[HN Gopher] After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivot...
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After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning
Death
Author : mikhael
Score : 182 points
Date : 2025-12-01 17:13 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Ah, too bad to hear his upcoming game is cancelled!
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Do we know why it was?
| kg wrote:
| The publishing and investment climate
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ron-gilbert-cancels-rpg-
| projec...
|
| It's pretty tough getting a game funded right now.
| willmadden wrote:
| It's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible.
| The games are more about social conditioning than
| entertainment.
|
| See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France
| and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is
| 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
| samiwami wrote:
| Social conditioning? Clair Obscur is good and was very
| unique, but is not 100x than "the slop big studios
| publish".
| UpsideDownRide wrote:
| Infinity times better coukd be a better hyperbole, very
| goos game versus no good. Dividing by zero gets you
| infinity instead of just 100
| ido wrote:
| "Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince"
| is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying
| to make good games). How much did it cost to make the
| Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and
| salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with
| all their money just hire another Beatles?
|
| Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another
| Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved
| problem.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| On the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming
| studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like
| we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from
| indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal
| Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of
| experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop
| on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath
| them or something though. Or maybe they're just
| structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11
| years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after
| all.
| ido wrote:
| The more people you add the slower you get, not faster.
| Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and
| particularly slow to change directions) vs small
| upstarts.
| baud147258 wrote:
| yeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a
| studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them
| 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and
| let them cook to see what comes out.
| ido wrote:
| They tried that, e.g. "EA Originals"[0] is basically that
| (there are similar programs at other major publishers). I
| suspect it proved to not be a big money maker at the
| scale required to move the needle at publishers of that
| size., and that they are keeping these on as a sort of
| prestige programs.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts#EA_Orig
| inals
| tikotus wrote:
| This is a conjencture, even if I do work in the industry
| but not AAA, but: Following the trends simply isn't part
| of their business model. Following current trends is a
| very unpredictable business. Many try, and many fail. AAA
| had the luxury of somewhat predictable sales. They can
| make big bets like working years on a game, since they
| know they will have millions of players. And they know
| smaller studios can't compete with them in that business.
|
| But, of course, making games is hard, and sometimes they
| fail. And now the free tools are getting really good, and
| smaller studios are becoming increasingly competent. Will
| we soon see the big ones fall? Their only way to survive
| is to keep going bigger, escaping the smaller studios to
| a place they can't reach. Now we have AAAA games. But is
| there a limit where players stop caring how many As a
| game has?
| Supernaut wrote:
| > How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A
| piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4
| guys?
|
| The Beatles did only take a few days to knock out each of
| their earliest LPs. However, per Wikipedia, "the group
| spent 700 hours on [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
| Band]. The final cost [...] was approximately PS25,000
| (equivalent to PS573,000 in 2023)."
|
| So, actually, envelope-pushing cultural landmarks
| typically do require a lot of effort and money to
| complete.
| binary132 wrote:
| >Industrializing culture isn't a solved problem
|
| Someone's never heard of the American music industry
| willmadden wrote:
| Correct, a better description.
| willmadden wrote:
| Yes, it is 100x better than the slop the big studios
| publish.
|
| Enter: parasitic storytelling
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
| andrepd wrote:
| Your mention of "social conditioning" a propos of nothing
| gives you away like the "three fingers" in Inglorious
| Basterds. I would highly suggest not basing your entire
| personality and opinions on a slack-jawed streamer's
| meandering rant delivered from his RGB gaming chair for 5
| hours straight.
| willmadden wrote:
| Here, educate yourself:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
| schnebbau wrote:
| He can't be trusted after fumbling the ending of Return to
| Monkey Island.
| donogh wrote:
| In his defence, Monkey Island _is_ Ron's creation and the
| ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a
| fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the
| whole saga.
| simpetre wrote:
| He's also been creating absurdist controversial endings
| to adventure games for a long time before Return to
| Monkey Island (SoMI2, Thimbleweed Park)...
