Interview: Ron Gilbert ueber SCUMM und das Adventure-Genre heute

 Ron Gilbert, Erfinder der SCUMM-Engine (ein sehr bekannter Begriff fuer begeisterte Click'n'Point-Adventure-Gamer) sowie von Monkey Island, wurde von IGN.com interviewt und plaudert nun ein ganz kleines Bisschen aus dem Naehkaestchen. [...]
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Interview: SCUMM of the Earth
Ron Gilbert chats about Maniac Mansion, the current state of adventure games, and 300.
by Daemon Hatfield
April 26, 2007 - This year marks the 20th anniversary of the SCUMM engine, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which powered most of the classic LucasArts graphic adventures. SCUMM streamlined the process for coding these intensive, epic games and greatly decreased their development times. IGN recently caught up with the man behind SCUMM, the Grumpy Gamer himself, Ron Gilbert.

Gilbert started out programming on the Commodore 64 while in college, and was eventually employed by LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) doing C64 ports of their Atari 800 games. A fan of adventure games, when the time came to make his own title he had grand plans of improving the genre. He wanted to make an adventure game that was more interactive and graphically exciting than what had been done up to that point. His big idea: Maniac Mansion, a hilarious romp with multiple playable characters (each with specific abilities), multiple endings, and cut scenes that revealed hints at solving the game's mind-bending puzzles.

Ambitious as the idea was, Gilbert realized it would take ages to program the actual source code. SCUMM was his solution to simplify the coding process -- it allowed him to create the game's story, dialogue, items, and environments with built-in tools and saved him having to write scripts for each action. SCUMM would go on to power almost all of LucasArts' adventure games, including Zak McKracken and the Alien Mind Benders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. The legacy continues today, as Sam & Max, while it no longer uses the engine, is still going strong as a franchise.

These days Gilbert is shopping around a new adventure/RPG game to publishers and runs the Grumpy Gamer blog. We recently got the chance to reminisce about the glory days of graphic adventures with Gilbert, and discuss how totally awesome 300 was.

IGN: What originally brought you to work in the games industry?
Gilbert: I had bought a Commodore 64 when I was in college and I was just programming it because it was fun to do. I wrote an extension to the Basic language that came with the Commodore called Graphics Basic. It allowed people using Basic to get access to the Commodore 64's graphics, which were really, really powerful but there was no way to access them through Basic. I sent that off to some companies to see if anyone wanted to publish it and there was a company that offered me a job. So that was the first job I had in the industry.

IGN: You worked on the SCUMM engine with fellow Lucasfilm Games employees Aric Wilmunder and Brad Taylor. What was your contribution to the engine?
Ron Gilbert: I created it. It was kind of my concept because I really needed it to build Maniac Mansion. I did most of the Commodore 64 programming for the engine. Aric and Brad's contribution came in when we did the PC ports of the engine.

IGN: Why was it necessary to create a new engine for Maniac Mansion?
Gilbert: I started kind of hand-coding it all in assembly language, which was really about the only thing you could use to program the Commodore 64. And it was just obvious this was going to be a very difficult task without some kind of a language to be able to abstract the gameplay, in a way. There was a guy working at the Lucas games group at the time named Chip Morningstar, and he was kind of an expert in compilers and so we started chatting. He cobbled up the first version of the actual compiler for the SCUMM engine, which I then went on and extended. But the game was so content intensive, without some kind of a scripting language you would just spend forever coding these things in assembly language.

IGN: What was your inspiration for Maniac Mansion?
Gilbert: A lot of different things. I had always really enjoyed playing adventure games. I had played in college on the big mainframe computers; the old Adventure, Infocom stuff… I really liked the gameplay, but I really wanted to see graphics. I had seen the early King's Quests that Sierra had done which added graphics, which I thought was a big improvement, but it had a parser. And that just bugged me. I thought, "You know, if I'm going to be playing and interacting with this game graphically, I should be interacting with the graphics. I should be clicking on the things I want to manipulate." So it came from that. I wanted to get rid of this parser. And the guy who designed Maniac Mansion with me, Gary Winnick, we were good friends and we had always loved bad horror movies. So we started coming up with this idea for Maniac Mansion.

IGN: And what was your involvement in other LucasArts games like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure?
Gilbert: I worked on the SCUMM engine for those projects. I continued to upgrade it, and pretty much worked on the engine from that very first day until I left [LucasArts]. It was always the thing that occupied at least half my time.

IGN: In 1992 you left LucasArts to form Humongous Games and created adventure titles for children like Pajama Sam. What made you decide to move into making games for kids?
Gilbert: I think it was just that I wanted to do something a little bit different with adventure games. I had seen kids play Monkey Island and there was something they were really, really liking about playing that game. They didn't really get the humor, they couldn't read the text… They couldn't do a lot of the things that I would consider playing the game for real. But that act of going around and exploring, opening doors, getting new screens to show up -- they were really intrigued with that. And I thought that was an area that no one had really tackled at all: adventure games for kids.

IGN: What are you working on now?
Gilbert: Mostly I do a lot of consulting for other companies. Game design, writing, stuff like that. There is an adventure, role-playing game hybrid that I'm currently designing and looking for a publisher for.

IGN: What do you think of the current state of adventure games? Anything you've been impressed by recently?
Gilbert: Well, certainly the Sam & Max games. Those are really, really good, and they show what a good adventure game can be -- especially with the writing and the humor. I think Sam & Max is kind of a shining light for adventure games. I do think for adventure games to succeed they need to be melded with some other game genre. I don't know if a pure, pure adventure game could really survive today. Maybe with different distribution mechanisms. I could see a very pure adventure game working distributed through something like Xbox Live Arcade, where people are getting them almost episodically.

The thing I think adventure games have suffered from over the years is that lack of replayability. Every other game genre is something you can play over and over and over. Eventually you kind of work through the systems or you get bored with it, but it has a lot of replayability. But you play adventure games once, and you're just not going to play them again. You might play them several years later, kind of like you watch a movie a second time. I think that's kind of their Achilles heel, in a way.

IGN: Do you spend much time with current consoles and handhelds?
Gilbert: I spend a lot of time with the DS. I have all the consoles at home but I don't really play them that much. Mostly I play PC games and the DS.

IGN: And you also run the Grumpy Gamer blog. Why so grumpy?
Gilbert: (laughs) I don't think I'm a particularly grumpy person in person. I had owned that URL for many, many years, so it was a natural thing to use when I started writing about it.

IGN: You recently posted about the movie 300 and joked about Hollywood striving to make movies like videogames. All jokes aside, do you think there is any truth to that?
Gilbert: I think one of the things we're going to see over the years is a lot of really good Hollywood directors that have grown up on videogames. And we're getting into that first full generation of people that has been playing games for as long as they can remember. It's hard for me to imagine that up and coming filmmakers today haven't been heavily influenced by games. And there is a certain sensibility and pacing of games -- I just can't imagine that they're not starting to integrate that into the art of film in some way.

IGN: What do you think about ScummVM, which allows games that use the SCUMM engine to be ported to every platform under the sun?
Gilbert: I think it's great that it's been ported to so many platforms. I remember how difficult it was to work with and I'm amazed that they've made it compatible with so many different games. It just completely blows me away. I actually saw someone playing Monkey Island on the DS. Really, really neat.
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