Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" | Talks at Google

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[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: Ron, it's a pleasure to have you here. RON GILBERT: And here. SPEAKER: So we won't have time to talk about the movie-- the movie "Park." You joined Lucas Arts more than 30 years ago, so I would like to talk a bit about that as well. RON GILBERT: It was a long time ago. SPEAKER: Can you take us back? How did you-- how did you get the job at LucasArts-- Lucasfilm Games back then? SPEAKER: Getting the job was actually a lot of random luck. I was in college at the time, and I built this program called Graphics BASIC, which was this little BASIC extension language for the Commodore 64. And I'd sold it, you know, the publishing rights to this company in California. And after they kind of-- we signed that deal, they said, hey do you want a job? So I thought, OK, well that sounds fine. So I quit college, and I loaded up my car and I drove to California, because I was living in Oregon at the time. And I went to work for them, and maybe six months after I started the company went bankrupt. So that was my first introduction to the games business-- my company going bankrupt. And so I packed up my car, and I moved back to Oregon. And I was going to enroll back in college and all that kind of stuff. And I was, like, literally I was in my parents' kitchen and I was about to head up to the University and have lunch with a friend. And it's like I walked out the door and the phone rang. And I'm like, oh, I really don't want to go back and answer that. And I started to head more out and the phone kept ringing and I finally I'm, fine, I'll final answer it. And I just went back in and answered the phone. It was somebody from Lucasfilm, because they were looking for a Commodore 64 programmer, which was what I had done at the previous company. And I guess they had heard about me from someone that worked there. And I thought, wow, Lucasfilm! And I had no idea the made games. To me, Lucasfilm was Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I had no idea they made games. And so it's like, wow, Lucasfilm! So I packed up my car and I drove back to California. And I mean, I haven't even gotten the job interview, right? I just moved back to California because I was getting that job. There was no way I was not getting that job. So I got the job. SPEAKER: So the gaming branch of Lucasfilm was very new. While the Lucasfilm name was very big, of course. And can you take us back? How was working there in the early days? Because I think you had this fancy Skywalker Ranch while you were working there? RON GILBERT: When I first started, we were in this kind of industrial complex called Kerner. And it's where Industrial Light and Magic was, because they had a lot of warehouses. Because they were constantly blowing stuff up all the time. So we were kind of down, down with them. And we were there for, I guess about a year and a half maybe. Maybe two years. I can't quite remember. But when I started, there were seven people in the Lucasfilm games group. You know it was a very, very, very small group of people. But it was just an amazingly creative group of people. It's like, I don't think in my life I had ever been around smarter people, you know, than those people. And it was kind of this weird experience. And it was just-- I mean, it was absolutely wonderful to be there. And, you know, I was 11 years old when Star Wars came out, right? And that was like the perfect age to be a Star Wars fan. And so, I mean, to me, you know Lucasfilm was just this like amazing thing. And George Lucas was like my hero, and all this stuff. And then to be working there, you know, it's just mind boggling. SPEAKER: I think you are one of the very few game developers who do both the coding bit, but also the creative bits. How did this come about? Did they ask you to do both? Or did you bring that and that was your advantage? RON GILBERT: In the early days of the game business, I think you really had to do both. I mean, people were building games completely on their own. And so, you know, you did art and you did programming and you did design. And you did, you know, all this stuff in those early days. And I was hired at Lucasfilm to be a programmer, to do Commodore 64 work. And it was there that that I met Gary Winnick, and he was an artist. He was actually the only artist in the Lucasfilm Games group. And he and I just really hit it off and we had a really great friendship. And we just started just working on this weird idea we had for this mansion, and this weird family that lives there. And this group of kids that go in and all the stuff which later became "Maniac Mansion." And I think we just kind of started working on this. I mean, nobody gave us permission. we just kind of started working on it. And, you know, I think it was-- in those early days of Lucasfilm, you know, games weren't really green-lit. There was no process. I mean, people just started working on them, and then when nobody told them not to it kind of just became a game at that point. That's kind of the way "Maniac Mansion" really developed. SPEAKER: It's still considered a seminal game for the genre, many mention. RON GILBERT: Yeah, it's kind of the first true point and click adventure game. SPEAKER: Yes. So how did that come about? Did you look at other games, like the Sierra games, and think about how do you improve on that? RON GILBERT: Yeah I looked at-- you know, Gary and I started working on "Maniac Mansion." And we had a lot of story ideas, but we had no game. We had no idea what this game was going to be. We just knew there was this weird family. And we knew it was weird mansion. And we had a bunch of weird stuff that was going to happen, but we had no