One Way To Fund Your Game? Find A Rich Guy

Hello, One Take Shrier here. How do you finance a video game? Well, if you're Ron Gilbert, the legendary creator of Monkey Island, you take an unorthodox approach. You find a rich guy to do it for you. Today, I'm going to tell the story of Ron and his new game that's coming in a couple of years, Thimbleweed Park 2, and the unorthodox funding method behind it. I've talked a lot on this channel about the challenges of funding a video game because if you're making a video game, you need to pay the people behind it unless they're volunteers, which can go wrong in all sorts of ways. You need to be able to make sure your staff can feed themselves and pay their rent and pay for their kids' child care and whatnot. And to do that, the traditional approach is to go and talk to a video game publisher that will finance your game and in exchange for various kind of terms including splits on the revenue of

the game. Often times, you'll have to you'll get some sort of advance payment and you'll have to help the publisher recoup that with the sales of your game before you see anything and then you'll have some sort of split. But Ron Gilbert, this kind of this guy who's been making video games for 40 years and I'll get to his story in a second, he was running into a problem, which is he was talking to publishers about a sequel to his game Thimbleweed Park, which came out in 2017 and was fairly successful. And the terms were not great. And I'm going to quote him here because I spoke to him about this for a Bloomberg story last week. You can check out the article in the show notes of this video. Gilbert said to me, quote, "I don't mind the publisher earning back their money. It's just that once they have earned back their money and become whole, they still want the majority of money. Or there are really goofy terms like you don't make anything unless it's a major hit. I always thought that was unfair.

Let me tell you about Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert is a guy who started his career as a programmer in the 1980s where he worked for a company called LucasFilm Games. George Lucas at the time, uh prescient guy, uh guy who who kind of or or I should say a a foresight thinking guy who presciently knew that the video game industry was going to be a big deal, that games were going to be a big deal. And he launched a video game component to his film company, which of course was known for Star Wars and Indiana Jones and other films at the time, the 1980s. Um and he launched LucasFilm Games, which would later become known as LucasArts. Um but back then as LucasFilm Games, it was very small, and Ron Gilbert pioneered this genre of games that would become known as the graphical adventure. Um he started off with a game called Maniac Mansion, which was a game where you uh you got to control three different protagonists out of like you could pick three out of a group of seven, and each

of them had special abilities, and you could use them to explore this this kind of horrifying mansion filled with uh with all sorts of nasty things including aliens and um mad scientists who wanted to kill you. And um and you had to uh rescue uh one of your friends from the mansion. And to do that, you could point and click your way through all these different puzzles. Um Maniac Mansion actually kind of was really tough, and you could really screw yourself out of things. You could really get yourself killed in uh in ways that could would just destroy your progress. Um which was a lesson that Gilbert and therefore LucasFilm Games would learn for the future as they kind of transitioned into making point-and-click adventure games where you could not actually die. There was no way to lose. And one of the first of those, the game that really put Gilbert on the map, was called The Secret of Monkey Island, um which was this kind of riff on Pirates of the Caribbean with um with all these great gags and and humor, um still still

uh very entertaining even today. You might have seen um kind of a a meme image from it, which is uh a close-up of the main character, Guybrush Threepwood, saying, "Never more Never pay more than $20 for a computer game." Um very entertaining game, uh hit game, led to several sequels, led to a whole franchise. Um phenomenal music. It really pioneered a genre. It was really It was one of the kind of like part of this this golden age for point-and-click adventure games um that had a certain just kind of sensibility to them, a certain style. Um they were all very funny. You could use You You would interact with the world by exploring and just getting lost in these puzzles and trying to hunt for things and trying to figure out the game's kind of weird logic. Um led to some real uh masterpieces, and Gilbert would be this team that included Tim Schafer, who would go on to, of course, found Double Fine and make games like Psychonauts, but back then he worked on games like Monkey Island and its sequel and also Day of the Tentacle, which was probably