| turtlebro wrote:
| I thought the ending was lovely as well. We get
| sincerity, but seems some people can't go to sleep
| without an epic boss fight and some dramatic reveal of
| the "secret". This was the better way to do it and for me
| the best point and click ever made.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| So instead you get a sophomoric meta-ending that has
| absolutely no originality and shits on decades of
| storytelling? The ending is trash and an insult to the
| fans' intelligence because the author can't accept he's
| "just" writing adventure fiction, as if that's beneath
| him and instead needs to make some philosophical point
| about the nature of aging, thereby completely stepping
| out of his skill set. Go read Proust, Ron Gilbert, and
| leave _that_ silly ambition to rest.
| hnal943 wrote:
| But that's Ron. He's a Portland Gen X Socialist. Irony
| and cynicism are the only things he knows.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I believe that, as far as "The Secret" goes, this is what
| he always intended. The idea had been floating around
| forums for quite a while and I have no objections to
| that.
|
| Having said that, RtMI feels like Ron Gilbert telling me
| to go away and do something else with my life. The world
| is falling apart, the game characters don't care, the
| ending itself gives up on you and, in case you didn't get
| it, there's a letter afterwards from Ron Gilbert himself
| telling you that, if you try to recapture the past,
| "you'll sort of get what [you] want but it won't be what
| [you] expected".
|
| As far as I'm concerned, I would have preferred it if he
| hadn't made the game at all.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Truly infuriating.
| vaylian wrote:
| There is an alternative ending if you know what to look
| for: https://www.trueachievements.com/a375369/i-dont-
| believe-achi...
| sph wrote:
| My issue with it was not even the end, but everything else:
| it felt like a nostalgia tour and retreading of old ideas.
| Even the themes of the soundtrack were based off the
| originals. I quit a couple hours in; I wanted a new Monkey
| Island story, all I got was a game for people that simply
| wanted to relive their youth.
| goopypoop wrote:
| birds are immune to pepper heat
| p2detar wrote:
| It's not. It's about an older RPG.
|
| https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer/1156577401223472...
| acomjean wrote:
| His website is pretty fun.
|
| https://grumpygamer.com/
|
| He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park
|
| https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
| N_Lens wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, his website has a nice vibe.
| tomovo wrote:
| Yes and the podcast was fun to listen to. Great chance to
| follow work in progress of an experienced game developer, week
| by week.
| kentm wrote:
| He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the
| takeaway is that people don't care about the story. However, I
| wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and
| read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me
| don't believe that I could possibly be following the story. But
| that's just how fast I can read game dialog.
| hyfgfh wrote:
| Two words: Disco Elysium
|
| Maybe you need VA too
| vidarh wrote:
| I'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I
| typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game
| dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first
| couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip
| the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue
| is gone whenever it pops up.
| latexr wrote:
| Fortunately, these days it seems more common that games
| highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so
| you at least get the important keywords.
|
| I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at
| a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so
| generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest
| offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of
| exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember
| one where I was pressing "A" furiously for _minutes_ , with
| no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually
| quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing
| any gameplay.
|
| A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It
| throws you directly into the action and shows you "this is
| how the game is going to feel" from the get go. Then it pulls
| back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying
| on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few
| minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come _and
| liked it_ , I became much more interested and patient in
| experiencing the story.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Yeah, exposition overload is a rookie mistake a lot of
| writers make.
|
| And video game writers in particular? Sometimes it feels
| like just having a Wattpad account could put you in top 50%
| of them. I've seen AAAs where saying the writing was
| "fanfic tier" would be an insult to fanfics. Like they
| either hire the cheapest people they can get, or give the
| job to someone like an executive's daughter with big ideas
| and no ability to execute on them.
|
| A good writer knows the power of "show don't tell", and
| knows the value of keeping the audience hungry and wanting
| for more.
| andrepd wrote:
| But to be honest, isn't this also true of the basic
| Hollywood or Netflix fare?.