game. And I-- it was during a Christmas break, I went and I visited my aunt and uncle. And my cousin was playing "King's Quest I." And that's the first time I'd ever seen "King's Quest." And I remember just watching him the entire vacation sitting there playing this game called "King's Quest," and it just kind of dawned on me. It's oh, this is what "Maniac Mansion" needs to be. It needs to be an adventure game. I had played text adventures and stuff, but I never really thought about "Maniac Mansion" as an adventure game. Because I think, you know, Gary and I always-- had always figured it was going to be a very visual game. And to me, adventure games were text adventures. But seeing "King's Quest" kind of-- it's like a hit in the head. And I go, OK. You know, adventure games can have graphics. And-- but I really-- I just hated the parser. I hated typing. It's probably because I can't spell at all. And so it was just getting rid of with the parser. And it was-- as I played "King's Quest," I realized there's only about 10 verbs it really understands, right? Everything else is just like synonyms. And so it's like-- I just kind of boiled it down to those 10 things and those became the verbs that showed up in "Maniac Mansion." SPEAKER: There are rumors that Steven Spielberg took some interest in what you were doing at Lucasfilm games? RON GILBERT: Yeah, yes. Spielberg was a huge gamer, you know? And then back then, he just loved games. And whenever he would come and visit George up at the ranch, he always had to come by and see what, you know, what we were doing. And and he was, I mean he was a great person. Because, you know, he wasn't the kind of person who would come into the room and kind of sit there and look at your demo and go, that's kind of nice. I mean, he wanted to play it, right? And he was just in there trying to do it. So I think my claim to fame is I got in a fight with Steven Spielberg over a mouse. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: So how does it feel to be considered a pioneer of the video gaming industry, and still one of the very big names in it? Is it more advantage? That, for example, it's easier to do crowd funding nowadays? Or would you rather have some more time under cover to develop your games? RON GILBERT: Well it certainly is an advantage, in that, you know, things like doing crowd funding for "Thimbleweed Park." You know that having a name in the business helps you a lot. I don't know that we would have gotten the game funded, had we not had the name that we had. But, I mean, it can also be a little bit of a detriment. I'm so known for point-and-click games that people just assume that's all I want to do with my life, is just make a point-and-click games. And so there's a little bit of that kind of comes with it. SPEAKER: So the Monkey Island games are, I think, the games which are most famous for being associated with your name. But after "Monkey Island 2," you left LucasArts to fund Humongous Entertainment. And that was a time where the LucasArts games were very popular and very famous. Why did you decide to try something new, and found Humongous Entertainment and target children? As opposed to-- RON GILBERT: Well, you know, the Lucasfilm games-- you know, the Sierra games were always a lot more popular in the US. And that was very frustrating to us. It's like, we put out in Monkey Island and it got good review scores. And, you know, "King's Quest 5" sold 10 times the number of copies. And so that was always kind of frustrating. And, you know, so people do ask. It's like, why did you leave Lucasfilm? It's like you had this amazing franchise. Monkey Island was this monster hit and you left. And it's like, well it really wasn't, right? I mean, at the time, you know, Monkey Island was a good game and really proud of it, and-- SPEAKER: It's probably my German perspective of it. RON GILBERT: Yeah. And it was completely the opposite in Europe, right? Like Europe, the Lucasfilm games were hugely popular and the Sierra games weren't quite as popular. But you know, I didn't really have a lot of visibility into what was going on in Europe with that stuff. It's like, I knew they were translated. But we had no internet back then. So you didn't get that immediate feedback from people that, oh, this is really getting popular over here. So I just--it's not something that really occurred to me. So I don't feel like I left this hugely successful franchise to go do Humongous Entertainment. But Humongous Entertainment really started from watching a five-year-old play "Monkey Island." And, you know, he was playing the game, and he couldn't really read. There was no voice in the game back then, and he couldn't read. So he had no idea what was going on in the story at all. And, you know, he kind of figured out what the verbs were eventually. But he was just having so much fun walking around the world opening and closing doors. And just walking through the doors and talking to people, even though he had no idea what was being said. And occasionally triggering some weird animation, where you step on a plank and a bird flies away. And he just loved that, and he would spend hours playing this game. And that's when, you know, I kind of thought about, well maybe I should just make adventure games for kids, you know? And not kind of dumbed down storybooks, you know, which had kind of started to come out at that time. But real adventure games, with actual puzzles and characters and all those things. But just simplify stuff a little bit. In a normal adventure game, you might solve a puzzle and there might be four different puzzles that chain together to you have to do to solve the thing. But in the Humongous Entertainment games, it was only two chains, right? All puzzles were just kind of two steps to solve them. So it was just a little more