Ron Gilbert Announces DeathSpank
Lucasarts alum, Monkey Island creator, and all-around smart guy Ron Gilbert announced something super cool at Grumpy Gamer today. After unsuccessfully courting the usual suspects, he recently struck a deal with Hothead Games (the studio behind the upcoming Penny Arcade Adventures) to develop and publish his upcoming game, DeathSpank. And there’s more:
I called up Tim Schafer and said “Loan me a desk, I have a game to design!” and I proceeded to crank out what can only be called the perfect melding of a Monkey Island style adventure game with the wicked RPG game play of Diablo. Clayton [Kauzlaric] and I got together and banged the kicks out, slapped some meat on the characters and tightened up our story and world, and damn it, we had a design you could cook an egg on.
The more I talked to the fine people at Hothead about the deal, the more I liked what I was seeing in them. They had that spark of independence, a lot of experience and were all mighty fun people to boot, so I decided to move to Canada and go work for them as their Creative Director as well as leading the DeathSpank project.
Good for Ron. I’ve long felt that his talent and experience weren’t being put to enough use, and I’m very happy to see him over at Hothead.
What do we know about DeathSpank? Apart from the above Diablo-meets-Monkey Island description, not much, except that It’s coming “soonish,” and it looks to be episodic.