the best of them, the the real masterpiece of uh of that golden age, the real the real gem, um Grim Fandango, and many and many others, um including a really underrated Indiana Jones game called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which uh I would say is is as good in it as any of the rest and has really aged quite well, I will say. But anyway, LucasFilm really really dominated, and Ron Gilbert was responsible for a lot of that. He was He was played a key role in making a lot of these games happen, including writing code for the engine, the graphical engine that they used to make these games. Um after Lucas, he left Lucas in the early '90s, he went on to do a whole bunch of things. He went to He founded a company He co-founded a company called Humongous that made a bunch of children's games like Putt-Putt. Um he wound up working on an action game called DeathSpank that uh also uh kind of underrated cult classic I would say this very funny action RPG style game and the I believe that came out in the either late 2000s early 2010s

I don't remember exactly when there were a couple of them too and then he started his current studio which is called Terrible Toybox and in 2014 back when we were seeing the what I would call the peak Kickstarter era he and his studio Terrible Toybox Gilbert and his studio raised more than $620,000 on Kickstarter for a game that they called Thimbleweed Park which was very much a throwback to Maniac Mansion in terms of graphical style and interface and when you would interact with the world but it had a lot of modern sensibilities so there was a lot less there was no no dying of course but also a lot less pixel hunting in fact Gilbert even threw in a great joke where you could actually hunt little pixels that were called like specs of dust or grains of dust or whatever and collecting them all would get you an achievement but nothing else they were all just a waste of time other than that it had modern graphical techniques also despite looking at like if you look at the characters they have this great pixel art that resembles Maniac Mansion

and 90s era games but it plays with a lot of graphic more modern graphical techniques tons of jokes in jokes there's a corpse at the beginning of the game because the plot the plot is very Twin Peak inspired you play as these two FBI agents who come into this small town of Thimbleweed Park where lots of weird things are going on and they came in to investigate a murder and so there's a corpse that you find at the beginning of the game and it talks about how the the pixels are are decomposing that's going through pixel rot and the game did really well it resonated with players people really liked it there was a lot of fun stuff in it there was this character that you could play as named Ransom the Clown who was It's foul mouthed entertainer um, I think a lot of people really enjoyed. It ended up selling more than 300,000 copies, and so it did quite well for Gilbert and his team. Um, then they went on to do a couple other things, um, including a surprise return to Monkey Island called Return to Monkey Island, which came out in 2022. Um, also did

pretty well. And then last year they put out this game called Death by Scrolling that I don't think anyone really noticed in part because it wasn't marketed very well. Um, it was also a very different game than Gilbert usually makes. It was more of kind of an action action game, like kind of a little bit Survivors-like. It was kind of like a scrolling, almost like a phone-type game. Uh, I I didn't even know that it came out, um, until after it came out. Um, yeah, like the the it was published by MicroProse, which I didn't even know that they were still around, which I think speaks to itself. But anyway, so at some point Gilbert starts thinking about the ending to Thimbleweed Park, which is really this deus ex machina, and I just kind of insane, uh, ridiculous shark-jumping ending, which is a Ron Gilbert specialty. If you've ever played the second Monkey Island game, Monkey Island 2, um, very similar thing happens there. And of course, the most recent Monkey Island game also has another just ridiculous ending. So, Ron Gilbert's specialty Ron Gilbert's specialty that I think has become polarizing over the years, uh, for him. But, um, Thimbleweed Park's ending

really went off the rails, and Gilbert started thinking about it, and he came up with this way to come up with a new game to like get out of that dead end and make a Thimbleweed Park 2, which he is very careful to say is not a sequel, nor is it a prequel, which I guess we'll find out what that means when the game comes out. So, he writes it down. He writes down this one-page story. Um, then in January of this year, he puts up a blog post on his on his, uh, website, which on which which is very very good, by the way. He writes all the time about all sorts of things about the industry, about his games. It's a very good blog. He's a very transparent guy, uh, and likes talking about game development. One of the really cool things about the first Thimbleweed Park was that he operated this development diary where he would just talk about all sorts of things involving the game. He would talk about how it was going and different aspects of it. He talked about the budget at one point. Really cool, really um admirable level of transparency, I would say. And so Gilbert, he wrote this blog post saying uh in January saying that he wanted to make Thimbleweed Park 2, but hadn't figured out the funding.

