Monkey Island legend Ron Gilbert had big plans for a retro Zelda-style open-world RPG, but publishers said no: "They didn’t look at it as 'we're gonna make $100 million and it’s worth investing in'"

Link holds up the Master Sword in a screenshot of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past — (Image credit: Nintendo/Zelda Dungeon)

Ron Gilbert may always be best known as the writer and director of the beloved LucasArts point-and-click adventure game, The Secret of Monkey Island, but these days it seems he's keen to take on other genres. He recently launched a roguelike action game called Death by Scrolling, and prior to that he even had a concept for retro Zelda-style open-world RPG – an idea that fell through under the cruel analytics of game publishing.

After the launch of Return to Monkey Island in 2022, Gilbert had "this vision for this kind of large, open world-type RPG" in the Zelda style, as he tells Ars Technica. Gilbert's spoken about this Zelda-style game in the past on his blog, but in this interview he sheds a bit more light on the struggle to get it funded.

Gilbert says he didn't have the time or the financial resources to build "a big open-world game like that." The concept could only be realized as a "passion project" that might spend 10 years in development, or one with substantial backing from a big publisher. But after shopping the concept around to try and secure that funding, he says that "the deals that publishers were offering were just horrible."

"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 $100 million and it’s worth investing in,'" Gilbert says. "The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this."

Gilbert doesn't name any specific publishers here, but says many of the big names "are very analytics-driven," with arcane formulas deciding how profitable a given game might be. That results in "a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games," he reckons.

Death by Scrolling, it turns out, is set in a "purgatory taken over by investment bankers," a concept Gilbert says is borne out of "looking at the world today and realizing capitalism has just taken over, and it really is the thing that’s causing the most pain for people."

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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