simplified, but they were real adventure games. And so that's kind of why I decided to do Humongous Entertainment. SPEAKER: In the time after you left LucasArts more Monkey Island games kept coming out. Curse of Monkey Island, Escape from Monkey Island. What was it to see other people carry on with what you started with Monkey Island? And probably, for those who don't know, "Monkey Island 2" left on a very controversial note. I loved it-- RON GILBERT: Oh good. SPEAKER: --but-- RON GILBERT: A lot of people didn't. SPEAKER: --some people didn't. And then to see that you can't continue from that point, but others do. How was that? RON GILBERT: I think it's always strange when you create something and then you see other people take it on. And I think it's true of any creative thing. It's like when you create it and you kind of push it out to the world, right? Because it's a little bit like having a kid that you have of raised and then you shove it out into the world and cross your fingers and kind of hope that everything's OK. And I think anything creative is like that. You kind of send it out there and, you know, the fans react to it. And the fans take it places. And in this case, you know, people made sequels from the games. And I quite liked "Monkey Island 3." I thought it was a very good game. It's not the game I would have made. They did they did stuff I would not have done. I never would have had Guybrush marry Elaine. I never would have done that. But, so they did-- they did stuff like that. But I think it's a good game. You know, I'm kind of happy to have that game as a part of that-- as a part of the series. SPEAKER: I wonder, as a game developer, do you also play a lot of games? Or is it when you spend the whole day making it that you want to do something else? I remember last time I met you, you were very much into "World of Warcraft," but that's probably a special case. RON GILBERT: Right. SPEAKER: So do you also play, for example, adventure games? RON GILBERT: I do play adventure games, but I play them-- I think I play them for work reasons. You know, it's like I want to understand what people are doing. But I don't play them for enjoyment because I'm too close to them. It's like I can't play an adventure game without deconstructing their puzzles, you know, and going, I would have done that. I have done a hint over here. I would have done this. And it kind of sucks all the enjoyment away from that kind of stuff. So I don't-- I do play a lot of games. I like RPG's. I did play way too much "World of Warcraft" when it came out. I don't do it anymore. And I kind of enjoy RPG. You know, so I think that's kind of the game that I play for fun, is that kind of genre. You know, like Diablo-style RPG's. SPEAKER: Jumping a bit in time. In 2012, your former colleague Tim Schafer basically invented crowd funding for games. Not really, but he was hugely successful with collecting more than $3 million for "Double Fine Adventure." And at that point, you were [NO AUDIO] on the [INAUDIBLE]. So how was the atmosphere then? Because crowd funding was quite a new thing and no one really expected that amount of money to come in. RON GILBERT: Yeah I think it was very surprising. I mean, I don't think-- I wasn't really involved in that project. So I don't-- I don't really kind of know the behind-the-scenes kind of work. But just as a company, I think there was this kind of feeling, I think they asked for like 400 or 350 or something like that, initially. And I think there was this feeling that they were going to barely get that, you know? And there was going to be a thing where, just at the end, everybody was going to be out there begging people for money. So when it kind of went through the roof like that it was-- I think it was a surprise and a shock to everybody with that. SPEAKER: And it was not for some-- for shooter or for some popular genre. Because classic adventure games by then were quite a niche. RON GILBERT: Not for a popular genre. SPEAKER: I mean-- RON GILBERT: I know what you mean. [LAUGHTER] Sadly, I know what you mean. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: I don't there are a lot of classic adventure games in the last 10 years that have that kind of budget. RON GILBERT: Well I think things like Kickstarter and any crowd funding, I think those platforms work really well with nostalgia. Because-- you know, anything nostalgic. And I think "Thimbleweed Park" is an excellent example of that-- that nostalgia kind of hits us at this emotional level. And if you can kind of tap into that, I think that's where Kickstarter really excels. It's like when you tap into someone's emotions in some way. If you want to build a really successful Kickstarter, the thing that I always tell people when they ask me, is don't try to sell people your game. It's like, sell them your dream, right? So it's all about, this is my dream to make this game. Not, here's this game I want to make. And I have four enemies, and I have 16 things of armor. It's like, well that's a box with a bullet point list, right? Sell them your dream about what you want to do. And that kind of taps into their emotions, which means it's a lot easier for them to go and kind of do funding. And I think nostalgia just easily taps into that same emotion. And that's why you've seen games and other things on Kickstarter do really well-- because of the nostalgia component. SPEAKER: Two years later, you started your own Kickstarter project, "Thimbleweed Park." And before we talk about that, I think we can show a trailer with scenes from the game. