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After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning Death

157 pointsby mikhaellast Monday at 5:13 PM63 commentsview on HN

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nonethewisertoday at 4:57 PM

>While Gilbert said he’s always harbored these kinds of anti-capitalist feelings “at some level,” he said that “certainly recent events and recent things have gotten me more and more jumping on the ‘Eat the Rich’ bandwagon.” Though he didn’t detail which “recent events” drove that realization, he did say that “billionaires and all this stuff… I think are just causing more harm than good.”

This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet there is a very large difference between his wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between himself and Bezos, for example, is waaay higher than between a poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the latter. But where is the more important disparity? It's between a poor person and himself.

He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not the degree of difference is what matters.

[0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M. That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.

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dbalaterotoday at 5:32 AM

This title freaked me out... I thought he was dying. Glad to hear it's just a new game!

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kentmtoday at 5:25 AM

He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog.

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acomjeantoday at 4:43 AM

His website is pretty fun.

https://grumpygamer.com/

He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html

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aidenn0today at 4:30 PM

I'm kind of sad we miss out on RG's take on an action RPG.

s_devtoday at 2:21 PM

Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.

For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.

I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.

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thaumasiotestoday at 12:07 PM

> while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that the game’s style was “a little too much ‘ADHD’ for me. I look at those games and it’s like, wow, I feel like I’m playing a slot machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and that… it’s a little too much.”

Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.

philipallstartoday at 2:06 PM

> After hiring an artist and designer and spending roughly a year tinkering with that idea, though, Gilbert said he eventually realized his three-person team was never going to be able to realize his grand vision.

This seems spectacularly obvious. No retrospect required.

HelloUsernamelast Monday at 6:30 PM

Ah, too bad to hear his upcoming game is cancelled!

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