Setting Sail
» [PC] Our plucky hero Guybrush was named after a placehol der filename for a character sprite.
As
soon
as
Ron
Gilbert
finished
working
on
Maniac Mansion, he immediately started planning out his next big title.
But, as the sales figures rolled in, he wondered why Sierra On-Line’s King’s Quest was outselling Maniac Mansion by so much. Perhaps, he thought, it was because King’s Quest was a fantasy title – fantasy was all the rage, after all. “The problem was: I didn’t like fantasy at all,” he tells us.
“I really didn’t want to make a game about dragons and orcs and all that stuff, so I started thinking about other genres and settings that could capture what I thought fantasy did – without actually being fantasy. One of the ideas I had was pirates.”
When Ron was asked to work on Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade for Commodore 64, it gave him some much-needed breathing room to work everything out. Despite constantly going through different ideas for his pirate game, nothing stuck.
» The real secret of Monkey Island was the incredibly creative team behind the game, and Ron’s abilities as a master collaborator.
Photos courtesy of Tim Schafer.