Legendary game designer and programmer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island) has revealed that one of his exciting-sounding upcoming projects has been canceled due in part to investors not coming to the table to fund the project.
Speaking to Ars Technica, Gilbert said this game had a vision of being a “large, open-world-type RPG” in the vein of The Legend of Zelda. Gilbert worked alongside two other people–an artist and a designer–for about a year on the project before Gilbert realized it was not going to happen.
“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.”
Gilbert previously described his new project as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park,” and a lot of people were excited to find out what that might look like. Now it’s not happening.
“Horrible” publishing deals
Gilbert said he pitched the project to people in the industry but discovered that “deals that publishers were offering were just horrible.”
The kind of game Gilbert envisioned “isn’t the big, hot item” so potential publishers didn’t invest, he said. “The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this,” he explained.
Gilbert funded 2017’s Thimbleweed Park on Kickstarter, bringing in more than $600,000 USD. Gilbert also took private investment to complete the project.
The industry veteran observed that publishers today can be “very analytics-driven” and have devised their own formulas to “try to figure out how much money they could make.” The result of this, Gilbert observed, is that publishers take on less risk, and in turn, games that do get made often look the same.
“You end up [getting] a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money,” he said. “When we were starting out, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what made this money … I think that’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity and you know, strangeness, and bizarreness.”
Gilbert’s latest game is Death by Scrolling, an action game that was released at the end of October this year. Before that, he partnered with Devolver for Return to Monkey Island.