BKPartisan
CAGiversary!
There's a podcast interview of Ron Gilbert over on GameSpot. I'm not sure if anyone here has heard it yet, but I thought it was worth a post. He says some interesting things about the video game industry, craftmanship, and Tim Schafer.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6153188/index.html
Here are some highlights from the text version:
Ron Gilbert: "There's a lot more money at stake and as soon as you start spending millions of dollars to make something, it's a lot harder to just kind of go off with a small team and make something and see if it's interesting or not because you have a lot of money on the line. You have marketing departments. You have PR departments. You have all these people now because it's an event, in a way, and so I think that makes it a lot harder to just kind of rush out and do different things. You know, success is 90 percent failure and if you can't have the opportunity to fail, you're just not going to be able to do interesting things. I think that is one of the problems that the games business has now--there is just no room for that failure, to try new things."
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Greg Kasavin: It looks cool. I mean, everyone seems to recognize the roots of it, whoever played Total Annihilation back in the day. Some concepts, I guess, don't go out of style. We're talking about all these games from way back when--what's it like to be best known for works that happened a while ago, frankly?
RG: You know, I think it's great that people, like you were saying before, that people still play that stuff, that people are still playing Monkey Island. They're still into Monkey Island. There are still Monkey Island Web sites that are still being updated on a daily basis. I think it's really great to have created something or worked on something that even to this day people are still interested in and still very fixated on. It's great to have done that.
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GK: Do you intend to top that? It's going to be hard to live up to something like that again?
RG: No, I very much want to top it. I mean, I'm currently working on a game that's kind of a combination of an RPG and an adventure game, taking the elements of those two things that I enjoy the most. I'm designing that and out pitching it to publishers right now, which is, you know, it's a very hard pitch. I think our game really will bring a lot of those things that people just loved about those games to something a little more current. So, yes, I definitely want to try to top all that stuff.
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GK: And speaking of Monkey Island, did you ever plan on revealing what exactly the secret is?
RG: I had definitely planned on doing that in the third game, yes. There's no question about that, but, you know, and then when Jonathan and Larry made Monkey Island III, which is a great game...I think they did a fabulous job on that. They didn't know what the secret was. I told nobody. So, you know, they weren't really able to kind of reveal that, but I would love to make another Monkey Island game. If I could make another one...I have this whole story mapped out in my head for how I want to tie it all together with the other two games, kind of bring it all back to the original thing, and that would just be a dream of mine.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6153188/index.html
Here are some highlights from the text version:
Ron Gilbert: "There's a lot more money at stake and as soon as you start spending millions of dollars to make something, it's a lot harder to just kind of go off with a small team and make something and see if it's interesting or not because you have a lot of money on the line. You have marketing departments. You have PR departments. You have all these people now because it's an event, in a way, and so I think that makes it a lot harder to just kind of rush out and do different things. You know, success is 90 percent failure and if you can't have the opportunity to fail, you're just not going to be able to do interesting things. I think that is one of the problems that the games business has now--there is just no room for that failure, to try new things."
------------------------
Greg Kasavin: It looks cool. I mean, everyone seems to recognize the roots of it, whoever played Total Annihilation back in the day. Some concepts, I guess, don't go out of style. We're talking about all these games from way back when--what's it like to be best known for works that happened a while ago, frankly?
RG: You know, I think it's great that people, like you were saying before, that people still play that stuff, that people are still playing Monkey Island. They're still into Monkey Island. There are still Monkey Island Web sites that are still being updated on a daily basis. I think it's really great to have created something or worked on something that even to this day people are still interested in and still very fixated on. It's great to have done that.
------------------------
GK: Do you intend to top that? It's going to be hard to live up to something like that again?
RG: No, I very much want to top it. I mean, I'm currently working on a game that's kind of a combination of an RPG and an adventure game, taking the elements of those two things that I enjoy the most. I'm designing that and out pitching it to publishers right now, which is, you know, it's a very hard pitch. I think our game really will bring a lot of those things that people just loved about those games to something a little more current. So, yes, I definitely want to try to top all that stuff.
------------------------
GK: And speaking of Monkey Island, did you ever plan on revealing what exactly the secret is?
RG: I had definitely planned on doing that in the third game, yes. There's no question about that, but, you know, and then when Jonathan and Larry made Monkey Island III, which is a great game...I think they did a fabulous job on that. They didn't know what the secret was. I told nobody. So, you know, they weren't really able to kind of reveal that, but I would love to make another Monkey Island game. If I could make another one...I have this whole story mapped out in my head for how I want to tie it all together with the other two games, kind of bring it all back to the original thing, and that would just be a dream of mine.