According to Ars Technica, after years focused on point-and-click adventures like 2017’s Thimbleweed Park and 2022’s Return to Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert’s next project was initially a large, open-world Zelda-like RPG. After a year of work with a small team, he couldn’t secure funding, calling publisher offers “horrible” and noting that a $600,000 Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park still required private investors to cover half the final budget. His pivot led to Death by Scrolling, a rogue-lite action-survival game released in October, inspired by modern classics like Binding of Isaac and a 2019 prototype called “Runner.” The game’s theme, finalized in the last six months of development, casts the player in a purgatory run by “investment bankers,” requiring gold to pay a profit-focused River Styx ferryman.
The RPG that couldn’t be
Here’s the thing about the modern games industry: it’s brutal for mid-sized, creative ideas. Gilbert’s story is a perfect case study. He had this vision for a pixelated, old-school Zelda-type game. Sounds like a dream for a certain audience, right? But according to him, publishers today are “very analytics-driven.” They have formulas. And a retro top-down RPG just doesn’t fit into the “$100 million” potential box. So the deals were, in his words, “horrible.”
This is the squeeze indie devs with pedigree face. Even a successful crowdfunding campaign isn’t enough anymore. Thimbleweed Park raised $600K on Kickstarter against a $375K goal, but it still needed another half of its budget from private backers. Now, Gilbert says, “Kickstarter is basically dead these days as a way of funding games.” So what do you do? You either spend a decade on a passion project, or you find a smaller, more feasible idea. He chose the latter.
From Runner to Death
That smaller idea was a prototype from a 2019 game jam. It was a simple runner where you outscroll the bottom of the screen and shoot enemies. The key twist Gilbert landed on early was automatic aiming and firing, to avoid “cognitive overload.” He’s quick to point out this was before Vampire Survivors popularized the style. And he has opinions on that, too. He enjoyed Vampire Survivors but found it “a little too much ‘ADHD’… like playing a slot machine.”
His version, Death by Scrolling, is less frenetic. The real genius came late: the Grim Reaper. Death is an unkillable, instant-kill enemy that periodically hunts you. You can only stun him. That moment of panic when the music swells and he appears? That’s the core tension. It gave a “funny little prototype” a soul—and a great name.
Writing for players who skip
This is a fascinating insight from a master writer. Moving from dense adventure games to an action rogue-lite, Gilbert had to accept that most players will mash through dialogue. He’s seen it even in his adventure games! People just want to get to the action or the next puzzle. As a writer, he admits that’s “frustrating,” like fast-forwarding through a movie.
But his solution is pragmatic: treat the story as “truly optional.” Don’t bury critical gameplay info in lore. Let the skippers skip. For those who do pay attention, he’s baked in a “less-than-subtle” critique of capitalism. Your purgatory is run by “Purgatory Inc.,” and you’re grinding gold for a corporatized Ferryman. Gilbert says recent events have him firmly on the “Eat the Rich” bandwagon, and the game is his sarcastic outlet for that. It’s a theme you can engage with or completely ignore while running for your life.
Are adventure games dead?
Gilbert’s take on his own legacy genre is pretty blunt. The classic LucasArts “use verb on noun” point-and-click interface? He compares it to a black-and-white silent movie. It’s dated. It will survive only as a niche for nostalgic players. “When we’re all dead, it probably won’t be the kind of thing that survives,” he told Ars.
But he’s not dooming adventure games *as a concept*. He’s optimistic about titles that evolve the narrative experience beyond that old SCUMM engine model. The interface might be archaic, but the desire for story-driven games isn’t. It’s a sobering, maybe even sad, perspective from one of the genre’s architects. But it also feels honest. The industry moves on. And sometimes, that means a legendary adventure game designer spends his time making a game about outrunning Death and investment bankers. Go figure.