|
| I've been watching season 5 of Stranger Things. It has a
| budget of approximately 1 gazillion dollars. The writing
| is utterly basic predictable, boring, cliche, it's either
| a marvel-tier quip or a hollywood trope. Most Netflix
| shovelware isn't better than this.
|
| So I don't think it's unique to video games :)
| kalavan wrote:
| It's surprising that series and movies with gazillion-
| dollar budgets don't seem to have money for decent
| writers. About the only explanation I can think of is
| that the way the series or movie is made itself makes
| story too hard to do.
|
| E.g. an action movie is designed around its stunts and
| then the plot is stitched together to support them. And
| series that are made one episode at a time can suffer
| from serious plot drift when they aren't planned ahead
| properly, or when executives can't decide whether they're
| going to have one more season or not.
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's worse than previous series, I've noticed myself
| zoning out a few times, but the entire Stranger Things
| schtick is that it's a homage to the 80s. It's story
| lines are cliched, that's the point. They're predictable
| because you have seen them before.
|
| They even highlight and play with it themselves in the
| show, introducing the big bad via the D&D table in the
| first episode of each season, referencing the films
| they're doing, sometimes including the same actors from
| the films they're riffing off (Sean Astin as Bob, Robert
| Englund as Victor Creel).
|
| Season 1 : Aliens/ET
|
| Season 2 : Goonies, The Exorcist
|
| Season 3 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob
|
| Season 4 : Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser
|
| Season 5 : So far we've seen Home Alone, Lost boys,
| Terminator
|
| Saying it's predictable and cliched is just saying
| they've done their job well! And missing one of the main
| points of the TV show. My friend was almost giddy that
| they'd used Technicolor in the Holly/Max world.
| phantasmish wrote:
| My wife works a lot with LLMs and writing, and some time
| in episode 3 she was like, "I'm pretty sure a lot of this
| was written by AI."
|
| The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.
|
| That's in addition to repeating everything several times,
| which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account
| for people who aren't paying much attention.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is
| predictable and boring
|
| I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure
| games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are
| predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
| harrall wrote:
| Same.
|
| Game writers need to learn about character development.
|
| I never care about 99% of characters in video games.
| Characters need history that they don't necessarily let up
| easily, deep seated fears that they don't want to tell you,
| and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure
| you're still hacking and slashing but you're also thinking
| "hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?"
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I've seen quite a few streamers that click through the text and
| don't care about the story.
|
| It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some
| games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and
| repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too
| many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is
| that a game was playtested within an inch of its life.
|
| Someone ended up optimizing for the kind of player who doesn't
| care much, because the playtesters didn't care much - they were
| only there for a paycheck.
|
| But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan
| entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text
| while retaining all the information.
|
| I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief
| seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough.
| jerf wrote:
| Game text is highly patterned. And since gamers generally
| can't be trusted to read long text, it's easy to extract the
| actually important parts, by design, if you practice it a
| lot.
|
| It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret
| programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs
| streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a
| reasonable chance of picking out the _one_ log message that
| stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact
| the logs are highly patterned.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > they were only there for a paycheck
|
| Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few
| times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick
| succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find
| out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the
| Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after
| he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall
| through the deck-plating and into space there.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| I don't mean the "play the same levels 300 times" QA. I
| mean the usual blind playtests that are conducted to gather
| external feedback on the gameplay.
| criddell wrote:
| Most of the time I wish games had an option to auto-skip
| everything that's skippable (and just about everything that
| isn't gameplay should be skippable).
|
| I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it,
| but the story part of the game usually doesn't click with me.
| I'm playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it's a perfect example
| of that. Super fun game, boring story.
| LostMyWords wrote:
| Visual novels usually present an autoplay feature[1] which
| stops at choices, or just skips text you haven't met yet. The
| genre is famous for its multiple endings, even in the dozens,
| so a game can branch a lot and players re-play a game many
| times, so the autoplay feature is appreciated. You can also
| set the text speed in many games, and there's a play log
| called history[2] if you missed something.
|
| [1] https://vndev.wiki/Autoplay [2]
| https://vndev.wiki/History
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I'm also a speed reader, grew up on Infocom text adventure
| games. Interesting connection!
