The Indie Game Magazine January 2015 | Issue 45 | Page 14

INTERVIEW

Thimbleweed Park: Interview with Ron Gilbert
and Gary Winnick by Katrina Filippidis
IGM: How would you describe your
roles on Thimbleweed Park?
Ron Gilbert: We’re both co-designing,
doing a lot of the writing, and then
I’m doing most of the programming.
Gary will be responsible for most
of the art-that’s kind of how we’re
dividing our roles right now.

A

n idea twenty five years in the making,  Thimbleweed Park has finally come to fruition in the form
of a murder mystery point-and-click adventure
game-or as former LucasArts developer Ron Gilbert puts
it, “a game that is much more complicated than that.”
Dubbed as the spiritual successor to LucasArts’ classics  The Secret of  Monkey Island  (1990) and  Maniac Mansion  (1987),  Thimbleweed Park  is the result
of  Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnicks’ creative efforts,
and a new classic point-and-click adventure that is
“deep, challenging, funny, and everything you’ve
loved about adventure games” of yesteryear.
Ron Gilbert has had experience designing both Monkey Island 1 and 2, and began studying and analyzing
video games early in his teens. Gary Winnick has worked
alongside him by contributing dialog to both Maniac
Mansion and Day of The Tentacle (1993), and has experience as the art supervisor for Indiana Jones and The Last
Crusade (1989). After growing up with games like Day of
The Tentacle, it was both a pleasure and an honor to be
able to interview Ron and Gary, who talked to me about
the inspiration behind Thimbleweed Park, the importance
of retro-style graphics that stay true to their older games,
and their thoughts about taking on the world. They are
remaining tight lipped about the project at this point, but
reveal just enough to whet the appetite of all the pointand-click enthusiasts among us.

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Gary Winnick: Which is pretty much
how we worked together on Maniac
Mansion, which we started working
on in 1985 and was published in 1987.

Gary Winn
ick

IGM: Where does the title Thimbleweed Park come
from? How would you describe the game?
Gilbert: Thimbleweed Park is kind of a satire, or a spoof of things
like  Twin
Peaks, True Detective, and The X-Files; you
know it’s taking that genre and then doing
a spoof out of it in the same way Maniac
Mansion was kind of a spoof of B-Horror
movies. And the title-Gary and I just had
this big brainstorm and just wrote down
all these titles-I don’t know how many
we had, probably fifty or even a hundred
of them, and that was kind of one that
stuck out at us as something we liked.
The story itself is definitely more complicated than just trying to find out who
was responsible for the dead body.
It’s definitely a lot more than that-it’s
not just a murder mystery.
Winnick: It seems like most of the titles
of games that Ron and I have done
are the names of places, like Maniac
on
R
Mansion, or Monkey Island, or The
Cave. As Ron was saying, I think it kind of reflects
places like Twin Peaks, or, I think Steven King has Salem’s Lot or
Castle Rock, you know those places, which are kind of understood
as average Americana looking places on the surface, but there’s a
lot more going on than meets the eye. I mean we have four interwoven stories where you have four sets of protagonists, that are
each kind of involved in a story that relates to the major story arc,

The Indie Game Magazine

Gilbert