Monkey Island creator asks Disney to sell IP
"I'll pay real actual money."
Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island, has asked Disney to sell back his gaming IP.
That includes the rights to beloved adventure game franchise Monkey Island, as well as Gilbert's 1987 classic Maniac Mansion.
Both franchises are now owned by Disney following the company's acquisition of LucasArts, where Gilbert worked for the best part of a decade.
Disney isn't doing anything with either series and, to be realistic, the likeliest scenario is that it never will.
Gilbert publicly put the call out to Disney last night via his Twitter account.
But it's far from the first time Gilbert has discussed regaining his game franchises. In late 2012, at the time of Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm and LucasArts, he said pretty much the same thing, noting how unlikely it was Disney would ever do anything with it.
"I would love to get the rights back to Monkey Island and be able to really make the game I want to make," Gilbert told Eurogamer at the time.
A year later, he penned a detailed blog post explaining what his Monkey Island game would look like, if it ever got made.
Gilbert's new call to Disney comes a couple of weeks after the company decided to end its game publishing business for good (canning Disney Infinity in the process). It was the last gasp for Disney-made games, a process begun back in 2013 when it ended internal development at LucasArts.
Disney will now simply license its properties to other developers. With that, there may be room for Gilbert to apply for his own indie Monkey Island idea - if it suits the suits at Disney. Disney may finally relent and offload the dormant IP. Or it could continue to sit on the rights like a giant Mickey Mouse-eared Smaug.
"It's not like I could ever offer them enough money to make it worth their while for them," Gilbert reasoned back in 2012. "They just seem to be a company that hoards IP, and that kind of worries me.
"If it had been anyone else but Disney that bought them, I would try to go put together some money and buy them back. Because it's Disney, maybe not. But we'll see, you never know."