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Funny you mentioned Disco Elysium. I played the game when it
| was first released and had no audio dialogue. I read moderately
| fast, but I never skipped any dialogue and always explored all
| branches my skills allowed. It took me 40 hours to finish.
|
| When audio dialogue was released I played it again and I
| couldn't stand the slower pace. It'd have probably taken 150h
| to finish the game again like that. So I switched to another
| language that was text only. (Btw, having a hotkey to switch
| between languages on the fly is AMAZING design).
|
| All I'm saying is I'm agreeing with GP, going fast didn't mean
| I didn't care, quite the opposite as going faster meant I could
| explore more options.
| dbalatero wrote:
| This title freaked me out... I thought he was dying. Glad to hear
| it's just a new game!
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| First I thought he was dying, then I thought he was committing
| all his resources into extending human life / reaching the
| singularity (like Kurzweil)
|
| Then I read the article :)
| tomaskafka wrote:
| I thought worse - that he became another longevity dudebro.
| Phew :).
| dbalatero wrote:
| Damn, that truly would be worse.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well, we all are. Slowly
| quitit wrote:
| Except the bots.
| Trufa wrote:
| I thought he was joining Bryan Johnson
| cliffordc wrote:
| I thought he was in a new episode of Family Guy
| szczepano wrote:
| his new game link
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3773590/Death_by_Scrollin...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that
| the game's style was "a little too much 'ADHD' for me. I look at
| those games and it's like, wow, I feel like I'm playing a slot
| machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and
| that... it's a little too much."
|
| Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot
| machines.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Dang, that explains so much about it.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This seems spectacularly obvious. No retrospect required.
| s_dev wrote:
| Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre.
| People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new
| 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being
| announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.
|
| For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these
| are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
|
| I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the
| gaming world.
| hvs wrote:
| Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans.
| I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to
| play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and
| Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the
| past few months.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Yeah, great game it's just a shame the publisher screwed over
| the dev team.
| lkramer wrote:
| Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the
| Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the
| nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved
| with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
|
| I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly
| misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure
| games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and
| was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank
| and The Cave.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Disco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing
| else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's
| revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still
| possible to do something amazing in the genre.
|
| I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've
| ever read.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm kind of sad we miss out on RG's take on an action RPG.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >While Gilbert said he's always harbored these kinds of anti-
| capitalist feelings "at some level," he said that "certainly
| recent events and recent things have gotten me more and more
| jumping on the 'Eat the Rich' bandwagon." Though he didn't detail
| which "recent events" drove that realization, he did say that
| "billionaires and all this stuff... I think are just causing more
| harm than good."
|
| This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet
| there is a very large difference between his wealth and the
| wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between
| himself and Bezos, for example, is _waaay_ higher than between a
| poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the
| latter. But where is the more important disparity? It 's between
| a poor person and himself.
|
| He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be
| eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer
| people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not
| the degree of difference is what matters.
|
| [0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but
| he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company
| that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a
| moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M.
| That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.
| MattRix wrote:
| You can be a beneficiary of a system and still complain about
| that system.
|
| On top of that, billionaires who take over media companies and
| lobby politicians have much more power than a millionaire like
| Ron. Their ability to make things worse is on a completely
| different level.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Absolutely you can. But what does Gilbert expect to happen to
| his wealth?
| sd9 wrote:
| It's ok to believe and advocate for something that reduces
| your individual ability to accumulate capital.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Absolutely it is. What impact on his wealth does he think
| dismantling capitalism will have?
| dbalatero wrote:
| Why do you assume he cares?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I think it's a pretty simple cutoff. If you're so rich that you
| can rent an entire city for your wedding, that's too rich. If
| you can buy an entire Hawaiian island, that's too rich.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| And then they leave, the tax base gets smaller, and Ron
| Gilbert is now in the richest class.
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