Use Questions on Developer: A Ron Gilbert Retrospective

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The next step in Ron Gilbert's career is the upcoming (and Kickstarted) Thimbleweed Park, which looks like it could have been a 1992 follow-up to Monkey Island 2 had he stayed at LucasArts. But Gilbert isn't toiling away on this project by himself; former LucasArts colleagues David Fox, Gary Winnick, and Mark Ferrari are working alongside him to craft an experience that evokes The Golden Age of Adventure Games.

USgamer: So do you think Thimbleweed Park could've come into being without the existence of crowdfunding? Was it even a possibility for you to just make this game and put it on Steam? Or do you feel like you needed to test the waters and see if there's a demand for this kind of idea?

Ron Gilbert: It's not about testing the waters—it's just about getting money. (Laughs) I don't have money to fund a game like that myself. The whole "I could live on instant ramen for a year and maybe crank out the game" thing—I certainly couldn't ask a team of people to do that. The thing with Kickstarter, it's not about testing the waters. It's about cash.

USg: It's extremely practical, then.

RG: Yeah! Because no publisher would ever fund [Thimbleweed]. I could not go to a publisher and say, "Hey, I want to do a point-and-click. I think publishers would be interested, but I'm fairly confident the game would have immediately been pushed into a modern adventure that got rid of a lot of the tropes that I think make the game charming. I think those things would've been very quickly whittled away by a publisher.

USg: How does the scope of this game compare to past adventure games you've worked on? Did you set out saying, "I want this to be as big as the first Monkey Island, and I know the amount of puzzles and writing and assets that will entail?"

RG: That's exactly what it was. [We're setting out to say], "We're making a game that's the size of Monkey Island." That was my benchmark. Maniac Mansion is actually a pretty small game. There are only 40-some-odd rooms in Maniac Mansion, and I think there are close to 90 rooms in Monkey Island. It's not quite double the size, but it's definitely around twice as big, or maybe even larger.

Just recently, a friend of mine who'd never played Maniac Mansion before played it, and I sat down and watched her play the whole thing, because I was very curious to see how she approached it—you know, just in terms of Thimbleweed Park stuff. She's definitely an adventure game player, so she wasn't new to the genre at all, and she completed all of Maniac Mansion in less than six hours.

USg: Wow.

RG: I found it really surprising. People talk about those games back then—Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and whatnot—and just how complicated and hard they were. They say how adventure games today are much too small, and why can't we make games that take us 40 hours to complete? So I found it very interesting that she was through the whole thing in six hours. It makes me wonder whether those games seemed hard to people because they were ten years old.

USg: That's true.

RG: They only played for like an hour a day when they got home from school. I don't think many people were adults when they were playing these games. I wonder if that's kind of clouded our perception of those games a little bit. My girlfriend never played Monkey Island 2 before, so I did the same thing where I sat down with her and watched her play. She got through it with no help from me in eight hours. That was also very surprising to me because I remember Monkey Island 2 as like, "Wow, that's a 40 hour game!" But I don't think it is anymore. I wonder if players understand that in a way.

USg: So, can you tell me why you went with a retro aesthetic for Thimbleweed?

RG: It was a couple of reasons. One is that we really were trying to make a game like those classic Lucasarts games: Specifically Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. Those were very pixelated games. It was an artistic choice. I think it's a little bit more authentic in some ways.

It's also a lot easier. There's a little bit of uncanny valley with 2D art: The farther you get away from realism, the more you can go to these abstract shapes and abstract animations. If you have a very pixelated sprite, like our characters, or Guybrush, or Bernard in Maniac Mansion, you can get away with him doing animations that don't completely sync up with the backgrounds. Whereas the more refined 2D animation becomes, the more people expect things to happen right. They expect feet to be locked to the floor when you walk. They expect that if you reach for a doorknob, your hand actually touches the doorknob. By doing more of a retro look, we could just get around all of that complexity. It's the type of thing people just don't notice, because the art is very forgiving.

The way that I've always approached the game is that I want this game to be like, "Remember those old LucasArts games?" Not the way they actually were. I think when you think about them in your mind, you probably imagine them looking a lot better than they actually did. Since we have the hardware technology to do some of that stuff now, it's like I want to do that stuff. It kind of helps the whole visual style, yet still remains kind of retro. But it's not pure.

I've been called for it on the blog several times by readers. They look at something and say "Hey wait a minute, this wouldn't be possible back then," and yeah, that's probably technically true. Like, we have lighting. All the characters are lit by light sources in this game. So when characters walk under streetlights, they actually brighten when they're under the lights, and they dim when they leave the lights. That's all done with shaders. We certainly didn't have any of that stuff back then. But I think it really helps the visual look of the game a lot.