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - My name is Dolores Edmund, and I am here to warn you about Thimbleweed Park. My uncle built the town and the world-famous pillow factory using his brains, sweat, arrogance, and ego. Thimbleweed Park was the center of a social scene-- parties, movie stars, and rich and famous all drawn to its flickering light of promise and vision of the future. Then the factory fell on hard times. Everything slipped away, and the town descended into the shell of decay and pity before you. Leaving the pillow factory the me was my uncle's only plan for redemption. He knew I could save it, and him, from ruin in the eyes of history. But I don't want to save it. Something terrifying is happening. Something that itches and festers and grows with each scratch. Something I know my uncle started, and his death is making me stronger. My name is Dolores Edmund. I am one of only five people that can prevent what our careless ambition and reckless dreams have brought upon us. [GUNSHOT] [CRICKETS] - Hey. It's Ransome the [BLEEP] clown here. I tell you about this game called "Thimbleweed Park." If you think this is a game about figuring out who killed the stiff out by the bridge, you're [BLEEP] wrong. That rotting corpse is the least of your [BLEEP] problems in a town like this. The town is run by a rich, narcissistic, egomaniac who's obsessed with artificial intelligence built from vacuum tubes. Yeah I'm not [BLEEP] kidding. Before I was cursed by this old lady, I was rich, famous, and at the top of my game. Doing sell-out shows every night. Now I'm reduced to breaking into a burnt-out pillow factory to steal back the plans for my come back doll. Oh yeah. And these [BLEEP] morons are also going to help. Man. Thimbleweed Park. [BLEEP] it to hell. [CRICKETS] [GUNSHOT] [CRICKETS] [END PLAYBACK] SPEAKER: That does not look like most games in 2017. [LAUGHTER] You already said a bit about this, but what made you decide to go for this retro style? I mean it looks like-- not exactly like 1992, but it's very close. What was the decision process here? RON GILBERT: Well it started with-- before the Kickstarter. Gary Winnick and I, who did "Maniac Mansion" together, we were just having lunch. And we were talking about the old Lucasfilm games like "Maniac Mansion" and "Loom" and "Monkey Island," and, you know, "Indiana Jones"-- all those games. And those games, to us they had this certain charm to them. And as much as I like current adventure games, like I really enjoy "Firewatch," "Gone Home," and "Kentucky Route Zero," and all those things. But they don't have the same charm that those games had. And we were kind of talking about what is that charm. What is it that those games have that a lot of games don't? And we just didn't know. And we kind of had the idea of, well, let's just build one again. Let's build one like we built those games back then and see if we can figure out what that charm was to those games. And so that really started the Kickstarter. Because it was really kind of the only way to fund a weird experiment like that, was through Kickstarter. So that's really what started it, which is kind of why you see the very 8-bit pixel graphics and stuff because it was like, well is that a part of the charm? You know, did a lot of the charm of those games come from the graphics? It's kind of a simplified, almost kind of icon-based graphics. Was that really part of it? And then the other thing we wanted to do-- and you don't really see it from the trailers, but you really see it if you actually play the game. Our goal was to build a game that wasn't, you know, like a game back then. But it was like you remembered a game back then. So there's just a lot of stuff going on. It's like we have real-time-- SPEAKER: Voiceover. RON GILBERT: --lights in our scenes. They kind of cast off of characters as they walk under things. And so that's all the stuff that your mind filled in for you when you were playing those games. And it's like, well we're going to do it now because we have the technology. And all the smooth scrolling, and there's 11 different layers of parallax that can move as the screen scrolls. And you know, we just didn't have that stuff back then. So it's really about-- this game is really about recreating that memory, more than it was kind of authentically recreating that stuff. SPEAKER: Speaking of technology, I think you still are involved in really coding the game? And while that might have been the thing to do in '87, nowadays there's almost no one who actually codes something and does the creative process. So do you want to have all the control over the game? Or why do you do that? RON GILBERT: I think I just love programming. You know, it's like the engine for this game. I built this whole 2-D adventure game engine from the ground up for this game. It's like I didn't use Unity, I didn't use any stuff, I just built the whole thing. And-- SPEAKER: There are lots of existing engines around. RON GILBERT: Yeah, there are. I mean, there's lots of really good ones. But I think a little bit of it is that control thing. You know, I've worked in other engines before. And as a programmer I get very frustrated, because it's like, well I want it to do this and the engine won't do that. Especially if the engine is kind of a black box, you know like Unity can be. You really can't get in and start mucking with the code. That stuff really just frustrated me. And I knew-- I knew from the beginning that we wanted to do a lot of different things with this game graphically. Because we wanted it to be a game like you remember those old games. So I didn't want to use one of the adventure game systems that was currently on the market because they tend to more authentically recreate, you know, what you could do from that era. And we really wanted to really push beyond that stuff. And I felt like just creating my own engine for that is probably the best way to do that. And I just love to program. It's what I do for fun. So it wasn't a hassle at all. SPEAKER: So in the day you're making a game, and then in the evening to relax