And he this is going to cost more than the first game. Obviously, inflation, people's salaries. And also he told me that uh Gilbert told me that in for the first game, a lot of people who worked on it took less than they normally would have taken. Just they were working on it kind of almost as a favor, but like they were working for rates that they they normally wouldn't be working for. And for Thimbleweed Park 2, Gilbert wanted to come up with a budget that would actually pay people what they are worth. Um so he needed a publisher. Like he he doesn't have he's not in so independently wealthy that he could fund this game himself. So he needed some sort of um financier. And so he'd been talking to publishers, publishers had reached out to him and expressed interest, but the terms were just unpalatable. Um he just was not happy. He wouldn't get into specifics with me, but he just wasn't happy with the way that they worked. Basically, they were looking for terms that like sometimes it would be just ridiculous splits, sometimes it would be that he and Terrible Toy Box and his developers would only make money if the game was a

massive massive hit, otherwise they wouldn't make anything. Just kind of really bad terms. And And one day I I'm curious to talk more Maybe down the road I'll do a video about like what publisher terms actually look like. And if you out there are reading this and you have some insight into that, feel free to reach out cuz I would love to hear more about that. But I've also heard here and there um bits and pieces of that over the over the years, so I could talk a little bit about that, too. Anyway, so uh he puts up that blog post, and then he gets a message. He gets an email from a friend of his who says, "Hey, I have a friend who is independently wealthy, does not work in the video game industry, but is wealthy, and is a fan of Thimbleweed Park, and a fan of fan of adventure games, and a fan of Ron Gilbert, and would love to talk to you about potentially funding the sequel." And Gilbert says, "Ah, you know what? I mean, I've heard this sort of thing all the time. This isn't the first time this has happened, but okay, sure. Uh give me his email. I'll send him a note." And so, Gilbert sends him an email, and they start talking. And this person, by the way, has requested anonymity for the time being. Maybe one

day he'll reveal himself, but at least for now, he is not saying who he is. And so, as they're talking, turns out this guy is the real deal, and Gilbert puts together this budget that he says is a pretty realistic budget for about a 2-year development timeline to finish Thimbleweed Park um by like early 2028. Um it's going to cost more than the first game, which, like I mentioned before, the first game was about a million, a little over a million dollars, um in part because people were working for less than they should have. Um And uh the investor says, "Sure, looks good. Let's come to terms." And uh Gilbert comes to terms with them and is very happy with them. It's very attractive, more attractive than the game publishers that he was talking to. It's a it's a deal that essentially makes the investor whole very quickly, pays him back for his investment really quickly, and then turns into a much more reasonable split than the offers he was getting from game publishers. Quick side note here, by the way, um game

publishers uh uh it's funny. In book publishing, which is the the industry that I'm very familiar with, having written three books uh that were all published through traditional book publishers, in book publishing, there is a very traditional split, and the terms do not change very often. You are, as an author, you are probably going to get the same royalty rate, no matter where you go, no matter which book publisher you talk to. It is negotiated with an agent, the agents know what all the standard terms are. Occasionally, you can get wrinkles here and there to your advantage, and you can kind of change the terms a little bit, but like the royalty split is pretty much staying the same no matter where you go, unless you're Stephen King or something like that. Whereas in game publishing, not only does every publisher offer different things, there's also the terms will also change based on the climate. Like if game publishers and potential financiers know that the climate is really rough as it is today in 20 26. Um they can offer worse terms, and they know they'll be able to get away with it. So, the lack

