Ron Gilbert

Ron Gilbert was born on January 1, 1964. He began his career in 1983 while at college by selling Graphics Basic, a third-party extension of the BASIC programming language of the Commodore 64, to HESware. They in turn offered him a job, and spent only 6 months there programming for games that were never released, as HESware went out of business.

He later joined Lucasfilm Games (later known as LucasArts), and worked on some Commodore 64 ports before co-developing Maniac Mansion in 1985. He created a scripting language, Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, or SCUMM. This was used for most of the adventure titles subsequently created by the company until 1998 where they switched to GrimE.

In 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island was released, designed, co-written and co-programmed by Gilbert. Its sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge was released in 1991. Both were lauded for their humour, graphics and very accessible controls.

In 1992, with LucasArts producer Shelley Day, Gilbert left the company and formed Humongous Entertainment. Here he worked on a number of children's games, until forming Cavedog Entertainment, a subsidiary of Humongous Entertainment designed to produce games for an older audience. He produced Total Annihilation and worked on Good & Evil, which was shut-down along with Cavedog in 1999.

In 2007 he began to work with Hothead Games on Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness and also contributed to Tales of Monkey Island for Telltale Games, though not actually being employed by them. He later designed DeathSpank and DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue.

In April 2010 he announced his departure from Hothead, and in September of the same year it was announced he had been hired by Tim Schafer to join Double Fine Productions. In 2011 Double Fine released the Psychonauts Vault Viewer for iOS, which Gilbert created alongside Lee Petty along with Schafer's commentary. The viewer is the same as the in-game vault viewer - memories exaggerated by the character's emotion in a few succinct slides. In February 2012 Schafer confirmed Gilbert was working on a new adventure game, and in May it was revealed to be The Cave - which was subsequently released in January 2013.

On March 11, 2013 Gilbert announced his departure from Double Fine Productions¹. He subsequently said that this was as a result of The Cave being finished and joined up with Double Fine in order to make it, nothing more. He is now working independently on a new iOS game called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG with DeathSpank co-creator Clayton Kauzlaric.².