you-- RON GILBERT: I program. [LAUGHTER] I do. I have websites and servers and all this stuff that I'm just constantly-- constantly mucking with. SPEAKER: You mentioned you started this with Gary Winnick, who was a former LucasArts colleague. You also worked with other colleagues like Tim Schafer after you left Lucas. Is there something like a class of '92 thing going on, where you meet up with former LucasArts colleagues? Because it was such a dense place of talent which still has big names in the gaming industry. RON GILBERT: Yeah. With "Thimbleweed Park" it's like I am working with Gary Winnick again. But I'm also working with David Fox. And David Fox-- when Gary and I built "Maniac Mansion," there were three people that built that game. The whole team was three people big, and it was me and Gary and David Fox. And David fox did game programming. And I built the engine and did game programming. Gary did art and so-- but David's working on this. He's doing game programming on this as well. And all of the art-- the background art that you see was done by Mark Ferrari. And Mark Ferrari was the background artist on the original "Monkey Island." So it is kind of this little bit of a reunion team of people getting together for it. But you know I think I have stayed in touch with people. Like Dave Grossman, you know, is a good friend of mine. And he worked on "Monkey Island." And I think we were a small enough group of people. I think we just kind of forged a lot of friendships in that period. SPEAKER: So now that the project is almost finished, I think it's being released very soon. RON GILBERT: Soon. SPEAKER: So already a date? RON GILBERT: Soon. SPEAKER: Soon is the date? RON GILBERT: It's on the 17th of soon. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: Looking back, the decision to go to Kickstarter. I've talked to a couple of game developers and some are very happy with the decision to go to Kickstarter. Some are not so happy. What's your perspective? RON GILBERT: I'm really happy that we went to Kickstarter. I think one of the things that we really wanted to do with the Kickstarter was to make sure that we were very open about our development. And it wasn't just about sending monthly Kickstarter updates and, you know, hey, this is where we are. But we really wanted to really, really talk about the development of the game. And we started a blog and a podcast that we do. And we talk about a lot of stuff. It's like, I post code on there, and I talk about coding and how I'm coding stuff up. And we talk about our dialog system and how that works. And we talk about testing. We talk about all these different components. And we talk about budget. It's like I, know-- I published a little spreadsheet which is our budget for the game and I kind of walked people through. Well this is how I budget a game. This is how I account for all the people and the time and all these kinds of things. So I think we've been really open with people. And I think a lot of Kickstarter projects that I've seen where backers kind of turn on the developers. And I think that mostly comes from just the lack of communication. I think if you communicate with people and you explain to them what's going on, you can really kind of hold them in a way. And that's what we've really tried to do. And I think it's been a wonderful process I mean, these books that you see on this little screenshot here. We-- I wanted to have all of these books for the library in the mansion that Dolores lives in. And I thought, well, what would be really fun if-- rather than just these graphic images you can't do anything with, it if you actually had little books that were like two pages long. And so every time you clicked on a book it would pop it open, and there'd be two pages. And that would be really fun. But we didn't have the time to do that. And I figured, well I'm going to go to the blog and I'm going to ask the backers and the readers of the blog if they were interested maybe just writing a couple of pages for the book. And I figured, well, maybe we'll get like 150 of these books, and it will be really good for the library. And we got over 1,000 submissions. And so if you go into the library in Delores' mansion, there are 1050 books in the library that you can read two pages of every single book. And some of them-- SPEAKER: All with voiceover? RON GILBERT: Not with voiceover. [LAUGHTER] No, no. You can just read them. And some of them are just wonderful. I mean, some people just spend a lot of time just really thinking about their two pages, you know? And this one group of friends got together and they did a whole choose your own adventure. Where it's like one-- you read one book and it says, if you want to do this go read this book. If you want to do this go read this book. And you have to go find that book. And it's just I mean it's wonderful, right? And so I think the backers and the readers of the blog, I think they've really contributed to this game with things like the book. And we have a voicemail system, where if you backed the game at more than $50, you got your name in the Thimbleweed Park phone book. And if you go to these numbers, and you actually dial the number into the phone in the game, you get a voicemail message that the backer had recorded. You know and there are 4,000 names in the phone book, 900 of which are Germans. So you know, there's 4,000 names in this phone book. And you go and you dial up the names and you get these just charming little voicemail messages the backers have recorded and are playing in the game. So I think that's just kind of a way that I think that the people who have backed and supported the game just have made the game so much better. It's just so much richer with their involvement in it. SPEAKER: Kind of a recurring theme. There was a library in "Monkey