I can’t help but think that those words were said under the expectation that he would never actually get to make a third Monkey Island game. Now that it’s a reality, you can see Ron backpedaling a bit and trying to downplay people’s expectations.
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But I don’t think Ron knew he was going to quit Lucas…
To add confusion to confusion, this new statement corroborates the “we had no idea” hypothesis:
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I mean… I’m ok with “new and better”.
The quote came from Ron after he had already left LucasArts (16 years after the fact, no less).
Its not that confusing. It tallies with everything Ron has said in regards to the game; that he’s always known what the Secret™ is but beyond that, he had no plans for what a third game would actually entail (aside from some rough draft concepts such as Guybrush going to Hell and Stan being there - which has now been scrapped because Tales already explored the Hell concept). It makes total sense because there would be no reason for Ron to design and plot out an entire game unless he was actually going to make it. It would be a waste of his time.
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Agreed.
I love all of you but how is it you all are so good at adventure games despite all of this illogical thinking??? 
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Maybe it’s just semantics, but I perceived “Guybrush chases the demon pirate LeChuck to hell and Stan is there” exactly as a clear (yet very broad) direction. So to me it sounded off when Ron said, just a few days later, that there was no direction.
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Yes, there’s something fishy going on 
It’s all a fantasy of a couple of fish, confirmed!
Maybe Guybrush actually died here, or is in a coma, and is dreaming all the events that happened later:
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That’s because, back then, illogical thinking was necessary to solve some obscure and illogical puzzles. So some of us developed this skill. 
My logic has been violently monkeywrenched when I was a teenager!
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I have always perceived that as a tongue-in-cheek comment.
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Guybrush going to Hell and Stan being there wouldn’t have been the whole game though. It would have been one part of the game (maybe say, a quarter of the entire game, at most). It’s far from a solid and locked down design document. It’s literally just two very vague ideas. It was just Ron spitballing potential ideas within his own mind.
It would be akin to Ron saying “I had an idea that the story would involve Guybrush traveling to LeChuck’s secret hidden fortress and encountering a captured map maker there”, had he not made Monkey Island 2 back in the day. There’s so much more to the actual game than that, obviously.
Ultimately, Ron’s never said that he had an absolute and clear vision for what his Monkey Island 3a would entail, other than that he would reveal the Secret™ at some point during the game. As far as I can tell, he’s never contradicted that stance over the years, at least not substantially so.
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Ok, maybe I’m overinterpreting things, but…
So, obviously, the first tweet is a silly joke. What I think is interesting is Ron’s answer, mostly this part: “no point in playing Return to Monkey Island now”.
For me, he’s implying that he does reveal the secret in the game.
Maybe he’s just trolling, but I feel like it would be too cruel, even from him.
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I could interpret that statement in the same way, but I can also see other explanations for it.
For example, Ron could be simply aware that some people will play the game hoping to see the secret revealed.
To me, at least, it is a confirmation that the secret has not been revealed, yet.
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YES! The reason is psychological: suppose you are Ron Gilbert and during development you have decided to drop the secret, because it wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t interesting enough. Well, in this case, there’s no way you would have made that joke. Because that joke wouldn’t occur to you. Because you wouldn’t be conscious of the importance of the secret. In your mind it’s not important. But then, you wouldn’t conceive a joke about the secret being so important that RTMI is not worth playing without it.
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I’m not sure why people have gotten the idea that Ron wouldn’t reveal the Secret™ in Return to Monkey Island. He will. I’m 99.9999% sure of that.
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We started being seriously worried when he didn’t want to answer the question “did you reveal the secret in RTMI”…
People are misreading what Ron was saying. Here’s the relevant quote…
Will the actual secret of Monkey Island be revealed by the end of this game? Gilbert paused and said, “Oh wow, that’s…um…[laugh]…I don’t know that I want to answer that,” before he added, “I think fans will be really excited and happy for what we did or totally angry about what we did.”
It’s pretty clear what he’s saying here; that he will reveal the Secret™ in the game and that it’ll make some fans very happy and others annoyed and deflated at the reveal (as in “what, that’s it? That’s the Secret™?!”).
Think about it, if Ron were saying in that interview that he’s not revealing the Secret™ in the game, then that quote would make no sense whatsoever; why would some fans be “really excited and happy” about Ron not revealing the Secret™, after decades of build up and saying that he would?
All that’s happening here is that Ron is (understandably) a little bit nervous about how fans are going to react to what the Secret™ actually is, given that the decades long mystery of it has outgrown the reality of it. There’s nothing to suggest that he’s not going to reveal the Secret™. People are panicking over nothing. Prepare to be disappointed at the reveal but rest assured, there will be a reveal and I say that as someone with an inordinately pessimistic mindset.
Likely the only reason that Ron doesn’t want to outright say “yes, we will reveal the Secret™ in this game” is because…
A/ It’s not something he’d care to announce during a PR interview for a single online gaming site, when he wasn’t even expecting the question to be asked of him by the interviewer in the first place and
B/ He doesn’t want to build up expectations for the Secret™ and expectations for how mind blowing the Secret™ is, any more than people’s expectations are already are built up. If he categorically states says “yes, I will reveal the Secret™”, then that’s all fans will be thinking about when playing the game and when they see what the Secret™ actually is, they’re gonna be extra disappointed.
Ron’s merely quelling unreasonable and unrealistic expectations from players as to how impactful the Secret™ actually is. He doesn’t want the entirety of the game to be judged by players’ reactions to the Secret™. He wants the game to be enjoyed and appraised as a whole.
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holy crap, you’re right!
I had read it as “you’re going to be really excited because, even if we didn’t reveal the secret, we did a pretty good game”. But what you are saying is more logical.
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