Ron Gilbert canceled his Zelda-inspired RPG, in part because a good publisher is hard to come by these days: 'It's like they have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make'

Ron Gilbert is something akin to PC gaming royalty, having worked on all-time greats like The Secret of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion—he also designed the Mona Lisa of edutainment, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, so he's good in my book. You might think such a resplendent back catalog would mean publishers are tripping over each other to offer Gilbert the chance to make whatever he likes, but not so; he had to cancel his last project, a Zelda-inspired open world RPG, in part because he couldn't get the resources he needed.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Gilbert talked about why the project was scrapped: “I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that."

Although, Gilbert once described it as "the game I always wanted to play," as our initial news piece about the RPG states, that dream apparently wasn't worth a decade of grueling work. As he told Ars Technica, "it’s either a passion project you spent 10 years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources."

This is typically where a publisher would step in, and it sounds like Gilbert tried to secure funding, but he said in the interview that "the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense." It's something he pins on a larger industry issue, saying that "analytics-driven" publishers wouldn't see much in a pixelated passion project like his.

"The big companies," he continued, "It’s like they just have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make." He added that this leads to "a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money."

It's no secret that the creative and financial sides of gamedev are prone to tension. But Gilbert said the extremity of the issue is worse today than it was when he made his most celebrated games. Thimbleweed Park circumvented the need for a big publisher with the help of crowdfunding, but Gilbert argued that Kickstarter is "basically dead" for videogame funding these days. While there are still games making bank on the platform here and there, it still wasn't a perfect solution for Thimbleweed Park back in 2014; private investors provided half the game's final budget.

As for games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, Gilbert reckons they were made before there was enough data for publishers to bet solely on formulaic games. "When we were starting out, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what made this money," he told Ars Technica. "I think that’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity and you know, strangeness, and bizarreness.”