An Interview with
Ron Gilbert
Ron Gilbert was a co-founder of Humongous Entertainment, the children's interactive software powerhouse, and co-founder of Cavedog Entertainment, developer of the megahit Total Annilihation. Cavedog Entertainment closed this March due to a restructuring at parent company GT Interactive, which is now under the direction of Infogrames. Gilbert subsequently left Humongous at a particularly shaky time in the computer-games industry to pursue new interests. Recently, he shared with us a few thoughts about the changing business of games.
GameSpot: This is a particularly poignant time to speak with you, as you are about to leave the company you started nine years ago and begin a new venture. We'd like to ask you to look back over your career and talk about some of the high points - and low points. You are certainly well remembered for your work at what was then called Lucasfilm Games - Maniac Mansion and Secret of Monkey Island, in particular. But what are your game design roots? Did you have any experience in game design before you joined Lucas?
Ron Gilbert: Yes. When I was in college, I wrote a language for the Commodore 64 called Graphics Basic. It was an extension of Basic that allowed you to do some fancy graphics - more than just drawing simple lines. For instance, it offered multitasking abilities like moving sprites around the screen - stuff that nobody else was doing. I pretty much wrote it for fun, but I sent it to a company called Human Engineered Software, or HESware. They liked what I was doing and offered me a job. I worked at HESware for about six months doing games for the Commodore 64, but then they went out of business and none of those games ever came out.
GS: What kinds of games were you making then? Any brilliant gems that would have swept the emerging computer game industry?
RG: No. Nothing like that. They were just your basic arcade games... games like Jump Man or Sneakers. I was only there for six months anyway. It was just standard run-of-the-mill arcade stuff.
GS: How did you end up at Lucas?
RG: One of the people I was working with at HESware had a friend at Lucasfilm Games, and through that connection, I was able to get a job doing C64 ports of some of the early Lucasfilm Atari 800 games. While I was working on those ports, I got to talking with Gary Winnick, one of the artists at Lucasfilm, and we came up with the idea to do an adventure game, which became Maniac Mansion. It took a while for Lucasfilm to agree to it, since it was the first game I'd designed, really. But ultimately, they did let us go ahead.
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GS: You designed the original scripting language for Lucas adventure games - the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, better known as SCUMM. Is that where SCUMM was born?
RG: Yes. About halfway through the Maniac Mansion project, I discovered that it was really difficult to do what I wanted to do, and I began to see the need for a scripting language. So I wrote the first version of the SCUMM system at that time to help complete Maniac Mansion.
Next: Ron Gilbert revisits his earliest adventure games