Island 2." There was one in-- RON GILBERT: In Fat Island, yeah. SPEAKER: --The last crusade. Now this. What's going to happen in your next game? RON GILBERT: I don't know what I'm going to do? How do I top that? How do you top 1,000 books a library to read? But we brought play testers in to play the game. And, you know, sometimes they hit that library. And they're like, oh my god, I'm going to spend hours in this library reading these books. So some people just love it. SPEAKER: But there's not one of them which has vital information. RON GILBERT: There is. There are two books in the library that contain vital information in solving a puzzle. But fortunately, there are lots of clues and stuff to tell you exactly where those books are. So we don't expect you to go through and read 1,000 books looking for the one book. SPEAKER: We'll soon open up to questions for the floor. So if you have questions, please go to the microphone in the middle. That's easier for the cameras. I will have one more question, and we will open up. So what's going on with the toilet paper? RON GILBERT: Yeah the toilet paper. I posted a picture of the bathroom in Thimbleweed Park, at the quickie pal. And, you know, like any public restroom and you have some toilet paper there. But the toilet paper like curved under the roll, rather than curving over the roll. And I posted a picture on Twitter. And I just-- I wasn't thinking about the toilet paper. I just posted a picture of the bathroom, because I thought the bathroom was really interesting. And it just kind of created this storm of-- and I mean literally hundreds of tweets coming at me, telling me the toilet paper was wrong. The toilet paper is supposed to curve over the roll, not under the roll. And it just became this thing, you know? And so you know it's kind of interesting because Mark Ferrari, when he did the bathroom, he did the toilet paper hanging under. And I remember he delivered that piece of art to us and I think David was the first one that got it. And you know, David kind of slacked me and he's like, hey, the toilet paper is wrong. And I kind of went and I looked at it and went, oh yeah, it is. And then we both said, no one will notice. And we just-- and then we just went on with stuff and then that whole Twitter thing happened. And it was-- you kind of got to the point where we were kind of talking about it on slack. And we was like, wow, we should put an option. We should put an option for the toilet paper. So when you're playing the game, if you go to the options menu, and you snake down into the video menu and all that stuff, there's a little check box-- toilet paper under. You just click it and it just switches the toilet paper. And we thought we thought that would be more interesting than having an in-game way to do it. It was such a weird thing it's like, no, it's got to just be a menu option. That's the way it needs to be. SPEAKER: OK, I think we have a question on the floor. AUDIENCE: Hello, my name is Marina. Huge fan. Your games were also popular in Latin America. They taught me a lot of things as a child, for example, the notion of transferable skills with the sword challenge in Monkey Island. So kudos for that. And also, thank you so much for making the sword master a woman. Because in an industry that is largely dominated by males, that was a very empowering message. So I wanted to ask you about the character creation process and how do you profile each of the characters in terms of psychology, motivations etc? RON GILBERT: I don't think there's a scientific process to that. It's like when I'm creating characters for a game, it's just whatever I think is interesting, you know? And so the characters just kind of get created and I don't really know, necessarily, where those sparks come from. Sometimes they're driven very heavily by the story. Obviously, you know, the two agents in this are kind of driven by that. But you know, for the two agents that are in Thimbleweed Park, it's like-- I didn't want to have that typical or stereotypical kind of agent buddy system-- partners going out and do a crime. I wanted to do something a little bit different with them. And what we came up with is that the two agents both kind of stumble on the body separately. It's like they're not partners, and there's a huge amount of distrust between them because they don't really know each other. And for good reason because, neither of them are there to actually investigate the body, right? They're there for these whole other reasons in town. And it just felt more interesting to me to have these two agents that were kind of at odds with each other. And in terms of Carla, the swordmaster in "Monkey Island," she's based on a person that worked in tech support at Lucasfilm, named Carla. And you know, Carla looks very much like the close-ups of the swordmaster. And I don't I don't exactly remember. I think it was probably just some weird thing where we were having a conversation with her one day, and she really loved the sword fighting or something, and we went, you're the Swordmaster. So it's kind of probably how it happened. I don't remember exactly. SPEAKER: Another question? AUDIENCE: I think I have two, but will choose one I like. Lately, video games tend not to be only about video games. Like the monetization part of video games, with purchases, ads, or these kind of things, are very deeply entangled with game play. And how do you feel about that? Like, how do you feel it impacts the experience? How do you feel the future of the monetization for games should be, or will be? RON GILBERT: I'm not a big fan of current monetization of mobile games and stuff, because I feel like a lot of that stuff, you know, designers-- or it's probably really not even the designers. It's probably more of the marketing and those departments. That they're