Ron Gilbert’s Monkey Island announcement was a joke ‘18 years in the making’
This year, Ron Gilbert pulled off perhaps the best April Fools’ joke ever. On April 1st, he announced on his personal blog that he was making a new Monkey Island game. It was hard to know if this was actually a joke, but a few days later, he revealed it was real by sharing the official trailer for Return to Monkey Island. The game promises to harken back to the classic point-and-click era of the first two Monkey Island titles, with creator Gilbert returning, Dave Grossman back to co-write, and composers Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian writing the music once again.
This week, I had a chance to talk with both Gilbert and Grossman to learn a little bit more about the game and its development. The team making Return to Monkey Island has revealed very little beyond what’s in the trailer, and while Gilbert and Grossman didn’t want to get into too many specifics, they did shed some light on what to expect when the game comes out sometime this year.
Read on for our full discussion about creating a modern point-and-click adventure, learning from past projects, and keeping the project a secret. The team has also shared the first official screenshots of the game, which we have included throughout this article. The captions were provided by the developers.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why are you both returning to Monkey Islandright now?
Ron Gilbert: As is kind of obvious if you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, I’m just constantly bombarded by people who want a new Monkey Island, and it’s definitely something I’ve been very interested in. [Note: I missed a sentence here because I accidentally pressed something on my keyboard that turned on a YouTube video. Thankfully, I was
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