Ron Gilbert
His fascination with programming technology, which allowed gamers to interact with characters and situations, mixed with his love for telling stories, like that of "Star Wars", were his main inspirations to start making games.
[5] The impact of Star Wars and his love for telling stories was so big that Ron Gilbert, at the age of fourteen, and his good friend Tom McFarlane made a couple of films on a Super-8 camera.
The first film they shot in 1978 was Stars Blasters; it was directed by Ron Gilbert and acted by McFarlane and friend Frank Lang.
[7] Gilbert began his professional career in 1983 while he was still a student at Eastern Oregon State College by writing a program named Graphics BASIC with Tom McFarlane.
They sold the program to a San Francisco Bay Area company named HESware, which later offered Gilbert a job.
[7] Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Gilbert,[9][10] that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events.
[13] The technology was used in all subsequent LucasArts adventure games,[14] with the exception of Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island.
While at Humongous Entertainment, Gilbert was responsible for games such as Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam,[3] and the Backyard Sports series.
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.
He also started a blog "Grumpy Gamer", offering game industry commentary, occasionally in the form of animated cartoons that he created with Voodoo Vince designer Clayton Kauzlaric.
[22] In 2007, Gilbert created "Threepwood", an exclusively Monkey Island-themed guild on the World of Warcraft server Quel'Dorei,[23] and Gilbert began to collaborate with Hothead Games on Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a game based on the webcomic Penny Arcade.
On April 6, 2010, on his blog he announced that he left Hothead Games but that he would continue to promote DeathSpank with Electronic Arts.
Ron Gilbert has been quoted in November 2012 as not being optimistic about the franchise's future, believing that Disney might abandon the franchise in favor of Pirates of the Caribbean;[30] however, in December 2012, he was also quoted as wishing to contact Disney, hoping to "make the game he wants to make".
Most recently he worked on the iOS and Android game Scurvy Scallywags with DeathSpank co-creator Clayton Kauzlaric.
The game reached its funding target on the crowd sourcing site Kickstarter on December 18 and was released on March 30, 2017, in full "talkie" mode for Windows, Linux, Mac and Xbox One.
[33] On May 23, 2016, Gilbert took to Twitter to express a desire to buy back earlier LucasArts franchises saying "Please sell me my Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion IP.