really kind of feeding off people's almost gambling impulses, right? That it isn't about building a really great game that you want to give a lot of money to. I'm fine with that. It's like, if I build a really great game that is just really fun and you enjoy it, you know, that's really good. I mean, god knows I spent thousands of dollars on "World of Warcraft." But I don't think that it was because they had kind of tapped into this weird gambling part of my brain. They just built a really good game, and I was happy to give them a bunch of money over the years to play that. Where, I think a lot of the monetization now, and especially with this kind of live A/B testing that goes on, it's like they can just narrow something down to just that right little button click that you're going to do. And I just don't feel like a lot of that is game design. I mean there are exceptions, right? There are some really good mobile games that do in-app purchases that are really good games. But it just feels like a lot of it is more this the science of pulling money out of you, rather than the art of game design. AUDIENCE: So starting programming on the Commodore was a very, very different experience probably than programming today. Were there any features or game systems that you really wanted to put in "Maniac Mansion" or "Monkey Island" that you just couldn't because there wasn't enough memory, or your processing power wasn't enough? And then from that, were there any of those kind of long, percolating ideas that you did put in "Thimbleweed Park"? RON GILBERT: Yeah there's two things really come to mind. One are the arcade games. If you go into "Maniac Mansion," there's a bunch of arcade games that are up on the third floor, I think, but none of them are playable. And that was the kind of thing where we kind of thought, oh, we should make all these games playable. But we didn't have the disk space, right? I mean "Maniac Mansion" on the Commodore 64 was two sides of a single density floppy disk. Which was 320k, all right? Not meg, k. That was entire game. And so we couldn't really get all of the arcade games working. And for "Thimbleweed Park" we have an arcade in the town that can go into. And there are all these arcade games. And we thought, excellent! We're finally going to get all of these games working. But we totally ran out of time. [LAUGHTER] So none of the arcade games are playable. But through the miracle of patching, which is really simple to do these days, soon as the game ships we're going to jump in and get all those arcades working and then there will be a patch that will get them all functioning. So that's one example. The other example that comes to mind, if you play "Maniac Mansion," there are several ladders in the game. And when people use the ladders, they just walk up the ladders, right? There's no climbing animation. They just they just do their normal walk and we just kind of vertically move them up the screen when they do it. Because we just don't have the space, right, to do an actual climbing animation. We were so incredibly tight with-- on the memory that we could have, the number of things that we would have loaded, as well as what was on disk. We just couldn't do climbing animations. And that was something that just bugged the hell out of me at the time. But with "Thimbleweed Park," as you can see, we have ladders in "Thimbleweed Park." And we have climbing animation. So when characters get on ladders, they actually go into climbing animations. And that was very cathartic for me to see climbing animations. So those are kind of two things that come to mind SPEAKER: There was a computer in the other tentacle a couple of years later, after "Maniac Mansion," where you could play "Maniac Mansion." RON GILBERT: You could play it, yeah. SPEAKER: Yeah, but one doesn't have a predecessor that you could play. AUDIENCE: So getting back to-- you were talking about the charm of some of these older games. Something I've sort of thought about as well. Some of it maybe comes from the fact that limitations forced you to be a bit more abstract, I think, in a lot of these games. Which gave more wiggle room then for weirder things to happen that just don't work when things are more realistic, and also engage the person playing with a game a bit more. Because you've got to imagine some of it yourself if, you know, you're filling in the gaps. So just, what do you think about-- RON GILBERT: I think that's very right. I think that's one of the things that we've discovered through the process of making "Thimbleweed Park," is I do think that the 8-bit graphics kind of allow for a lot more imagination. And Gary, doing the art and stuff, it's like he was saying, that that isn't an agent. That's an icon of an agent. And because of that, you can kind of extrapolate in your mind. And we very carefully-- it's like we never show closeups of any of the characters. We never have scenes where you cut to a close up of this highly rendered, painted face of anybody. We always keep them in that same kind of view. For that exact reason, that I think it just allows your imagination to go a lot more. And I think the other thing that we've kind of discovered, in terms of the charm of those games, is kind of what I've come to call this sense of place. That I think-- that "Maniac Mansion," it was this weird house. And you got to know the house. And the house was almost-- became the main character of "Maniac Mansion." And you explored the house. And you got to understand where all the rooms were, and you built this little mental map of the house. And it had this really strong sense of place, you know? And all the characters that did it. And I think a lot of the Lucasfilm adventures had that. They always created really interesting environments, and we spent a lot of time trying to make those