Acclaimed game designer Ron Gilbert has shown the first trailer for his next game, Death by Scrolling.
Gilbert – who created Mania Mansion and was writer-director on The Secret of Monkey Island – first revealed the game on his blog earlier this year, but information on it has been minimal.
“I started working on this game back in 2019,” Gilbert recalled on his blog earlier this year. “It started out great and everybody I showed it to loved it, but it was simple. Everyone asked for progression and “game” stuff and over the next six months I proceeded to ruin it.
“Then a little game called Return to Monkey Island came along and I took the next two years to build that with Dave Grossman and a wonderful team.”
After working on an open world RPG codenamed RPGTBD for a while, Gilbert decided it was too ambitious for the small team he had, and was never going to be completed.
“Then I remembered Death By Scrolling,” he says. “I shared the prototype with [designer] Elissa and she really liked it. There is something about the game that I could never let go of.
“I rebuilt the whole project, stripping out all the stupid stuff and returned it to the core of the game back when it was fun. Over the next 3 months Elissa and I added back pieces bit-by-bit with a nice progression system, story, quests and challenges.
“It’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but Elissa and I get lost in playing it when we should be testing a new feature, so I guess that’s good.”
