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A tale for the ages, in which Chris and Jake sit down with the creator of some of their fondest childhood memories, learn the true state of their journalistic abilities, and realize that prepared questions always look fifty times lamer once you've actually got to ask them. - An Interview by the Idle Thumbs staff
Ron Gilbert Speaks: Part 1
You probably already know Ron Gilbert as one of the framers of the grand LucasArts graphic adventure tradition, more specifically in his role as lead designer behind the seminal The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991). What you may not know is that he doesn't mind setting aside the occasional three hours to speak with a couple of ill-prepared and argumentative game journalists. Well, now you know.
Before his work on Monkey Island, Gilbert was also responsible for other LucasArts graphic adventures such as the revolutionary Maniac Mansion (1988), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989). After leaving Lucas upon completion of MI2, Gilbert co-founded Humongous Entertainment with Shelley Day, a company best known for its classic children's adventure franchises such as Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam. In 1996 he moved on to create Cavedog Entertainment, home of the critically acclaimed Total Annihilation series of real-time strategy games, which Gilbert produced. Four years later, he and Day were responsible for co-founding Hulabee Entertainment, a digital media firm again targeted towards children.
In 2004, Gilbert's career reaches its zenith when he is featured on well-loved games journalism site Idle Thumbs. The fruits of this astounding union are transcribed here for your amazement. To ease the flow of conversation, we have enabled our proprietary HeadMode™ technology for this interview. The parties involved are:
 | Ron Gilbert |  | Chris Remo |  | Jake Rodkin |
When we actually arrived at the meeting place to interview our esteemed subject, it occurred to us that our prewritten questions were less than ideal, and that we were not in fact very prepared. Fortunately, Mr. Gilbert saved the day by pre-empting us with an inquiry of his own. "So tell me about the site," he said casually. And we did.
We also asked him what he thought of Painkiller, and he said he enjoyed it. Then Jake, in a cunning flash of incisive journalistic recollection, cited a Gilbert interview from days of yore, and the interview proper began...
Jake: A billion years ago you were interviewed by a magazine or by some site and you were talking about how your goal was to make "a hilarious episodic adventure game for adults that finally drives a stake though the heart of Quake." And now you're saying that you kind of enjoyed Painkiller... Has your opinion on that kind of game changed over the years?
Ron: Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that. I remember that quote, I don't remember the rest of the article though. I think, you know, my problems with Quake have more to do with the fact that Quake seems like a big tech demo, and I think there are certainly a lot of people who enjoy that kind of stuff, who enjoy the game experience for the technology. But I think there is a much larger audience out there who could care less about the technology, they just want to have a fun experience.
Name: Ron Gilbert
Loved for: the Monkey Island Series at LucasArts
Left LucasArts to found: Humongous Entertainment, Cavedog Entertainment, Hulabee
Did: Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Adventure Game), Monkey Island 1, Monkey Island 2, the Putt Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish children's adventure game series, amongst others.
Is working on: His first non-kids game in years and years.
We are: Excited by this.
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I think in some ways Quake and now Doom 3, they do our industry a little bit of a disservice because I think they just focus these very vocal very rabid people on the technology of games as the most important thing in the game. I think that's one of the reasons I don't really like those games because they're just big tech demos and they focus everybody, in my mind, on the wrong things. I certainly don't mind first person shooters. As a genre, I have no issue with them. I just wish they were a little bit, you know, deeper and what they were doing wasn't only running around shooting things all the time.
[Aside from Painkiller,] the other kind of first person shooter that I played a lot—actually I played it all the way to the end—was Call of Duty. I thought that was just a phenomenally good game. I thought that game was really really good at being very easy at the beginning, and that got you really suckered in level after level after level, and then it would start to get harder. By that time it got you very invested in the whole thing.
I thought the design of the missions was really good—they did a good job of always making me want to go where they wanted me to go. A lot of games will create these large environments but they'll have these kind of artificial walls around them. You'll want to go over here, but the designers will want you to go over there. There were only one or two times playing that entire game that I didn't want to go exactly where they wanted me to. That's a really hard thing to do in game design and I think they did a really good job with it.
"I have no issue with first person shooters. I just wish they were a little bit, you know, deeper and what they were doing wasn't only running around shooting things all the time."
Chris: That's understandable.
Jake: I think more people do that than anyone wants to admit.
Ron: I know. And it's too bad—we're paying 39 dollars or 49 dollars. If I paid 15 bucks for something I played for three hours, that's a pretty good deal, right? That's like going to a movie. But, you play something for three or four hours that you spent 50 dollars on, and it kind of becomes an issue.
