Ron Gilbert

Ron Gilbert
Ron Gilbert at PAX in 2009 Photo courtesy of Ronald Woan
Born	La Grande, Oregon
Occupation	Game designer

Ron Gilbert is an American computer 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. Gilbert was also co-founder of Humongous Entertainment and its sister company Cavedog Entertainment. His games are generally focused on interactive storytelling. Additionally, Ron founded Hulabee Entertainment with Shelley Day after leaving Humongous Entertainment. He works nowadays as Creative Director at Vancouver-based Hothead Games development studio.

Career

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 (C64). 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.

Maniac Mansion on the Commodore 64

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, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam and the Backyard Sports series. Many of these games continued to use an offshoot of the SCUMM engine. In 1995, Gilbert founded Cavedog Entertainment, Humongous' sister company for non-kids games.

While at Cavedog, Gilbert was the producer of Total Annihilation and worked on a game called 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.^[1]

As of 2005, Ron Gilbert was independently designing an unspecified new adventure/RPG game, which he was pitching to publishers. He also started a blog called Grumpy Gamer offering game industry commentary, occasionally in the form of animated cartoons that he created with Voodoo Vince designer Clayton Kauzlaric.^[2]

In January 2007, Gilbert created an exclusively Monkey Island themed guild on the World of Warcraft server Quel'Dorei, under the name Threepwood.^[3]

In May 2007, 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.^[4]

In January 2008, he joined Hothead Games as Creative Director, with whom he's developing DeathSpank, an episodic adventure/RPG game.^[5]

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.^[6] 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.

He was chosen to be the Keynote Speaker for Penny Arcade Expo for 2009.

Published works

• Maniac Mansion (1987), writer, director, art and programmer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
• Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), writer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989), writer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
• The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), writer and director, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991), writer and programmer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
• Total Annihilation (1997), (producer only)
• Penny Arcade Adventures, story and design consultant, Hothead Games, (2008)
• Deathspank (2009), design, Hothead Games.
• Co-created many children's games at Humongous Entertainment, including Freddi Fish and Putt-Putt.

References

External links

• Grumpy Gamer Ron Gilbert's blog
• Interview at World of Monkey Island in 2007
• Ron Gilbert at MobyGames
• Interview at The International House of Mojo
• Ron Gilbert Speaks A three-part interview with Ron Gilbert conducted by Idle Thumbs in 2004
• Interview at Gamespot
• Gamasutra feature
• Interview with Ron Gilbert on 2005, at La Aventura es la Aventura
• [2] June 30, 2006 Interview