After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning Death

If you know the name Ron Gilbert, it’s probably for his decades of work on classic point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Monkey Island series, and Thimbleweed Park. Given that pedigree, October’s release of the Gilbert-designed Death by Scrolling—a rogue-lite action-survival pseudo-shoot-em-up—might have come as a bit of a surprise.

In an interview from his New Zealand home, though, Gilbert noted that his catalog also includes some reflex-based games—Humungous Entertainment’s Backyard Sports titles and 2010’s Deathspank, for instance. And Gilbert said his return to action-oriented game design today stemmed from his love for modern classics like Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and Dead Cells.

“I mean, I’m certainly mostly known for adventure games, and I have done other stuff, [but] it probably is a little bit of a departure for me,” he told Ars. “While I do enjoy playing narrative games as well, it’s not the only thing I enjoy, and just the idea of making one of these kind of started out as a whim.”

Gilbert’s lost RPG

After spending years focused on adventure game development with 2017’s Thimbleweed Park and then 2022’s Return to Monkey Island, Gilbert said that he was “thinking about something new” for his next game project. But the first “new” idea he pursued wasn’t Death by Scrolling, but what he told Ars was “this vision for this kind of large, open world-type RPG” in the vein of The Legend of Zelda.

After hiring an artist and designer and spending roughly a year tinkering with that idea, though, Gilbert said he eventually realized his three-person team was never going to be able to realize his grand vision. “I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that,” he said. “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.”

And Gilbert said that securing that “bunch of money” to build out a top-down action-RPG in a reasonable time frame proved harder than he expected. After pitching the project around the industry, he found that “the deals that publishers were offering were just horrible,” a problem he blames in large part on the genre he was focusing on.