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‘Monkey Island’ Creator Finds Wealthy Investor for Next Game
‘Monkey Island’ Creator Finds Wealthy Investor for Next Game
Ron Gilbert didn’t want to go with a traditional publisher for ‘Thimbleweed Park 2,’ so he took an unorthodox route
The sequel to ‘Thimbleweed Park’ is planned for release in early 2028
Thimbleweed Park Returns
Ron Gilbert, the legendary designer behind video games like Monkey Island, has known for a while what he wanted to make next — a surprise sequel to the 2017 point-and-click adventure Thimbleweed Park. But there was a catch. He needed funding, and he didn’t want to work with a traditional game publisher.
It’s not that all of his experiences working with game publishers have been bad, Gilbert told me this week on a video call from his home in New Zealand. It’s just that the terms have been atrocious, especially in recent years.
“I don’t mind the publisher earning back their money,” Gilbert said. “It’s just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of the money. Or there are really goofy terms, like you don’t make anything unless it’s a major hit. I always felt that was unfair.”
Gilbert has seen it all in his four-decade career making video games. In the 1980s, he worked as a programmer for Lucasfilm Games, where he pioneered the graphic adventure genre with the zany horror game Maniac Mansion and then perfected it with Monkey Island — a riff on Pirates of the Caribbean that’s packed full of puzzles and gags.
After Lucasfilm, he founded a couple of companies, worked on games in genres ranging from children’s entertainment (Putt Putt) to comedic action (DeathSpank) and then started his current studio, which is called Terrible Toybox.
In 2014, Terrible Toybox raised more than $620,000 on Kickstarter to make Thimbleweed Park, a throwback to Maniac Mansion that blended classic pixel art with modern graphical techniques. The game starred two FBI agents sent to investigate a murder in a small town, heavily inspired by Twin Peaks. It resonated with players, selling more than 300,000 copies and inspiring a great deal of fan art thanks to a slew of memorable characters, such as Ransome, a foul-mouthed clown.
Gilbert and his team then worked with Walt Disney Co. on the fantastic Return to Monkey Island (2022) and last year put out an under-the-radar action game, Death by Scrolling. At some point along the way, he started thinking about the ending to Thimbleweed Park, which went off the rails, eventually revealing that the entire world was, in fact, a video game that needed to be turned off. (This was a polarizing decision that has become something of a Ron Gilbert specialty over the years.)
It suddenly occurred to Gilbert that there was a way to get out of that dead end and develop a Thimbleweed Park 2. “I had this weird brainstorm, so I wrote it down, this one-page story,” he recalled.
In January, Gilbert wrote a blog post suggesting that he wanted to make a Thimbleweed Park 2 but hadn’t yet found funding. He’d ruled out Kickstarter and wrote that publishers had expressed interest but the terms were unpalatable.
Then, Gilbert told me, he was contacted by a friend who knew someone who wanted to fund the game. This wasn’t someone who worked in the video-game industry — it was a wealthy outsider who really liked adventure games and was a big fan of Thimbleweed Park.
Gilbert was skeptical, but he was willing to at least have a conversation with the guy. “This is not the first time this has happened,” Gilbert said. “I said, ‘OK, fine, give me his email.’”
The outsider — who, for the time being, has requested anonymity — turned out to be the real deal. Gilbert put together a budget — “a very realistic one,” he said — for roughly two years of development on Thimbleweed Park 2. It would cost more than the first game, which came in at just over $1 million, both because of inflation and because he wanted to ensure that people were paid properly this time around. (On the first game, some of his developers worked for reduced rates.)
The investor thought it looked good, and the two parties came to terms that were far more attractive to Gilbert than any game publisher had offered. “This deal is a lot more fair in that he gets whole very quickly, and then it’s a reasonable split,” he said.
The plan, Gilbert said, is to release Thimbleweed Park 2 in early 2028. He won’t say much about how he plans to resolve the first game’s ending, although he teases that the game is “not a sequel and it’s not a prequel.” He said there will be a few changes to make things more approachable, such as streamlining the verb box that the first game used for interacting with the world (but not streamlining it quite as much as Return to Monkey Island).
Point-and-click adventure games might not be as lucrative as some other genres in today’s market, but they can still do well, Gilbert told me. He was buoyed by the ongoing success of the first Thimbleweed Park, which has had a long tail thanks to strong word of mouth.
“We’re almost ten years from release and that game still sells,” he said. “That tells me that there is an audience for that game and games like this.”
And what of Monkey Island, the franchise that Gilbert is best known for? He says he’s open to doing another one following the success of Return to Monkey Island, which was published by Devolver Digital. But there are a lot of obstacles — as there have been since Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012.
“Now there’s Disney involved, and it’s not that they were bad — they were a good partner, creatively,” Gilbert said. “But Disney, just because of the way they are, they like to work with large companies. They would not work with me directly, which means there would have to be somebody else like a Devolver in the mix for the whole thing. It just gets really complicated.”
