Ron Gilbert is an American video-game designer, programmer, and producer, best
known for his work on several classic LucasArts adventure games, including
Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games. His games are generally
focused on interactive story-telling. After leaving LucasArts, Gilbert
cofounded Humongous Entertainment and its sister company Cavedog
Entertainment. After leaving Humongous Entertainment, he cofounded Hulabee
Entertainment with Shelley Day. He was creative director at Vancouver-based
Hothead Games development studio. In 2013, he announced that he would move on
from Double Fine Productions. Biography
= Early career= Ron Gilbert was born in La Grande,
Oregon, as the son of David E. Gilbert, a physics professor and former president
of Eastern Oregon University. He became interested in games when he was thirteen
years old thanks to a Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator his father
used to bring home. That calculator included a simple game in which the
player had to guess the location of a battleship by entering the coordinates
and the calculator would answer if the player was high or low. But it wasn't
the game itself that captured Ron's attention so much as how this simple
calculator was capable of making decisions and reacting to his choices.
Another thing that made him approach the gaming world was a film, Star Wars. His
fascination with programming technology, which allowed gamers to interact with
characters and situations, mixed with his love for telling stories, like that
of "Star Wars", were his main inspirations to start making games.
The impact of Star Wars and his love for telling stories was so big that Ron
Gilbert, at the age of fourteen, and his good friend Tom McFarlane made a couple
of films on a Super-8 camera. The first film they shot in 1978 was Stars
Blasters; it was directed by Ron Gilbert and acted by friends Tom McFarlane and
Frank Lang. In 1979 they filmed another movie, Tomorrow Never Came, acted by Ron
Gilbert, Tom McFarlane; it was also directed by Ron Gilbert.
In 1979 his parents purchased a NorthStar Horizon home computer. At the
age of fifteen, he took his first steps in game programming. He used to study
and analyze games for hours; capturing in his mind every frame of the layout of
games like Donkey Kong, Pacman, Asteroids, Space Invaders or Robotron:
2084; taking notes of every detail and then trying to replicate them on his
computer. Once the games were replicated he would start doing experiments with
them, adding changes. He also used to look at Atari 2600 games' advertisements
in magazines, then imagined what the game was like to play and tried to make
them on his computer. Once the games were finished he used to bring his
friends home to test the games and tell him what did they like or did not like.
= LucasArts= Gilbert began his professional career in
1983 while he was still a college student by writing a program named
Graphics Basic with Tom McFarlane. They sold the program to a San Francisco Bay
Area company named HESware, which later offered Gilbert a job. He spent about
half a year at HESware, programming action games for the Commodore 64. None
of them were ever released; the company went out of business. Shortly
thereafter, Gilbert joined Lucasfilm Games, which later became LucasArts.
There he earned his living by doing C64 ports of Lucasfilm Atari 800 games. In
1985 he got the opportunity to co-develop his own game for LucasArts
together with graphics artist Gary Winnick. Maniac Mansion was about a dark
Victorian mansion populated by a mad scientist, his family and strange
aliens. Gilbert created a scripting language
that was named after the project it had been written for, the Script Creation
Utility for Maniac Mansion, better known as SCUMM. The technology was used in all
subsequent LucasArts adventure games, with the exception of Grim Fandango and
Escape From Monkey Island. Despite being an internal production tool, the SCUMM
acronym became well known to gamers since a location in The Secret of Monkey
Island, the SCUMM Bar, was named after it.
Gilbert created many successful adventure games at LucasArts, including
the classic The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
In 1992, he left the company to start Humongous Entertainment with LucasArts
producer Shelley Day. While at Humongous Entertainment, Gilbert was responsible
for games such as Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam and the Backyard
Sports series. Many of these games continued to use an offshoot of the
SCUMM engine. = Post LucasArts=
In 1995, Gilbert founded Cavedog Entertainment, Humongous' sister company
for non-kids games. In 1996, GameSpot named him as the 15th on their list of
the most influential people in computer gaming of all time. In 1997, Computer
Gaming World similarly ranked him as number 15 on the list of the most
influential people of all time in computer gaming for inventing the SCUMM
engine. While at Cavedog, Gilbert was the producer of Total Annihilation and
worked on a game titled Good & Evil. Widely regarded as his pet project, Good
& Evil was said to incorporate many different themes and gameplay styles.
The game was previewed by several publications, but the project was
cancelled when Cavedog closed down in 1999. In an interview with GameSpot
conducted a while after Cavedog's shut-down, Gilbert said the Good & Evil
project had suffered due to him trying to design a game and run a company at
the same time. As of 2005, Ron Gilbert was
independently designing an unspecified new adventure/R.P.G., which he was
pitching to publishers. He also started a blog "Grumpy Gamer", offering game
industry commentary, occasionally in the form of animated cartoons that he
created with Voodoo Vince designer Clayton Kauzlaric.
In 2007, Gilbert created "Threepwood", an exclusively Monkey Island-themed
guild on the World of Warcraft server Quel'Dorei, and Gilbert began to
collaborate with Hothead Games on Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick
Precipice of Darkness, a game based on the webcomic Penny Arcade. He was chosen
to be the Keynote Speaker for Penny Arcade Expo for 2009.
In January 2008, he joined Hothead Games as creative director, with whom he was
developing DeathSpank, an adventure/R.P.G. Although still working
at Hothead Games, Gilbert contributed to the design for Telltale Games' Tales of
Monkey Island, taking part in the brainstorming process early in the
development of the game. The episodic fifth entry in the Monkey Island series
marked the first time Gilbert worked on a Monkey Island game since 1991's
LeChuck's Revenge. On April 6, 2010, on his blog he announced that he left
Hothead Games. He will continue to promote DeathSpank with Electronic Arts.
In September 2010, it was revealed that Gilbert had been hired by fellow former
LucasArts game designer Tim Schafer, to work at Schafer's own Double Fine
Productions. In February 2012, Tim Schafer confirmed he will be working
with Ron Gilbert on a new adventure game. In May 2012, the game was revealed
as The Cave, it will be developed by Double Fine Productions and published as
a downloadable title by Sega in 2013. After the buying of LucasArts by The
Walt Disney Company in 2012, the rights to the Monkey Island series became the
company's property. Ron Gilbert has been quoted in November 2012 as not being
optimistic about the franchise's future, believing that Disney might abandon the
franchise in favor of Pirates of the Caribbean, however, in December 2012, he
was also quoted as wishing to contact Disney, hoping to "make the game he
wants to make". In March 2013, Gilbert left Double Fine
Productions revealing that his joining the studio was purely for the creation
of The Cave: "I was telling him [Tim Schafer] about The Cave and he really
liked it, so he said 'come to Double Fine and make it. It was really all
about making that game." Most recently he worked on the iOS and Android game
Scurvy Scallywags with DeathSpank co-creator Clayton Kauzlaric.
On November 18, 2014, it was revealed that he had reunited with Gary Winnick,
with whom he created his early critically acclaimed point'n'click games
at LucasArts, and that they were working together on a new point'n'click game
called Thimbleweed Park. The game smashed through its funding target on
the crowd sourcing site Kickstarter on December 18th and is set for release in
2016 in full 'talkie' mode firstly on Windows, Linux and Mac. A port to iOS
and Android was confirmed after the project met its last stretch-goal.
Games References
External links Grumpy Gamer - Ron Gilbert's blog
Ron Gilbert at MobyGames Ron Gilbert's complete biography