Thimbleweed Park

The creators of Maniac Mansion return to the scene of their crimes.

- Ron Gilbert

Ron Gilbert, the famed videogame designer behind Maniac Mansion and The Secret Of Monkey Island, is in an apologetic mood. “I don’t think we did a very good job of setting expectations in the classic adventure games,” he tells us. “We kind of gave players a lot of vague instructions and expected you to go and figure it out on your own.” It’s a legacy he’s keen to address in Thimbleweed Park, the Kickstarted spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion.

“This has been a slow evolution of adventure game design for me, going all the way back to Maniac Mansion,” he continues. “That was a game filled with dead ends and weird arbitrary deaths that I would, of course, never do now. Monkey Island got rid of death and the arbitrariness of a lot of the puzzles, so that felt like a big advance. And when I left Lucas film I started Humongous Entertainment, which built adventure games for kids. Kids are a very interesting audience to design adventure games for – they have a very short attention span. You need to really keep them engaged and make sure that they’re very clear about what they need to be doing – which is different to telling them what they need to do.”