Ron Gilbert GI Interview

[Icebox]

Ron looks angry. Man on a mission!

 

These scans are a little blurry. Here's a transcript.

 

"At Hothead Games, Ron Gilbert is looking to create a new hybrid of Diablo style action/RPG and adventure gaming with the innovative Deathspank"

 

"Ron Gilbert is legendary among PC gamers for his classic LucasArts adventure games, including Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. Recently, Gilbert has joined indie developer Hothead Games and is working on a new action/RPG named Deathspank, which won accolades at the recent PAX convention in Seattle."

 

"GI:Obviously, Monkey Island and all the adventure games you did at LucasArts still have a tremendous cult following (Damn Straight). What are some of your recollections of working with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman on those games?

Ron: Both of them were very funny. Working on Monkey Island, we had a lot of fun with the game. It was a lot of sitting around and making jokes and laughing. Just throwing out lots of weird, funny ideas and seeing which ones stuck and which ones didn't.It's about having as much fun making the game as you want the people who are playing it to have. The biggest thing going on at Lucasfilm was that we couldn't make Star Wars games. They had licensed the video game rights off to a toy company. That gave us the freedom to explore completely different things. That's where things like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island eventually came from.

 

GI: You are very passionate about the indie games scene. Do you think that the main-stream, large scale publishing business is broken in some respects?

Ron: I don't think it's fundamentally broken, I think that what the big game publishers - the Activisions and EAs and Ubisofts - need to do is embrace indie games. They need to look at these smaller games and fund them.The thing that scares me about the industry is that the large companies are very hit-driven. All they want to do is hit home runs. They don't quite understand that you need a lot of different games to make the industry healthy as a whole. I think the movie industry - and I think there are a lot of money-grubbers there like in any big company - understands that the strength of their industry is actually better if they get a lot of these indie movies made. They use them to bring up acting talent and directing talent. That's something that the big game companies haven't gotten yet.

 

GI: A great example would be Batman director Christopher Nolan. If you watched Memento, you'd never say, "This guy will go on to direct a movie that makes $600 million at the box office."

Ron: That's a perfect example of the types of things that the larger companies need to be doing. A lot of the film companies have indie film labels that put these movies out. EA need s to have an indie game label that has nothing to do with EA. Everything is done differently - the marketing, the sales, the production. They could really help foster a lot of these small groups of creative people out there. That would be healthy for the whole business.

 

GI: You consulted with Hothead for a while, and decided to join the company.What attracted you to this company?

Ron: First of all, I really like the people a lot. was pitch(ing) Deathspank to them, which I had (been) pitching to a lot of different publishers, they really just got it. I told them the idea and how I wnted to do the art, and it immediately clicked for them. The people here are good people, and are really funny. I just thought, "If I come here and make the game here, it's going to be really good."

 

GI: When did you hit upon the idea for DeathSpank?

Ron: I'd been kicking it around for a while, four or five years now. I have a website and a friend of mine, Clayton Kauzlaric, had been making some Flash cartoons with me. They were poking fun at the game industry. In one of the cartoons, we needed a video game characterHe needed to be over-the-top and have an absolutely ridiculous name. The name we came up with was "DeathSpank." So we created this character and he appeared in a couple of the cartoons. The more I thought about him, I began to really like him and I started to flesh out his world. What's his motivation?Who is he? Where does he come from? A lot of these stories started to flow out of that. So I started putting together this little adventure game with him, and I knew I wanted to meld that with an RPG. That's when I started pitching it to publishers and eventually ended it here at Hothead.

 

GI: The game has a very unique visual style that melds 3D graphics with a 2D, almost pop-up book feel. Do you think the game industry misses an opportunity to explore different visual styles other than hyper-realistic characters?

Ron: I think there is a missed opportunity there. I think a lot of people making games today are very tech focused.They're very excited about the technology and how they are going to model realism - "We have a million blades of grass and they are all swaying to the wind correctly!" That's interesting at some level, but I think they might be missing this whole other piece, which is creating interesting characters and creating interesting worlds and stories. It's the technical versus creative sides of this thing. I wanted to do DeathSpank the way it is because I like 2D art. I love when an artist can get in and massage every little pixel of a piece. But I also think roaming a real, 3D world is really interesting because it allows the player to explore and have it feel continuous. So, the goal was to get those things together.

 

GI: The Trailers are very focused on action, but I'm assuming the game has a strong adventure element as well.

Ron: Definitely. There's a very good, strong adventure game component that runs through the game. We don't really touch on that in the action-packed trailer. There's Monkey Island-style dialogue and there's all these people you can interact with and have conversations with. There are adventure game puzzles very much like the Monkey Island stuff that you can go through and solve. The game has this wave to it. At some point, you're just solving adventure game puzzles, then all of a sudden all this action happens. Then you go back to solving puzzles. The world is very non-linear. It's not like we take you through like, "Level One you fight. Level Two you solve a puzzle. Level Three you fight." You do as much of it as you want and roam the world at your own pace.

 

GI: You outed yourself as a WoW addict during your keynote at the PAX convention. Has playing that much WoW influenced you as a game designer?

Ron: Well, it's sucked up thousands of hours of my life. [Laughs] But you're talking how it's influenced me positively. I think that WoW is a brilliantly designed game. I will be playing the game and I will just stop and think about it for a while. The way that everything dovetails in - all the different items you can find, all the crafting and the different professions, all the stats and uses for items, and how it's all balanced and put together. It's awe-inspiring to me to think of how much work went into all this. There's a lot to admire about how they do quest structures and tell a story, the way they let the world tell the story.

 

GI: I know you haven't announced what platforms DeathSpank is coming out for, but XBLA has given an avenue to games like Braid and Castle Crashers that may have struggled in the traditional, disc-based publishing realm.

Ron: I think Xbox Live Arcade is great, and I think you're right. Castle Crashers may not have been able to exist as a retail product. It does give people a great avenue for that kind of stuff. My hope is that they really grow that service, so there are literally hundreds of games that I can get there. I think the Apple Apps Store is a really great model. They have their problems, but it's very open and a lot of people can get their stuff on there. The barrier to entry on the Apps Store isn't as great as it is on XBLA. I'm just using Xbox Live as an example. Wiiware and PSN are exactly the same; they really do allow a channel for a different type of game."

 

Phew. Lotta Good Stuff. Between this and the Idle Thumbs PAX Casts, we cover quite a lot of ground with Old Gil. Already anticipating DeathSpank!

[Kroms]

This is great. Thanks, Icebox.

 

I'm getting more and more excited for this game.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wow, awesome! Thanks, Icebox!