Return to Monkey Island: Forget old ideas, says Ron Gilbert

The internet never forgets. This also applies to old ideas for a new Monkey Island that Ron Gilbert published on his website in 2013.

However, you should not derive anything from this for the upcoming Return to Monkey Island.

Ron Gilbert does what he wants

In 2013 he wrote a blog post about what he would do if given the chance to create another Monkey Island.

Those old ideas and thoughts that came up with the expectation that he wouldn’t work on another shouldn’t be interpreted by fans as promises or expecting exactly that from Return to Monkey Island.

“What I mean to say is that these are not traditional commandments carved in stone on a huge tablet,” he writes. “It was just random thoughts about a (very unlikely at the time) new Monkey Island game.”

More Return to Monkey Island news:

Forget the old post

“None of this is a promise or anything I owe anyone,” Gilbert points out. “People talk a lot about Monkey Island 3a, like it’s the game I would have made after Monkey Island 2 if I’d stayed with Lucasfilm. The thing is, the whole idea was ‘Guybrush chases the demonic pirate LeChuck in Hell and Stan is there’. That’s it. That’s all it was.”

“Games, movies and books are never fully fleshed out. They start with a little bit of an idea and then the hard work begins. Had I stayed with Lucasfilm I might have started with that idea, but once the game was done it would be something completely different and better. And that’s what Return to Monkey Island is.”

As he states, one idea he and Dave Grossman discussed was that Guybrush would wake up 3,000 years in the future on a frozen earth. His original idea of ​​hell also came up, but nobody wanted to take that up.

“I wanted to start the new game right where LeChuck’s Revenge left off,” he says. “That became the only immovable point.”