I think it's one of those things that keeps a lot of people out of the game market that could potentially be in there too. Because they're only going to play it for three or four hours, that's all that they'll want to play it for, but that's not cost effective.
"If I paid 15 bucks for something I played for three hours, that's a pretty good deal. But, you play something for three or four hours that you spent 50 dollars on, and it kind of becomes an issue."
Ron: I think novels are a little different. I think a lot of people, when they read novels, they just read it for a little bit each day. Maybe they read it for a half hour before bed. Games really aren't structured like that. When you start playing them you need to be playing them for hours and hours and hours or you're not going to get anywhere. I think a kind of restructuring of that whole way that games kind of suck up peoples time is another important thing we could do to bring a lot more people into the gaming market. To allow them to go into the experience, spend a very short amount of time, and leave it successfully—not leave it as a failure.
Jake: I don't play very many long games anymore because of that reason—I just never beat them anymore. So I find myself just playing games with lots of minigames or games where you can just run a race or two and call it quits.
Ron: I've been playing a lot of Burnout 2 lately. I'm having so much fun with that. Again, thats the kind of game that I sit down and I play for a half hour and that's about it. You can just race a race, or play the little crash thing where you're trying to create giant wrecks on the freeway. I go in, I have a lot of fun, I leave.
Call of Duty really wasn't good at that, it's not the best example of that, I would spend hours a day at that game. You can't go in for a half hour. You come back a day later and you've forgotten all those little things you need to do to get through the level.
Chris: Call of Duty felt immediately impressive to me, it really felt like a through and through complete experience.
Ron: I liked playing the Americans, then playing the British, then playing the Russians. The thing that I really wanted to do, and if I could do a game like that, is have you play through it as the Americans, and then play through the missions backwards as the Germans. So you'd see the exact same levels that you saw the first time, but now you're seeing them from the other perspective. I'd do it backwards because games kind of get harder and you're kind of ramped up to certain levels. That was one thing I wanted to do in Call of Duty. I wanted to defend the mansion that's being attacked by the Americans, to see what that's like. Maybe a little of what you know about the tactics could help you.
Chris: This is kind of an out of the blue question, but are you still going into Double Fine? How is that working out? (For those of you who don't keep up on these things, Ron announced on his blog that instead of working from home he's simply started going into Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions offices in San Francisco.)
Ron: Tim just gave me a desk and so I have my Mac laptop and I just bring it in and hook it up to a monitor and kind of work off in a corner. A lot of days I don't even see Tim. I'm working on this game design that I'm putting together, pitching to publishers right now.
I was not getting anything done at home. If I sit at home there are just too many other things to do. There's a console out in the living room, which is a lot more fun than banging my head against the desk working on designs, so it was just much easier for me to get out of the house every day. I don't really have a lot of contact with the people of Double Fine. I just kind of work at my desk and occasionally say hi to people who walk by, but that's about it.
Chris: Can you tell us anything about your game?
Ron: No, no. Not really.
Jake: Can you at least say the intended audience. I mean, is it another Humongous or Hulabee type thing or is it a more—
Ron: Oh, it's for adults. It's not for kids.
Jake: "Adult" adult?
Ron: No no, not "adult" adult. You've got to be careful when you say that, especially when you talk to people who aren't in the industry. "Oh, what kind of games do you make?" "Oh, you know, fiction for adults." "Ooh, hmm." So, ah, yeah, but not kids stuff.
I got done doing the kids stuff, and then there was a year in which I didn't really do anything. Then I started to have a couple ideas for some games, and started to flesh them out. One of them started to take and so I've been working up a lot of design stuff on that, and going out and pitching to publishers.
"You've got to be careful when you talk to people who aren't in the industry. 'Oh, what kind of games do you make?' 'Oh, you know, fiction for adults.' 'Ooh, hmm.'"
Chris: Have you already made contact with publishers... some sort of tentative—
Ron: Yeah, I mean I started really slowly. One of the things I thought was, "Well, I could just put this thing together and contact everybody," but I decided to start it slowly, to contact one at a time and go through the process. I've only seen about four publishers at this point, so it's still pretty early.
[pause]
Chris: Got anything to say here?
Jake: No. I don't know?
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Thumbcast 08
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Thumbcast 07
A brief look at PS3 and Wii launch hype, discussion of gaming shows VideoGaiden and 1UP Show, the mario rap, and more. |
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Thumbcast 06
We discuss Tetsuya Mizuguchi's perpetual state of jetlag, the closing of Lik-Sang, the closing of Clover Studio, and possibly other bonus closings. |
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It is not as bad as it seems, because the voltage is quite low.
