Opinion: Throwing off the shackles of a publisher, Double Fine are creating a brand new adventure game. With Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert leading it, it’s in good hands, but will it be enough to resurrect an apparently dead genre?
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point during the last ten years, people decided the adventure genre was dead. No matter where publishers pointed, they just couldn’t click on its elusive pulse.
Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, the minds behind some of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s, clearly don’t agree. Schafer may have shied away from the genre in recent years – instead focusing Double Fine’s attention on all-manner of different, and excellent, games – but now he’s ready to return to the genre that made his name. And he’s not alone.
Where publishers failed to listen, the people responded, admirably and swiftly. Rallying around Double Fine’s decision to crowdsource the funding for their next game, the now famous Kickstarter project reached its target of $400,000 in less than eight hours, and broke $1million in less than 24.
Gilbert and Schafer now have a lot of weight on their shoulders: fans have put their faith and wallets behind them, and Double Fine will need to prove wrong the publishers who failed to back them. They need to show that adventure games still have a place in modern gaming and, based on their history, that should be no problem whatsoever.
Monkeying around
The first two Monkey Island games are the only two that Gilbert and Schafer worked on together in a writing capacity, but these two games laid the foundations for Schafer’s future work at LucasArts, and Gilbert’s influence is apparent throughout Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle. All their games ooze personality, and it’s a credit to the writing that people still remember the great puzzles, unique characters, and charming environments that the pair are so famed for creating.
Their puzzles are a chaotic mix of nonsensical ideas that somehow, against all odds, weave together in a logical way. From the outside they may appear ridiculous to the extreme, asking you to combine objects and environment in a way that doesn’t seem to have any grounding in reality, but once you’ve trained yourself to think in the abstract way that the games demand, you’ll be a mighty puzzle-solving pirate ready to rid world of tentacles and corrupt souls.
The puzzles work so well because they’re ingrained in the personality of the places they inhabit. Schafer and Gilbert create believable – if entirely silly – worlds, filled with pop-culture references that make you feel at home. There’s nothing accidental about them: everything is designed with something else in mind, a convoluted jigsaw in which every piece is as important as the last.
It’s clear from Double Fine that Schafer’s a man who likes taking risks, and who wholly believes in his own ideas. The boldest adventure game that he produced was Grim Fandango. It struggled commercially, but it’s one of the most imaginative games ever created. Its outlandish aesthetic may have hindered its mass-market appeal, but the mass-market missed out on something fantastic.
Schafer brought two seemingly distant ideas together, moulding them into a vibrant and somehow plausible world. Heavily parodying the film noir genre, it takes those conventions and lives them out in The Land of the Dead, a Mexican-inspired afterlife. It’s one of the most unique settings in gaming, characterised further by a brilliantly bleak humour that resonates throughout.
In comparison to that, Monkey Island seems a tad normal. It’s filled with pirates, islands, and mystical happenings, and while the puzzles are some of the best and most ingenious that Schafer has delivered, it’s the characters that really stand out.
Guybrush Threepwood. The very name sends shivers down even the most terrifying of one-eyed seafarers. The heroic everyman, he’s instantly likeable and his struggles are relatable to all. He may dream of fame and fortune, and engage in the odd nefarious deed, but compared to the villainous scoundrels that surround him he’s a flat-out saint whose intentions are always honourable.
Guybrush would love to take all the plaudits, but it’s Elaine Marley-Threepwood who really highlights the care and attention that Gilbert and Schafer put into their writing. At first glance, she may appear to be a mere damsel-in-distress, included in the game so that Guybrush has a reason to pull off his heroics: in most games, that’s exactly what she would be.
In Monkey Island, Elaine is much more than that. Half the time, she’s in trouble because of Guybrush’s doing, and if it wasn’t for LeChuck’s constant plans to kill her, raise her, and marry her, she’d be sitting happy as the governor of the tri-state island area. Hell, if she wasn’t constantly getting interrupted, she’d probably be governor of far more than that. She’s a strong female character who’s got far more sense and savvy than the clueless pirates around her: aspiring developers, take note.
Bringin’ back adventure
It’s safe to say Schafer’s and Gilbert’s record speaks for itself, and that’s without even delving into the fantastic non-adventure games that Schafer has been overseeing at Double Fine. But no matter how good their history, and no matter how certain I am that they are capable of writing and producing yet another great game, it doesn’t matter if people don’t actually want adventure games anymore.
LucasArts’ love of the adventure game fittingly ended along with the ‘90s, as Escape from Monkey Island, released in 2000, signified a grand departure from the genre. Escape cannot be blamed for this departure, as while it didn’t quite match the quality of its predecessors, it was still an excellent game in its own right.
The company cancelled the Full Throttle and Sam & Max sequels that were in development, turning their attention to the Star Wars franchise. It wasn’t until 2009 that the publisher returned to point-and-click, backing Telltale Games to develop episodic Sam & Max and Monkey Island games.
The Tales of Monkey Island recruited Ron Gilbert to help with the early idea stages of development, dubbing him ‘visiting professor of monkeyology’. It sold better than expected, topping the Steam charts for a number of days. The release of Sam & Max: Save the World was also seen as a commercial success, indicating that there is still a market for adventure games.
Even discounting these two recent successes in the genre, the very fact nearly 50,000 people have so far been willing to back the Double Fine Adventure project is clear evidence that people want the game. The only foreseeable problem is that everyone who contributed more than $15 is getting a free copy of the game, potentially limiting the customer base at release.
The thing is, though, the adventure genre is only dead as long as there’s not a buzz surrounding it. The sheer buzz surrounding Double Fine’s ambition in the past few days has been extraordinary. It is that which has revived the good old point-and-click.
From this stage, if anyone can make an awesome adventure game, it’s Schafer and Gilbert. With decent funding behind them, whispers of multiformat release, and no publishers to trample their creative spark, this will be a labour of love for the pair, and they’ll be fully aware of the duty they owe to the fans that helped make it happen.
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An expertly written piece. Reminds me of a bit of trivia I read in an old magazine. Guybrush’ name comes from the program used to create him, which had functions for creating ‘brushes’ (3D shapes), including templates for both genders: a ‘guybrush’ and a ‘girlbrush’. Apparently, the name stuck.
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Joannes Truyens (February 13th, 2012)