Ron Gilbert | Code Like It's 198x

In 1989 Ron Gilbert wrote an article for other game designers called “Why Adventure Games Suck”. He had already made two adventures at Lucasfilm Games, and he thought most of the genre, his own work included, broke the player’s concentration: games taught by killing you and making you reload, demanded that you pick up everything in case it was needed later, and hid their answers behind the right pixel or the right word. His next game, The Secret of Monkey Island, was, as he put it later, “a test to see if all those things I had written about were actually true”. By then he had already built SCUMM, the scripting system that ran Lucasfilm’s adventures for a decade. He then left to make adventure games for small children, and more than thirty years later he went back to Monkey Island.

Fast facts

Born: 1964; grew up in La Grande, Oregon.
First job: Commodore 64 programming at Human Engineered Software (HES), which published his BASIC extension, Graphics BASIC.
Lucasfilm Games: 1985 to 1992. Designed Maniac Mansion with Gary Winnick, built SCUMM, co-designed the Last Crusade adventure, and made The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2.
Companies: co-founded Humongous Entertainment (1992) and Cavedog Entertainment; later Hulabee Entertainment and Terrible Toybox.
Later games: DeathSpank (2010), The Cave (2013), Thimbleweed Park (2017), Return to Monkey Island (2022).

From Graphics BASIC to Lucasfilm

Gilbert’s first program to reach the shops was a set of extra commands for the Commodore 64’s BASIC, which had no instructions of its own for graphics. HES sold it as Graphics BASIC. Compute!’s Gazette noted it in September 1984 as a utility “which extends BASIC with 48 commands” for business graphs or games, with split screens and windows, at $29.95. Edge later said it was the extension that “earnt him a six-month stint” at HES, “programming games that would never see the light of day”.

“My first job in the industry was with a company called Human Engineered Software where I was doing C64 programming,” Gilbert told Retro Gamer. “They went bankrupt only a few months after I started. I spent about six months looking for a job and was about ready to go back to school when I got a call from someone at LucasFilm. They were looking for someone to convert the Atari games they were doing for the C64.” By his own account he started at Lucasfilm Games in 1985, porting Koronis Rift and Ballblazer.

Maniac Mansion and SCUMM

His first game of his own was Maniac Mansion (1987), designed with the artist Gary Winnick: three teenagers in a mad scientist’s house, with the commands built from verbs on the screen instead of typed. Gilbert had begun writing it in 6502 assembly language, found it “just too complex”, and spent “a good year” writing a scripting language instead. That system, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, went on to run Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Loom and every LucasArts adventure up to The Curse of Monkey Island (1997); Aric Wilmunder carried it to the PC. The Maniac Mansion and SCUMM entries tell that story in full. Gilbert co-designed the Last Crusade adventure (1989) with Noah Falstein and David Fox.

He was not proud of everything in Maniac Mansion. “Maniac Mansion was just a mess from a design stand-point,” he told Retro Gamer in 2013, “and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade was starting to get a bunch of stuff figured out.”

Why adventure games suck

Gilbert wrote the article in 1989, while he was designing Monkey Island. It appeared in The Journal of Computer Game Design, a newsletter written and read by designers, and Computer Gaming World printed an abstract in April 1990. Gilbert’s case was that every time a player had to restore a saved game, or sat “pounding his or her head on the desk in frustration”, the spell of the story broke. He set out twelve “Rules of Thumb” to prevent it, among them:

the final objective, and each sub-goal, should be clear;
players should not have to “die” and reload to learn, and should not have to pick up everything they see in case it is needed later;
puzzles should come after the problem they solve, should advance the story, and should make the player think “Of course, why didn’t I think of that sooner!”;
the game should reward the player’s intent, not demand “just the right pixel” or “just the right word”;
real-time puzzles make poor drama.

The article ended, in CGW’s summary, with “a telling, if cynical observation”: “The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.”

