Ron Gilbert is an American computer game
designerA game designer is a person who designs gameplay, conceiving and designing the rules and structures of a game. It is essentially the game equivalent to a screenwriter. The term applies to the designer of any game, whether a video game or tabletop games such as board games or card games...
,
programmerA game programmer is a software engineer who primarily develops video games or related software . Game programming has many specialized disciplines; practitioners of any may regard themselves as "game programmers"...
, and
producerA video game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a video game.The earliest documented use of the term producer in games was by Trip Hawkins, who established the position when he founded Electronic Arts in 1982...
, best known for his work on several classic
LucasArtsLucasArts Entertainment Company LLC is an American video game developer and publisher. The company was famous for its innovative line of graphic adventure games, the critical and commercial success of which peaked in the mid 1990s...
adventure gameAn adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story that is driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenges such as combat...
s, including
Maniac MansionManiac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games . Maniac Mansion has become known among gamers and programmers for its highly-acclaimed gameplay and its introduction of new ideas into gaming, including multiple possible endings, multiple user-selectable...
and the first two
Monkey IslandMonkey Island is the collective name given to a series of five graphical adventure games produced and published by LucasArts, originally known as LucasFilm Games through the development of the first game in the series. The fifth installment of the franchise was developed by Telltale Games in...
games. Gilbert was also co-founder of Humongous Entertainment and its sister company
Cavedog EntertainmentCavedog Entertainment, or Cavedog, was a video game developer based in Bothell, Washington. Cavedog released the real-time strategy games Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms....
. His games are generally focused on interactive storytelling. Additionally, Ron founded
Hulabee EntertainmentHulabee Entertainment created 2 games for children similar to Humongous Entertainment's adventure series , titled "Ollo in the Sunny Valley Fair" , and "Moop and Dreadly: The Treasure on Bing Bong Island"...
with
Shelley DayShelley Day is a former producer of children's video games. After leaving LucasArts, she founded Humongous Entertainment with colleague Ron Gilbert. She created the famous Putt-Putt character as a bedtime story for her son, which became a series of popular children's video games. In 1999 she was...
after leaving Humongous Entertainment. He works nowadays as Creative Director at Vancouver-based
Hothead GamesHothead Games is an independent video game developer and publisher based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Hothead is best known for its role-playing/adventure video game series, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, based on the Penny Arcade webcomic...
development studio.
Gilbert began his professional career in 1983 while he was still a college student by writing a program named
Graphics BasicGraphics BASIC is a third-party extension to the Commodore BASIC V2.0 programming language of the Commodore 64 computer. It was originally written in 1983 by Ron Gilbert and Tom McFarlane. The program was licensed to Hesware, who briefly sold the program in 1984 as part of their product line before...
with Tom McFarlane.
Ron Gilbert is an American computer game
designerA game designer is a person who designs gameplay, conceiving and designing the rules and structures of a game. It is essentially the game equivalent to a screenwriter. The term applies to the designer of any game, whether a video game or tabletop games such as board games or card games...
,
programmerA game programmer is a software engineer who primarily develops video games or related software . Game programming has many specialized disciplines; practitioners of any may regard themselves as "game programmers"...
, and
producerA video game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a video game.The earliest documented use of the term producer in games was by Trip Hawkins, who established the position when he founded Electronic Arts in 1982...
, best known for his work on several classic
LucasArtsLucasArts Entertainment Company LLC is an American video game developer and publisher. The company was famous for its innovative line of graphic adventure games, the critical and commercial success of which peaked in the mid 1990s...
adventure gameAn adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story that is driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenges such as combat...
s, including
Maniac MansionManiac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games . Maniac Mansion has become known among gamers and programmers for its highly-acclaimed gameplay and its introduction of new ideas into gaming, including multiple possible endings, multiple user-selectable...
and the first two
Monkey IslandMonkey Island is the collective name given to a series of five graphical adventure games produced and published by LucasArts, originally known as LucasFilm Games through the development of the first game in the series. The fifth installment of the franchise was developed by Telltale Games in...
games. Gilbert was also co-founder of Humongous Entertainment and its sister company
Cavedog EntertainmentCavedog Entertainment, or Cavedog, was a video game developer based in Bothell, Washington. Cavedog released the real-time strategy games Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms....
. His games are generally focused on interactive storytelling. Additionally, Ron founded
Hulabee EntertainmentHulabee Entertainment created 2 games for children similar to Humongous Entertainment's adventure series , titled "Ollo in the Sunny Valley Fair" , and "Moop and Dreadly: The Treasure on Bing Bong Island"...
with
Shelley DayShelley Day is a former producer of children's video games. After leaving LucasArts, she founded Humongous Entertainment with colleague Ron Gilbert. She created the famous Putt-Putt character as a bedtime story for her son, which became a series of popular children's video games. In 1999 she was...
after leaving Humongous Entertainment. He works nowadays as Creative Director at Vancouver-based
Hothead GamesHothead Games is an independent video game developer and publisher based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Hothead is best known for its role-playing/adventure video game series, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, based on the Penny Arcade webcomic...
development studio.
