Ron Gilbert Shuts Down Zelda-Style RPG After Publisher Backlash: “The Deals Were Just Horrible”

Ron Gilbert, the creative force behind Monkey Island, has pulled the plug on his long-rumored 2D pixel art RPG, citing bleak funding offers and a lack of publisher interest in retro-inspired adventure games.

Fans who caught wind of this secretive project may remember Gilbert’s tantalizing tease over a year ago: a game he described as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park.” Preview screenshots hinted at a bustling town, complete with a bakery and a weapon shop, offering everything you’d need before heading out into a wide-open world of quests. That world, however, will never see the light of day.

Publishers Weren’t Interested in Old-School Magic

Gilbert opened up to ArsTechnica about why his vision for the RPG came undone. Building a “big open-world game” isn’t cheap or quick, he explained: “It’s either a passion project you spend 10 years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources.”

He went out to find that money. But every publishing deal he encountered left him cold. “The deals that publishers were offering were just horrible,” he said. And genre bias didn’t help. “Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘we’re gonna make $100m and it’s worth investing in’.” For Gilbert, the money on offer made “absolutely no sense” for a project of such ambition.

While Gilbert had once found success using crowdfunding, even that avenue has dried up. “Kickstarter is basically dead these days as a way of funding games,” he noted, reflecting a wider shift in the indie development landscape.

Publishers Want Predictable Profits, Not Creative Risks

Gilbert is outspoken about the way major publishers approach funding these days. “Today’s big-name publishers are very analytics-driven,” he said. “The big companies, it’s like they just have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make, and I think that just in the end you end up giving a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money.”

He contrasts this with the experimental, risk-taking spirit of his early career. Back then, no one knew what would earn money, so developers tried new things. That’s partly why he still loves the indie scene: despite the challenges, there’s “a lot more creativity and strangeness and bizarreness” happening away from major publishers.

Some of the art from Gilbert’s canceled RPG is getting a second chance. It’s showing up in his newest game, Death by Scrolling: a “rogue-like vertically scrolling RPG” where you battle, collect treasures, and race ever upward, trying to gather enough money to pay the Ferryman and escape an endless purgatory, all while being chased by the Grim Reaper himself.

If you want a taste of what could have been, and what’s next, there’s already a trailer for Death by Scrolling, featuring hints of that signature Gilbert blend of humor, ambition, and dark quirks.

Ron Gilbert: 40 Years In, The Game Has Changed

Looking back, Gilbert says the world of game development is unrecognizable compared to when he started. Promotion is no longer about sending out a press release to print magazines. Nowadays, developers are expected to be charismatic on camera, selling their games on YouTube and in streams.

“The [developers] that are successful are not necessarily the good ones, but the good ones that also present well on YouTube,” he said. “And you know, I think that’s kind of a problem, that’s a gate now… As a developer, you have to be a performer. And I’m not a performer, right? If I was making movies, I would be a director, not an actor.”

Despite all this, Gilbert’s creativity hasn’t slowed. Just a few years ago, he and longtime collaborator Dave Grossman managed to pull off what seemed impossible: Return to Monkey Island, a surprise revival developed in secret and revealed on April Fool’s Day of 2022.

The world may not get Gilbert’s take on a retro Zelda-meets-Diablo RPG. But he’s not done carving his own path, even if he has to drag some of his world-building into purgatory to do it.