of people like me with your work on the Penny-Arcade games and DeathSpank for Hothead. Can you talk about how you found your way onto these projects and what that experience was like?

RG: DeathSpank started out as an idea that a guy named Clayton Kauzlaric and I had, and I worked with Clayton—he worked at Humongous Entertainment and he was the lead artist on Total Annihilation—and we just became really good friends. After I’d left Humongous, we had done some small casual games for Real Networks and some other companies, and we were just kind of having fun doing this stuff and we had created this character called DeathSpank, and I don’t know if you remember them, but back on my blog, I had these little animated comic strips. Clayton and I did those, and one of the characters we created for the comic was this over-the-top video game hero named DeathSpank, and he appeared in several of the comics and we started thinking about him and how much we liked him as a character and how we really wanted to do a game that was all about him, and so that’s really how DeathSpank came about.

USg: With Tales of Monkey Island, what was it like to revisit a series where you didn’t necessarily have creative control? Because I’m assuming that you didn't have final say in creative decisions on this project?

RG: No, not at all. I didn’t really have much involvement in it. Dave Grossman, who worked at Telltale at the time, called me up and said "Hey, you know, we’ve got this license to do this stuff," and he invited me to come in for some brainstorm sessions, so I spent a couple hours brainstorming with them about ideas and stuff—but yeah, I had no say at all. It’s a weird process, because I was certainly used to it with the Monkey Island stuff, I was definitely collaborating with people like Dave and Tim [Schafer] and Steve Purcell and all these people, but I had the final say. People could throw out really good ideas, and I got to decide “Okay, I’m keeping this one,” “I’m not keeping this one because it doesn’t fit overall,” whatever. But with the Tales stuff, I was just one of the people at the table throwing out ideas; I had no ability to go “Okay, that’s a really dumb idea, let’s not do that.” And so that’s a weird process; it’s a process I certainly do not mind being involved in when it’s not my game, but having it actually be my game it’s happening on, it’s kind of a little bit odd.

USg: Were you happy with Tales in retrospect? I’m just curious because it does seem like one of the last Telltale releases to take the form of a more traditional-style adventure game instead of the more narrative-based "moral decision games" they’ve been putting out lately.

RG: I wasn’t happy with it, mainly because I don’t think adventure games—at least, like I think of adventure games, you know, the classic point-and-click games—I don’t think that those can be told episodically, or at least not the way they’re being told episodically right now, because, to me, those games are about building ever-expanding worlds. It’s about starting the player off in some little confined area, and as they solve puzzles, you just start making the world bigger and bigger and bigger, and the puzzles can then become a lot more intricate and complicated as you’re dealing with this ever-expanding world. And the episodic games, like Telltale was doing them, they weren’t like that. They were these little linear nodes, right? You’d have Episode 1 and you’d play it, and to me it was a fine starting place, but then you go to Episode 2 and Episode 2 didn’t really build on Episode 1. It built on it from a story standpoint, but it didn’t build on it from a puzzle and world standpoint, because it had to be its own self-contained thing.

And the thing that they were very concerned with, and I think rightfully so, was that if someone heard about an episodic game at Episode 3, you can’t require them to go back and start at Episode 1. And what that does to me, it just eliminates the possibility for the classic kind of point-and-click games to have the structure that I think that they actually need. So I just don’t believe that episodic is a good model, but I think what Telltale did, though, was they did stumble upon the right model for that stuff. I think The Walking Dead game was so successful, and probably more than they even imagined, that I think they just shelved that whole model. They were supposed to do a King’s Quest game, right? They had other, more Tales of Monkey Island-style games that they were working on, and I think that they all just got shut down. I think the second The Walking Dead showed up, they realized “Oh, this is how you do it,” and they just canned everything else.

USg: The Cave seemed like an attempt to boil down the essential point-and-click adventure game mechanics into a more action-based thing. Do you have any postmortem thoughts on this game?

RG: I think it was successful from a creative standpoint, because it was my attempt to take a game and say, “Well, at its core it's an adventure game,” which The Cave is. It is an adventure game, but [I tried] to broaden the audience a little, [because when] dealing with console platforms and controllers, [I] had to make something that felt a little more… I mean, there is something really nice when you’re playing console games, where I think you feel a little more connected with the world because you have this controller and you’re controlling this thing on the screen, and I feel like there’s almost this extension of my hands all the way into the screen when I’m playing on a controller, which really I don’t have when I’m playing with the mouse and a point-and-click adventure.

So I think The Cave was really just to say “how can I really get people involved in that?” and maybe broaden that audience a little bit, and I don’t know that I was particularly successful in that one respect. I mean, it might have been that was just a failed thesis, that maybe that just not what is needed, maybe there’s another way to do that. So although I’m super proud of the game, and the team did an amazing job on the game and all that kind of stuff, I do kind of scratch my head and go, “Mm, maybe I should have approached this differently.” And I think with Thimbleweed Park, my approach is just “Screw it, I’m going to do it how I want to do it,” and not pander to that possible audience that is sitting out there with consoles.