Ron Gilbert
From MIwiki
Ron Gilbert is a game designer and the project leader for the first two games in the Monkey Island series. He is also considered to be the primary creator of the series, though the games were a co-operative effort between himself, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman.
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Early Career
Gilbert began his professional career in 1983 while he was still a college student by writing a program named Graphics Basic with Tom McFarlane. They sold the program to a San Francisco Bay Area company named HESware, which later offered Gilbert a job. He spent about half a year at HESware, programming action games for the Commodore 64 (C64). None of them were ever released; the company went out of business. Shortly thereafter, Gilbert joined Lucasfilm Games, which later became LucasArts. There he earned his living by doing C64 ports of Lucasfilm Atari 800 games.
In 1985 he got the opportunity to co-develop his own game for LucasArts together with graphics artist Gary Winnick. Maniac Mansion was about a dark Victorian mansion populated by a mad scientist, his family and strange aliens. Gilbert created a scripting language that was named after the project it had been written for, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, better known as SCUMM. The technology was used in all subsequent LucasArts adventure games, with the exception of Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island. Despite being an internal production tool, the SCUMM acronym became well known to gamers since a location in The Secret of Monkey Island, the SCUMM Bar, was named after it.
Gilbert created many successful adventure games at LucasArts, including the classic The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
Humongous and Cavedog
In 1992, he left the company to start Humongous Entertainment with LucasArts producer Shelley Day.
While at Humongous Entertainment, Gilbert was responsible for games such as Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam and the Backyard Sports series. Many of these games continued to use an offshoot of the SCUMM engine. In 1995, Gilbert founded Cavedog Entertainment, Humongous' sister company for non-kids games.
Gilbert was the producer of Total Annihilation and worked on a game called Good & Evil. Widely regarded as his pet project, Good & Evil was said to incorporate many different themes and gameplay styles. The game was previewed by several publications, but the project was cancelled when Cavedog closed down in 1999.
Later Career
As of 2005, Ron Gilbert was independently designing an unspecified new adventure/RPG game, which he was pitching to publishers.
In May of 2007, Gilbert began to collaborate with Hothead Games on Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a game based on the webcomic Penny Arcade.
He runs a blog called Grumpy Gamer offering humorous game industry commentary.
On Jan 9th 2008 he announced a new game entitled Deathspank Episode One: Orphans Of Justice. Little however, is known about that at this point.
