Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert has called time on his previously teased but largely under the radar RPG.
Back in May of last year, I first caught wind of the developer’s 2D pixel art RPG, which he described as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park”. Screenshots shared at this time showed a town, which was said to have both a bakery and a weapon shop. As Gilbert noted, these two establishments would really set players up with “all [they’ll] need before setting out on a day of questing”.
However, it seems that we will be unable to set out for a day of pixelated questing, as in a new interview, Gilbert has revealed he is no longer working on his Zelda-like RPG due to a lack of funding support from publishers.
“I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that,” Gilbert explained to ArsTechnica. “You know, it’s either a passion project you spent 10 years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
Gilbert added securing that “bunch of money” to help realise his vision was no easy task, as “the deals that publishers were offering were just horrible”. He also believed the genre he was working with did not play into his favour.
“Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘we’re gonna make $100m and it’s worth investing in’,” the Monkey Island creator said. “The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this.”
Gilbert previously turned to crowdfunding for his previous release Thimbleweed Park, but even this route isn’t as straightforward as it may have been in the past, with the game creator suggesting: “Kickstarter is basically dead these days as a way of funding games.”
Today’s big-name publishers “are very analytics-driven,” Gilbert furthered. “The big companies, it’s like they just have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make, and I think that just in the end you end up giving a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money.”
This is different from the start of his career, Gilbert continued. “When we were starting out, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what made this money, so it was, yeah, it was a lot more experimenting,” he said. “I think that’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity and you know, strangeness, and bizarreness.”
Some of the artwork from Gilbert’s now cancelled RPG has found a new lease of life, however, and features in the creator’s newest game, Death by Scrolling.
Death by Scrolling is described as a “rogue-like vertically scrolling RPG”, with the ultimate goal being to race upward through endless levels in order to amass enough money to pay the Ferryman and escape Purgatory. To do this, players will need to battle enemies, swipe gems and power ups, complete quests and more while outsmarting the ever-pursuing Grim Reaper. You can check out a trailer for Death by Scrolling below.
Closing the interview, Gilbert looked back at his career as a game creator, noting it is a very different world now than it was 40 years ago.
“Back then, there were a handful of print magazines, and there were a bunch of reporters, and you had sent out press releases… That’s just not the way it works today,” he said, adding the rise in content from not just streamers but developers on the likes of YouTube requires a person to be good on camera.
“The [developers] that are successful are not necessarily the good ones, but the good ones that also present well on YouTube,” he said. “And you know, I think that’s kind of a problem, that’s a gate now… In some ways, I think it’s too bad because as a developer, you have to be a performer. And I’m not a performer, right?
“If I was making movies, I would be a director, not an actor.”
Back in 2022, Gilbert along with co-writer Dave Grossman released Return to Monkey Island. It was a project many thought would never happen, but which had actually been in secret development for two years before its April Fool’s Day announcement that same year.