Around May last year, the one and only Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame announced an RPG that was meant to be some kind of mix between classic Zelda, and Diablo, and Thimbleweed Park, that last one being another of the game designer’s notable works. It never got a full reveal, or even a name, and unfortunately it seems it never will, as it’s essentially been canned.
Gilbert recently spoke with Ars Technica about his career, including his most recently released game, Death by Scrolling, which just launched this October, but the interview kicks off by discussing his unnamed RPG. The designer explained that after working on adventure games like Thimbleweed Park and Return to Monkey Island for a good many years, he was “thinking about something new.”
That something new resulted in Gilbert hiring an artist and another designer, putting a year’s worth of time into the aforementioned RPG. The problem? Not enough people, and as is the case with most of life, not enough money. “I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that,” Gilbert explained. “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.”
For Gilbert, bringing in funds was tougher than he thought it would be. He tried pitching the game to various places, but “the deals that publishers were offering were just horrible.” He continued, “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 $100 million and it’s worth investing in.’ 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.”
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter don’t work so well these days either, as Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park also went that route, and while it wracked up more than $600,000, the game dev noted that it still had private investors providing half of the game’s final budget.
This is mostly just another reminder that making games isn’t just hard because they’re technically complex, but they have material necessities that can’t always be met due to external forces. Would be nice if someone did something about that. Revolution anyone?
