Ron Gilbert And Dave Grossman Talk Monkey Island, Working With Disney, And Internet Toxicity
For many years, Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert said he’d never make another game in the series unless he owned the IP. The LucasArts franchise was acquired, along with the rest of the company, by Disney in 2012, and since then, Gilbert has made some attempts to get the rights back. While Disney wasn’t prepared to relinquish Monkey Island to Gilbert, they were still able to work a deal that would give his studio, Terrible Toybox, the opportunity to finally return to Monkey Island.
I sat down with Gilbert and co-designer Dave Grossman, who co-wrote and programmed the first two Monkey Island games, at PAX West in Seattle last weekend to talk about coming back to the series after all these years, and what it’s like to work with Disney on their own original creation.
“It’s not that we want to make the game and just ignore everything everyone says,” Gilbert explains when asked about sharing creative control with the House of Mouse. “Disney has been wonderful to work with. They’ve had notes about the game, some are good, some we say ‘Hey, that’s a really good idea, let’s do that. Some of them [we] wouldn’t like. We have basic control, but we also just take ideas that people have. Any good idea can go in the game.”
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Gilbert and Grossman have been working on Return to Monkey Island in secret for the last two years until it was announced on April Fools’ Day on Gilbert’s blog the Grumpy Gamer - an inside joke for fans who are well aware of Gilbert’s dislike for the holiday. In that time, the studio has found a completely new look and style for the game that Monkey Island fans have never seen before. Gilbert says it was important for them to make something that
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