How Ron Gilbert returned to Monkey Island 30 years later
At Devcom today, the team behind Return to Monkey Island shed light on the project's origins and development.
The panel discussion was called 'Beneath The Return of Monkey Island: Q&A with LeCrew', and featured game designer veterans Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and David Fox – who have all worked on the original Monkey Island titles, as well as the latest one – alongside Return to Monkey Island art director Zoe Nguyen Thanh and creative director Rex Crowle.
With 13 years between the last entry in the franchise and the release of Devolver-published Return to Monkey Island, and over 30 years since Gilbert was last involved in the series, one of the questions that came up during the panel is how exactly the team got together.
"I was at PAX 2019, I got together with somebody who runs Devolver, [co-founder Nigel Lowrie], and we were just having coffee and he mentioned that he had a good friend that was the head of something at Disney, and he thought they could maybe get the Monkey Island licence, and was I interested in doing another Monkey Island if they could get the licence to do that?" Gilbert recalled.
"I thought about that for a good two or three months, about whether it was something I really wanted to do. And I called up Dave [Grossman] and we talked about it and Dave flew up to Seattle for a weekend, and we just kind of hashed everything through [because] if we were to make this game, what would it be?
"Cause the thing is I didn't want to just make another Monkey Island. That's not interesting to me. I wanted to make sure that we had something to say. And so after Dave and I spent that weekend together and mapped everything at a very high level, I thought 'Okay, we have something, this is an interesting story.'
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