Monkey Island

“Monkey Island was the first game where I felt I had once-and-for-all figured out what an adventure game should be,” Gilbert said. He had loved Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride and “always wanted to make a game that existed in that world”, and for him adventure games “always started with the world and the characters just sort of come out of that”. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), written with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, gave its hero only one way to die. In 1991 Gilbert argued the point in public at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, against Lori Cole of Sierra, under the title “Death is Bad Drama”. The Monkey Island entry covers the game, its insult sword fighting and its sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991).

Gilbert left during work on the sequel, so the third game he had planned was never made. “I felt that I had grown to the point where I wanted to run my own company,” he said, “so I started Humongous Entertainment and we made adventure and other games for kids.”

Humongous Entertainment and Cavedog

Humongous was founded in 1992, and Computer Gaming World reported that October that its first product would be “a children’s graphic adventure”, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade. Gilbert designed it with his co-founder Shelley Day, and it ran on SCUMM, which Humongous licensed. At the 1993 Computer Game Developers’ Conference it was one of the games other designers chose to honour. “My second youngest was fighting for the chance to play and he’s only three,” one nominator wrote, and CGW summed up the case for it: “it gives the player a purpose. It’s the kind of game where a child can be a participant, not a tourist.” Fatty Bear’s Birthday Surprise followed in 1993, and then the Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam series. In 1996 GT Interactive bought the company; CGW reported the purchase as valued at about $76 million.

Gilbert and Day also started Cavedog Entertainment, a division of Humongous for games aimed at older players, which PC Zone dated to 1995. Its first game was Chris Taylor’s real-time strategy game Total Annihilation (1997), which Gilbert produced. “The goal for Cavedog is not to become a massive publisher producing 50 titles a year,” he told Edge in 1998. “We’re looking to have maybe five high-quality projects in the works.” One of them was his own Good & Evil, a comic role-playing game that CGW previewed in November 1999. It was never finished. Asked later what had happened to Cavedog, Gilbert told Edge that it “was not really closed in the traditional sense”: Humongous simply “stopped working on two games”, and Total Annihilation had been “a huge critical hit, but a very disappointing selling product”. By 2002 he had left Humongous and started another children’s software company, Hulabee Entertainment, and CGW put him in its Hall of Fame that November.

DeathSpank and The Cave

At Hothead Games, a Canadian studio, Gilbert created DeathSpank with Clayton Kauzlaric: an action role-playing game released for download on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in July 2010. Edge gave it eight out of ten, finding that Gilbert’s influence showed in dialogue trees that “mostly exist for the joy of reading the various silly options available”, and in puzzles that “nod to the non-sequiturs familiar to point’n’click fans”.

He then joined Tim Schafer’s Double Fine for The Cave (2013), published by Sega, in which the player takes three of seven characters down into a cave that narrates their progress with sarcastic comments. Gilbert told Edge that the characters had been chosen from about 30 on his whiteboard, with “an even split of male and female characters”, and that the game had no loading screens because he had “always objected to death in adventure games”: die, reload, play, die again. By then he worried about the genre’s audience. “I worry few modern gamers have the patience for them any more,” he told Edge in 2012. Asked in the same year why he made games at all, he answered: “Because I don’t know how to do anything else?”

Back to point-and-click

In November 2014 Gilbert and Gary Winnick launched a Kickstarter campaign for Thimbleweed Park, a new adventure made to look and play like their games of the 1980s. It came out in March 2017. Wireframe, looking back on that year, called it “his first pure point-and-click adventure title in a long time”.

After Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, Gilbert and Dave Grossman returned to the series itself. Return to Monkey Island, developed by Gilbert’s company Terrible Toybox and published by Devolver Digital, was announced in April 2022 after two years of work in secret, and came out that September. Gilbert said it began on Mêlée Island because “the story is kind of about Guybrush going back to unfinished business”. His next game was a change of genre again: Death by Scrolling, an action roguelike from Terrible Toybox published by MicroProse, released for PC in October 2025.

