Ron Gilbert

Ron Gilbert is an American video-game designer, programmer, and producer.

His games are generally focused on interactive story-telling, and he is arguably best known for his work on several LucasArts adventure games, including Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games.

Another thing that made him approach the gaming world was the film Star Wars (1977).

His fascination with programming technology, which allowed gamers to interact with characters and situations, mixed with his love for telling stories, like that of "Star Wars", were his main inspirations to start making games.

The impact of Star Wars and his love for telling stories was so big that Ron Gilbert, at the age of fourteen, and his good friend Tom McFarlane made a couple of films on a Super-8 camera.

The first film they shot in 1978 was Stars Blasters; it was directed by Ron Gilbert and acted by McFarlane and friend Frank Lang.

In 1979, they filmed another movie, Tomorrow Never Came, acted by Ron Gilbert, Tom McFarlane; it was also directed by Ron Gilbert.

In 1979, his parents purchased a NorthStar Horizon home computer.

At the age of fifteen, he took his first steps in game programming.

He used to study and analyze games for hours; capturing in his mind every frame of the layout of games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders or Robotron: 2084; taking notes of every detail and then trying to replicate them on his computer.

Once the games were replicated he would start doing experiments with them, adding changes.

He also used to look at Atari 2600 games' advertisements in magazines, then imagined what the game was like to play and tried to make them on his computer.

Once the games were finished, he used to bring his friends home to test the games and tell him what they did or did not like.

While a student in 1983, he co-wrote Graphics BASIC, and he then worked on action games for HESware, which went out of business.

He afterwards joined Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), and was given the opportunity to develop his own games.

He invented SCUMM, a technology used in many subsequent games.

Gilbert began his professional career in 1983 while he was still a student at Eastern Oregon State College 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.

Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Gilbert, that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events.

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 S.C.U.M.M. 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 S.C.U.M.M. 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.

After leaving LucasArts, Gilbert co-founded the children's gaming company Humongous Entertainment in 1992 and its sister company Cavedog Entertainment in 1995, where he produced games such as Total Annihilation for adults.

He cofounded Hulabee Entertainment with Shelley Day, releasing children's games between 2001 and 2003.

After working with Beep Games between 2004 and 2007, he was creative director at Vancouver-based Hothead Games development studio between 2008 and 2010, also doing some work for Telltale Games and with Penny Arcade.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

In 2013, he announced that he would move on from Double Fine Productions, after releasing the game The Cave with them.

In 2017, he announced Thimbleweed Park with Terrible Toybox, serving as writer, designer, and programmer since 2014.

Ron Gilbert was raised in La Grande, Oregon.

He is the son of David E. Gilbert, a physics professor and former president of Eastern Oregon University (then Eastern Oregon State College).

Initially, he thought of himself going into a career for film direction.

He became interested in games when he was thirteen years old thanks to a HP-65 programmable calculator his father used to bring home.

He found the ability to program games on the calculator interesting, citing an example of a Battleship-like game that was included on the calculator, leading him wanting him to learn how to program other games.

Gilbert saw the potential to program games as a creative outlet as he continued his studies towards the film industry.