When I met Ron Gilbert in London he'd just spent the previous couple of weeks touring Thimbleweed Park, the game he and Gary Winnick crowdfunded way back in 2014, for press and fans alike in Germany. He then spent half an hour demonstrating it for me, giggling at his own jokes in a very endearing way. As someone for whom the Lucasfilm games loom (har-har) large in their life, it was sort of surprising to see that Ron Gilbert — he who developed classic point and click adventure games like Monkey Island; architect of the instantly recognisable SCUMM engine — is not, as my childhood self assumed, some kind of actual wizard, but a regular dude in a flat cap who laughs at himself (and yet are we not all regular dudes?).
Thimbleweed Park is a point and click puzzle adventure modelled after the Lucasfilm/LucasArts games, but done better. 'To us it's like there's a certain charm to those games,' said Gilbert, explaining why they decided to make one of them again, 'And as much as I love a lot of modern adventure games — I love Firewatch, I love Gone Home, Kentucky Route Zero, I liked all those things quite a bit — there's just this charm that those old games have.'
They couldn't isolate what that charm was, so they decided to figure it out by making a game like they had back then, but with the benefit of 30 years of experience and more powerful tech. It's an attempt to recapture what was good about 8-bit adventures, not remake one. But that's why Thimbleweed Park has, for example, a nine verb action menu and an on screen inventory — something Gilbert thinks he'd play around with in any future games, having decided it's not a critical source of the aforesaid charm. So does he now know where it did come from?
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