Sources

Compute!’s Gazette issue 15, September 1984, p. 28: HesWare’s Graphics Basic, 48 commands, $29.95.
Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, Kim Wild on The Secret of Monkey Island, with Gilbert and Dave Grossman: Gilbert on HES, the call from Lucasfilm and C64 conversions, SCUMM and the parser, leaving to start Humongous Entertainment.
Edge issue 151, July 2005, pp. 94–98, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: the BASIC extension and HESware, porting Lucasfilm’s Atari 800 games, SCUMM begun in 6502 assembly.
Ron Gilbert, “About”, Grumpy Gamer (his own site; web): GraphicsBASIC; Lucasfilm Games in 1985 porting Koronis Rift and Ballblazer; co-designing the Last Crusade adventure; producer of Total Annihilation; DeathSpank with Clayton Kauzlaric; Death by Scrolling. https://www.grumpygamer.com/about/
Computer Gaming World issue 70, April 1990, p. 42, “Design Notes”: abstract of “Why Adventure Games Suck” by Ron Gilbert, from The Journal of Computer Game Design.
Ron Gilbert, “Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It”, Grumpy Gamer (his own site, republished 2004; web): “I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island.” https://www.grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck/
Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, pp. 72–79, Mike Bevan, “SCUMM Origins”: Gilbert on Maniac Mansion, “Why Adventure Games Suck”, Monkey Island as a test of it, Pirates of the Caribbean; Humongous licensing SCUMM.
Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991, pp. 44–45: the “Death is Bad Drama” debate with Lori Cole.
Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 27–32, “The making of Monkey Island”: Gilbert’s departure in 1992 to form Humongous Entertainment.
Computer Gaming World issue 99, October 1992: Humongous Entertainment as Gilbert’s new company, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade its first product.
Computer Gaming World issue 108, July 1993, pp. 34–35: the Computer Game Developers’ Conference awards; Putt-Putt Joins the Parade “designed by Shelley Day and Ron Gilbert”.
Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993: Gilbert and Day’s Fatty Bear’s Birthday Surprise.
Computer Gaming World issue 146, September 1996: GT Interactive’s purchase of Humongous, valued at about $76 million.
Edge issue 59, June 1998, p. 50: Cavedog in Woodinville, affiliated to Humongous; Gilbert on its goals.
PC Zone issue 76, May 1999: Cavedog “formed in 1995” by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day.
Computer Gaming World issue 184, November 1999: preview of Good & Evil; Gilbert as co-founder of Humongous and of Cavedog.
Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, p. 66: Gilbert on Cavedog and Total Annihilation’s sales.
Computer Gaming World issue 220, November 2002: Hall of Fame; Humongous, Cavedog, Hulabee Entertainment and the unfinished Good & Evil.
Edge issue 211, February 2010: DeathSpank preview (publisher Hothead Games, Canada). Edge issue 218, September 2010, pp. 92–93: DeathSpank review, 8/10.
Retro Gamer issue 104, July 2012, “On this day”: DeathSpank released on PSN in July 2010, the Xbox Live version a day later.
Edge issue 244, September 2012, p. 22 (Gilbert on adventure games’ audience) and p. 68 (why he makes games).
Edge issue 250, February 2013, p. 50: The Cave preview and Q&A with Gilbert.
Wireframe issue 30, January 2020: Thimbleweed Park in its review of 2017.
Wireframe issue 69, December 2022, pp. 25–30: Gilbert on Return to Monkey Island.
Wikipedia, “Ron Gilbert” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Shelley Day as co-founder of Humongous and of Hulabee; Hothead Games; joining Double Fine in 2010; the Thimbleweed Park Kickstarter from 18 November 2014 and release on 30 March 2017; Return to Monkey Island announced on 4 April 2022 and released on 19 September 2022; The Cave published by Sega. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Gilbert
“Death by Scrolling from Ron Gilbert / Terrible Toybox releases October 28”, GamingOnLinux, October 2025 (web, secondary): release date and MicroProse as publisher. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/10/death-by-scrolling-from-ron-gilbert-terrible-toybox-releases-october-28/