Career
Gilbert began his professional career in 1983 while he was still a college student by writing a program named
Graphics BasicGraphics BASIC is a third-party extension to the Commodore BASIC V2.0 programming language of the Commodore 64 computer. It was originally written in 1983 by Ron Gilbert and Tom McFarlane. The program was licensed to Hesware, who briefly sold the program in 1984 as part of their product line before...
with Tom McFarlane. They sold the program to a
San Francisco Bay AreaThe San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, or the Yay Area, is a metropolitan region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses large cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and...
company named
HESwareHESware was an American home computer software and hardware developer/publisher during the 1980s, who concentrated on the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit. The company was located in Brisbane, California. Published titles included numerous games as well as educational and productivity programs...
, which later offered Gilbert a job. He spent about half a year at HESware, programming
action gamePlatform game, or platformer, is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles. It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps...
s for the
Commodore 64The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January, 1982. Volume production started sometime in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$ 595...
(C64). None of them were ever released; the company went out of business. Shortly thereafter, Gilbert joined
LucasfilmLucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
Games, which later became
LucasArtsLucasArts Entertainment Company LLC is an American video game developer and publisher. The company was famous for its innovative line of graphic adventure games, the critical and commercial success of which peaked in the mid 1990s...
. 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
artistA game artist is an artist who creates art for one or more types of games. Game artists are responsible for all of the aspects of game development that call for visual art...
Gary Winnick.
Maniac MansionManiac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games . Maniac Mansion has become known among gamers and programmers for its highly-acclaimed gameplay and its introduction of new ideas into gaming, including multiple possible endings, multiple user-selectable...
was about a dark
VictorianThe Victorian era of the United Kingdom was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from June 1837 until her death on the 22nd of January 1901. The reign was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements...
mansionA mansion is a very large dwelling house. U.S. realtors define a mansion as a dwelling of over . A traditional European mansion was defined as a house which contained a ballroom and tens of bedrooms...
populated by a
mad scientistA mad scientist is a stock character of popular fiction, specifically science fiction. The mad scientist may be villainous, benign or neutral, and whether insane, eccentric, or simply bumbling, mad scientists often work with fictional technology in order to forward their schemes, if they even have...
, his family and strange
alienExtraterrestrial life is defined as life which does not originate from planet Earth. The existence of life outside the planet is theoretical and all assertions of such life remain disputed....
s.
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
SCUMMScript Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion is a scripting language developed at LucasArts to ease development of the graphical adventure game Maniac Mansion....
. The technology was used in all subsequent LucasArts adventure games, with the exception of
Grim FandangoGrim Fandango is a personal computer game in the graphic adventure genre released by LucasArts in and primarily written by Tim Schafer. It is the first adventure game by LucasArts to use 3D computer graphics overlaid on pre-rendered 2D backgrounds...
and
Escape From Monkey IslandEscape from Monkey Island is a computer adventure game developed and released by LucasArts in 2000. It is the fourth game in the Monkey Island series....
. Despite being an internal production tool, the SCUMM acronym became well known to gamers since a location in
The Secret of Monkey IslandThe Secret of Monkey Island is an adventure game developed by Lucasfilm Games. The game spawned a number of sequels, collectively known as the Monkey Island series. Released in October 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island is the fifth game to use the SCUMM engine. The game was primarily designed by...
, the SCUMM Bar, was named after it.
Gilbert created many successful
adventure gameAn adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story that is driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenges such as combat...
s 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 DayShelley Day is a former producer of children's video games. After leaving LucasArts, she founded Humongous Entertainment with colleague Ron Gilbert. She created the famous Putt-Putt character as a bedtime story for her son, which became a series of popular children's video games. In 1999 she was...
.
While at Humongous Entertainment, Gilbert was responsible for games such as
Putt-PuttThe Putt-Putt series is a collection of children's adventure and puzzle games created by Humongous Entertainment. They primarily involve clicking to get to a destination, although some sub-quests and mini-games involve the keyboard...
,
Freddi FishFreddi Fish is an award winning series of children's software from Humongous Entertainment.Freddi Fish is an anthropomorphic, yellow fish who takes on detective investigations throughout the series of games. She has her own pal, the green-colored Luther, who is her best friend and goes with her on...