of standardization is really a big thing. Um so anyway, so Gilbert came to terms, and now the game is funded. He's bringing back a whole lot of the people who worked on the first game, including David Fox, another just kind of veteran adventure game programmer, and a bunch of other folks who worked on the first game, same artists, etc. Um he wouldn't tell me uh how he plans to resolve the ridiculous twist ending from the first game, but he said they are making a few changes to make the game feel more approachable, such as uh streamlining the verb box, that box of verbs that was in the the lower left corner in Thimbleweed Park, and some other things, other kind of um aspects that'll make the game quality of life, you might call it, games, things to make the game more approachable even if you are not a big hardcore adventure game fan. Um yeah, cuz like point-and-click adventure games, I think are in an interesting spot, and I was talking to Gilbert a little bit about this. Point-and-click adventure games used to be really popular back in the day, didn't quite grow in popularity as much

as other genres, such as first-person shooters, did, but they also never really died, and there was always this perception, especially among big game publishers, that point-and-click adventures did not sell at all. And that was never true, Gilbert Gilbert was telling me. He was telling me that they're still they can be successful. They just don't have quite the same ceiling as a shooter or a friend slot game. You're never going to have a point-and-click adventure that sells 20 million copies, but you could certainly have one that sells a million copies or or a little bit less. And so if you can make a game that is done on a reasonable budget that doesn't cost $200 million, but instead costs a few million dollars, you can absolutely make a profit. If you are a big game publisher, that is not something you're interested in. You are interested in big home runs. You're not interested in just hitting singles by spending $2 million to make $4 million. But if you are a wealthy investor who works in another field and likes

adventure games and wants to see this sort of thing made kind of like an old Renaissance wealthy patron who would fund Leonardo da Vinci to come and and draw paintings for him, then that is the perfect fit. And by the way, if you're wondering Monkey Island, so I mentioned before the Return to Monkey Island, the most recent game did really well. That kind of surprise sequel that came out of nowhere and I absolutely loved it. It was one of my favorite games of that year. In fact, I believe Triple Click Triple Click representing this side Triple Click Triple Click representing. I believe on the Triple Click podcast all three of us, it was one of all of our favorite games that year in 2022. We all loved it. That game did really well, but he and he's like open to the idea of potentially doing another Monkey Island, but he was telling me that with Disney involved since Disney bought Lucas in 2012 and now owns Monkey Island, it makes things a little more complicated. He was telling me not necessarily because they were a bad partner, but when you work with Disney, that means you have to bring in another partner

like a large company to potentially publish the game. A Devolver Devolver for example is is helped publish Return to Monkey Island. And so it's it gets really messy and complicated and it's not something that he's currently actively pursuing. Right now he's focusing on Thimbleweed Park 2. Um But, yeah. I mean, I think adventure games can do well, and Thimbleweed Park is a good example of that. I suspect this sequel will do pretty well, too, based on the buzz I'm seeing. And if it is good, if it lives up to expectations, if it doesn't have a ridiculous ending, but of course, we all know it will because this is Ron Gilbert, then I suspect it could do pretty well, too. As for the secret, as for the unorthodox approach of finding a wealthy investor, I've seen it happen a couple times before. In fact, just at Summer Games Fest, I was chatting with some developers who have a similar um approach, where they are funding their new game through a uh outside wealthy investor. I've also heard of situations where a publisher or a fund will get

together a bunch of different wealthy investors from other industries, like, I don't know, wealthy car dealership owners or or whatever, and get them together to pool some money for a potential game funds. Um I think it can have its drawbacks, too, because if you are coming in from outside of the games industry, you might not be used to the nuances and complications of making games and how they can sometimes go off the rails, or how sometimes the game can really seem like it is not going well for a very long time until it all coalesces and comes together the last possible minute, uh and you could potentially panic and, I don't know, want to intervene. So, it really depends on the investor, but I will be very curious to see how this one goes and if it delivers and if it can be made without any interference or issues or panic or trigger-happiness. So, yeah, that's the story of Thimbleweed Park and Thimbleweed Park 2, which is expected,

according to Gilbert, in early 2028. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how he got himself out of that ending. Uh guess this end this video should end with a twist ending, too. So, um I don't know. I was dead the whole time.