Monkey Island Creator Agrees with TalkByte!

Ron Gilbert is one of the minds behind Monkey Island and other LucasArts adventure games. He is now working on DeathSpank, a fantastic looking downloadable action RPG coming out soon. Ron was interviewed in the newly redesigned issue of GameInformer. In the interview Mr. Gilbert talked a lot about DeathSpank and also about indie development. When asked about the big budget development scene in relation to the indie devs he had this to say.

I don't think it's fundamentally broken, I think that the big game publishers - the Activisions and EAs and Ubisofts - need to do is embrace indie games. They need to look at these smaller games and fund them. The thing that scares me about the industry is that the large companies are extremely hit-driven. All they want to do is home runs. They don't quite understand that you need a lot of different games to make the industry healthy as a whole. I think the movie industry - and I think there are a lot of money grubbers there like any big company - understands that the strength of their industry is actually better if they get a lot of these indie movies made. They use them to bring up acting talent and directing talent. That's something that the big game companies haven't quite gotten yet.

If you listened to TalkByte episode 0 these are statements echoed from that episode on indie development from a man much smarter than I. The following question from Matt Helgeson of GameInformer all too closely sounds like comments I made on episode 0 of TalkByte. Do you listen buddy? Probably not but great minds think alike!

A great example would be Batman director Christopher Nolan. If you watched Memento, you'd never say, "This guy will go on to direct a movie that makes $600 million at the box office."

That's a perfect example of the types of things that the larger companies need to be doing. A lot of film companies have indie film labels that put these movies out.EA needs to have and indie game label that has nothing to do with EA. Everything is done differently - the marketing, the sales, the production. They could really help foster a lot of these small groups of creative people out there. That would be healthy for the whole business.

Well, its good to hear a great mind like Ron Gilbert agrees with the likes of TalkByte. Who ever's mind it came from lets hope that one of those big companies listens up and takes that good advice and start up an indie label and hopefully this industry won't crash and burn. And if you missed TalkByte episode 0, what are you waiting for? scroll down a tad and download and give it a listen for yourself.