![]() Story.Ĩ2 Images No Death… Unless it Makes Sense or is Funny His first real development experience with the genre, then, would come at a time when Ron Gilbert was looking to change the form, shake things up, and lean into the reason players enjoyed these more cerebral games. As a relatively new employee at Lucasfilm Games, Dave Grossman would work alongside Ron Gilbert fleshing out the story, puzzles, and comedic dialogue. “It was an unusual way to run things,” Dave Grossman adds. It just kind of happened and we started working on it.” I don't think we even had a marketing department when we started Monkey Island, so there weren’t focus tests to see if an idea was good. If you could do that, it was a lot easier to get the go-ahead. ![]() “It was about getting all the other people in the games group to like your idea. “Back when Monkey Island came out, and things changed as time moved on, but back when Monkey Island came out it really was about gathering consensus,” he continues. When asked about pitching the game and kickstarting development, and whether or not it was a case of being able to work on whatever you felt passionate about, Gilbert says, “It was close to that.” Ron Gilbert’s distaste for traditional fantasy, love of things like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, and the novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, led to the genesis of Monkey Island. I don't think I have a good answer to why it was then that adventure games saw their heyday.”įor whatever reason though, they did, and the culture within Lucasfilm Games at the time was led by creators. Maybe people used to have more patience to puzzle things out and look at things. “I think people were probably looking for something a little bit different in video games, something slower, more cerebral. “I'm not sure exactly what it was about that time, that allowed adventure games to grow and flourish,” Ron Gilbert reflects. The aforementioned SCUMM toolset (which is short for Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion) would then serve as the foundation for everything from Monkey Island through to Day of the Tentacle and even the CD-ROM era classic Full Throttle. This eventually led to a string of point-and-click adventure games, starting with Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion. Since its inception in the early 1980s, the small team at Lucasfilm Games looked to make its mark in the computer game landscape with original titles. ![]() Yet, surprisingly, the studio was not creating licensed tie-ins set in the Star Wars universe, as those deals were already in place with other companies. The Secret of Monkey Island was an original adventure game from Lucasfilm Games, a studio housed within Skywalker Ranch. I think it just slowly became something of a cult hit, over time.” A Long Time Ago In A… You Get The Idea That's when I realised this Monkey Island thing, there's something weird there. “I just kind of moved on and it wasn't until about 2004 when I started my blog and I started doing posts - and they weren't even about Monkey Island in the beginning - that I saw this massive outpouring of people. “I went on to do Humongous Entertainment,” Gilbert says, of his departure. Selecting an action was a significant step forward. But, it wasn’t until much later that Ron Gilbert was made aware of what The Secret of Monkey Island meant to so many people. For old-school adventure gamers, the golden age of LucasArts is right up there on the peak. He helped pioneer verb selection as a means to step away from text parsers and was there as mouse input led to a more streamlined UI. For Lucasfilm Games, it was Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion and the SCUMM toolset he created that would serve as the foundation for a string of beloved adventure games.
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