Ron Gilbert may always be best known as the writer and director of the beloved LucasArts point-and-click adventure game, The Secret of Monkey Island, but these days it seems he's keen to take on other genres. He recently launched a roguelike action game called Death by Scrolling, and prior to that he even had a concept for retro Zelda-style open-world RPG – an idea that fell through under the cruel analytics of game publishing.
After the launch of Return to Monkey Island in 2022, Gilbert had "this vision for this kind of large, open world-type RPG" in the Zelda style, as he tells Ars Technica. Gilbert's spoken about this Zelda-style game in the past on his blog, but in this interview he sheds a bit more light on the struggle to get it funded.
