Ron Gilbert reveals its secret development, hint system, and ideas for an Elaine spin-off.
before its April Fool’s Day announcement a few months ago.
A three-headed monkey".
Apparently, this move works “every time”.)
“He came to me and said, ‘Hey, I know someone from Disney.
And get the licence it did - you could say everything clicked into place.
What ensued was a clandestine affair of virtual meetings and development.
“That door behind me has been locked for the last couple of years,” he laughed.
‘,” he joked.
But Ron had saved that away and kept it," Crowle recalled when asked about joining the project.
“That was kind of the jumping off point really.”
“I don’t think it was important in terms of my career…
It was just a fun thing to do,” Gilbert laughed.
“Having Dave on board with me, this just seemed like a lot of fun.
I’m at the point in my career where I [can] do fun things…
I’ve been making games professionally for almost 40 years.
So, I kind of don’t care about my career in a lot of ways.”
This playful attitude was echoed by Grossman.
“you might go and ask it questions,” Gilbert explains to me.
“[With this system] we actually know where you are in the game.
We know what puzzles you’ve solved.
We know what things you’ve seen, we know what inventory you have at the moment.
“Plank is extra fun,” Grossman chuckled.
“So you could kind of almost imagine this slight shift in personality.
In the courthouse, the system is run by lunatics.
This is where Monty Python comes in.
That “strange wackiness” seeped into Plank’s design from the get-go.
More technical issues, more deep design issues you could deal with in more long-form writing.
Gilbert sadly attributes this toxicity as being a part of the time we live in.
“It’s the modern world,” he said.
“Everybody loves Murray,” Gilbert says.
“He was fun to incorporate into this game.”
“[But] when we did our first play test, man, people hated that!
[They] absolutely hated that.”
And what of Elaine?
Well, actually yes.
(This wording has now been changed to describe Return simply as a “new chapter”).
Is Return the ending of the series?
If you pre-order, you will get yourself some shiny and useless horse armour to add to your inventory.
How useless is this armour?
Well, Grossman assures me “totally”, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