,
Pajama SamThe Pajama Sam series is a collection of point-and-click children's adventure and puzzle games originally created by Humongous Entertainment.-Character:...
and the
Backyard Sports series. Many of these games continued to use an offshoot of the SCUMM engine. In 1995, Gilbert founded
Cavedog EntertainmentCavedog Entertainment, or Cavedog, was a video game developer based in Bothell, Washington. Cavedog released the real-time strategy games Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms....
, Humongous' sister company for non-kids games.
While at Cavedog, Gilbert was the producer of
Total AnnihilationTotal Annihilation is a real-time strategy video game created by Cavedog Entertainment and released on September 30, 1997 by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. It was the first RTS game to feature 3D units and terrain...
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.
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 VinceVoodoo Vince is a video game for the Xbox, created by Clayton Kauzlaric, developed by Beep Industries and published by Microsoft Game Studios...
designer Clayton Kauzlaric.
In January 2007, Gilbert created an exclusively Monkey Island themed guild on the
World of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft, often referred to as WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
server Quel'Dorei, under the name
Threepwood.
In May 2007, Gilbert began to collaborate with
Hothead GamesHothead Games is an independent video game developer and publisher based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Hothead is best known for its role-playing/adventure video game series, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, based on the Penny Arcade webcomic...
on
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of DarknessPenny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodic video game series based on the webcomic Penny Arcade.Penny Arcade Adventures is a 3D action-adventure game that will be distributed episodically across four games...
, a game based on the webcomic
Penny ArcadePenny Arcade is a webcomic focused on video games and gaming culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. The comic debuted in 1998 on the website loonygames. Since then, Holkins and Krahulik have established their own site, which is typically updated with a new comic strip...
.
In January 2008, he joined Hothead Games as Creative Director, with whom he's developing
DeathSpankDeathSpank is an upcoming adventure game by Game Designer Ron Gilbert, who had been working on getting the game made since 2004; it was announced on January 9, 2008 that Hothead Games would publish the game. The game has been described as "Monkey Island meets Diablo"...
, an episodic adventure/RPG game.
Although still working at Hothead Games, Gilbert contributed to the design for
Telltale GamesTelltale Games is an American video game developer founded in June 2004 as Telltale, Incorporated. Based in San Rafael, California, the studio includes designers formerly employed by LucasArts...
'
Tales of Monkey IslandTales of Monkey Island is a graphic adventure video game developed by Telltale Games in collaboration with LucasArts. The game was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June 2009 alongside LucasArts' enhanced remake of the 1990 title The Secret of Monkey Island...
, taking part in the brainstorming process early in the development of the game. 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 ExpoThe Penny Arcade Expo is an annual gamer festival held in Washington state, USA. PAX was created by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, because they wanted to attend a show that gave equal attention to console gamers, computer gamers, and tabletop...
for 2009.
Published works
- Maniac Mansion
Maniac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games . Maniac Mansion has become known among gamers and programmers for its highly-acclaimed gameplay and its introduction of new ideas into gaming, including multiple possible endings, multiple user-selectable...
(1987), writer, director, art and programmer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
- Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a graphical adventure game, originally released in October 1988, published by LucasArts . It was the second game to use the SCUMM engine, after Maniac Mansion...
(1988), writer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure is a graphical adventure game, originally released in 1989 , published by Lucasfilm Games . It was the third game to use the SCUMM engine.-Plot:The plot closely follows, and expands upon, the film of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade...
(1989), writer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
- The Secret of Monkey Island
The Secret of Monkey Island is an adventure game developed by Lucasfilm Games. The game spawned a number of sequels, collectively known as the Monkey Island series. Released in October 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island is the fifth game to use the SCUMM engine. The game was primarily designed by...
(1990), writer and director, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is an adventure game developed and published by LucasArts in 1991. It was the second game of the Monkey Island series, following The Secret of Monkey Island, and the sixth LucasArts game to use the SCUMM engine. It was the first game to use the iMUSE sound...
(1991), writer and programmer, LucasArts (LucasFilm Games)
- Total Annihilation
Total Annihilation is a real-time strategy video game created by Cavedog Entertainment and released on September 30, 1997 by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. It was the first RTS game to feature 3D units and terrain...
(1997), (producer only)
- Penny Arcade Adventures, story and design consultant, Hothead Games
Hothead Games is an independent video game developer and publisher based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Hothead is best known for its role-playing/adventure video game series, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, based on the Penny Arcade webcomic...
, (2008)
- Deathspank
DeathSpank is an upcoming adventure game by Game Designer Ron Gilbert, who had been working on getting the game made since 2004; it was announced on January 9, 2008 that Hothead Games would publish the game. The game has been described as "Monkey Island meets Diablo"...
(2009), design, Hothead Games.
- Co-created many children's games at Humongous Entertainment, including Freddi Fish and Putt-Putt.
External links