environments feel like real places. You know, there were just weird things. Like you turn on the water in the kitchen and it would actually run. And you'd open up the refrigerator and there was stuff in there. And that's something we tried to do with "Thimbleweed Park," is we tried to make it this real place and give it a sense of place. And there's over 50 characters in "Thimbleweed Park," and 47 of them are all voice acted. And they all kind of inhabit their place in the town. And they run the stores, and they do this stuff. And it's all a part of that kind of sense of place. So I think the 8-bit graphics and that sense of place. I think they are two major components to the charm of those games. SPEAKER: So these agents, I guess, could be Mulder and Scully or could not be Mulder and Scully. RON GILBERT: Well I don't think they're Mulder and Scully because they don't have the personalities at all. I mean, Mulder and Scully were partners and they were in it together and all this stuff. Where Agent Ray and Reyez hate each other. And they're clearly not in this together. You know, there are times when they're trying to thwart each other and all this stuff. So I mean they're definitely not Mulder and Scully. SPEAKER: OK. AUDIENCE: Hello sir. First of all, your games are amazing. Thanks. We played them in Brazil. So one thing that's different, you talk about Sierra games a little, is that they were very punishing. So you die. You die, and you have to start all over again. For LucasArts games, it's funnier because yeah, you can keep going. And of course sometimes you got blocked, but did do have, like-- did you think about this back then? Because Nintendo games, for example, you die and you have to restart over it and sometimes it's kind of boring. And how does it impact your game design decisions? RON GILBERT: Yeah we thought about that a lot. If you play the original "Maniac Mansion," there were lots of places that you die. And there were lots of puzzles where just doing the wrong thing would completely screw you over. It's like, there was this can of Pepsi that you find, which was actually product placement, I might add. There was this can of Pepsi in the game and you needed it. You needed to give it to the man-eating plant, so the man-eating plant would start burping. So then you could climb up the man-eating plant. But you could also take the can of Pepsi and you could pour it down the drain. And if you did that there was no way to win the game. Because you didn't have a can of Pepsi anymore. And we never told you that. You know, so you would pour the can of Pepsi down the drain or you would do something else with the can of Pepsi and there was no clue at all that you had just completely screwed your game up. And I think some of that comes from just being naive, that it really was the first adventure game that we had done. And "Maniac Mansion" is just filled with that kind of stuff. And when I went and I did-- right before I did "Monkey Island" I wrote this article for this-- it was called the Journal of Computer Game Design really high-falluting sounding name. But it was this little magazine that you could do stuff. And I submitted this article called "Why Adventure Games Suck," and it was 15 rules that I had formulated for designing adventure games. If you go to my site grumpygamer.com, it's actually up there and you can read it. And one of the rules that I come up with was, no death. And I kind of felt like if you die in an adventure game you're basically pulled out of the fantasy. Because you've spent this time, you're living in this pirate world. And suddenly you die, and you're pulled out of the whole fantasy. And you have to pull up this menu of saved games and you have to go find your last saved game and load it. And that just felt wrong to me. It felt to me that you should be able to start the game, and sit down in your big comfy chair and just lose yourself for hours and just never get pulled out of the fantasy. And so that was really kind of the main reason that I just said, there's just no death. No death in adventure games. So it's kind of that reason. AUDIENCE: Thanks for doing that. RON GILBERT: Thank you. SPEAKER: Any more questions? I have one more, and then I think we finished. VR. Last year was the big year for VR. So that is quite a two-dimensional game, but what's your perspective on this? Do you think it's the next big thing in gaming, or do you think it's just a trend? RON GILBERT: You know, I don't know that I'm the right person to ask because VR makes me motion sick. It's like, I'm one of those people that I put on a VR helmet and within a few minutes I'm just completely sick from it. So I don't do a lot of VR, so I'm the first person to kind of say I don't know that I understand VR. Because I don't really do it with that kind of stuff. It does kind of occur to me-- like, I think VR is absolutely the future. There's no question about that. I just I kind of think that future is 25 or 30 years from now, not right now. And I think that's just a technology problem. I think that as soon as you're strapping something big and heavy on your face, I think you've just lost an entire segment of the world, you know, the second that has to happen. And I think until we kind of overcome that, right? Until VR is a part of my contact lenses, then it's always going to kind of be a little bit of a niche thing. But since I don't do VR, I'm not the best person to answer that question. SPEAKER: OK. Thank you very much Ron Gilbert. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 56,446
Rating: 4.9617724 out of 5
Keywords: Video Games, The 80s, LucasFilms, Game Engines, Talks at Google
Id: KgzWorfLjeE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 50min 43sec (3043 seconds)
Published: Thu Mar 09 2017
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