Hothead's Ron Gilbert

Season's greetings

As Gilbert's just mentioned, Deathspank is being released episodically, though there are no details yet on when or for which platforms. Penny Arcade Adventures, however, has been confirmed for episodic release on PC, Mac, Linux and Xbox Live Arcade this spring.

Versions for other platforms "may follow in the future", according to the Hothead rep. Apparently each PAA episode will feature between eight and 10 hours of gameplay. They will be released "more frequently than Half-Life 2 episodes, but less frequently than Sam & Max".

Speaking of which, Gilbert is supportive of Telltale's attempt to boost the adventure genre and episodic gaming with S&M. "That's driven a lot of interest. A lot of people are talking about adventure games again," he says.

"Episodic is a new genre and I think a lot of publishers don't really understand it. Financially there are a lot of good signs but it's not really proven, so you get a lot of big publishers - your EAs, Activisions, Ubisofts - they're just not ready to pour money into it yet.

"But I think with the success of Hothead and Telltale, you're going to see people paying a lot more attention. Gamers don't quite understand it yet so there's a little bit of scepticism, but this will change and it's going to be a very popular genre in the future."

The advantage of creating an episodic game, Gilbert observes, is that you can take more chances. "The game industry is very risk-averse right now, because you're spending 10 or 20 million dollars to market a game... With episodic games, you can spend a lot less money so you can try a whole bunch of different things. I think you're going to see a lot more creativity, a lot more different types of games coming out."

He's also keen on the way episodic gaming allows designers to tell a story from start to finish. "A lot of games being played today, nobody even finishes. 15 per cent of people see the ending. Episodic gives me the chance to tell a nice, compact story, and I know almost every single person is going to see the end. That's really appealing to me."

The plot thickens

But do gamers want to be told stories? After all, the adventure genre is not as popular as it once was. At this year's GDC, Dave Jones of Realtime Worlds spoke of his belief that storytelling should be left to books and movies. Unsurprisingly, Gilbert disagrees.

"I think that's completely unfair. The main reason games don't do stories well is we don't have good storytellers. That gets lumped in, 'Well, games don't know how to tell good stories.' Well, no, games can tell stories, but you have to tell good ones.

"And you can't just tell a straight, linear story like you can in a movie," he continues. "If you do that in a game, you end up with a bunch of action sequences with a bunch of cut-scenes breaking them up. That's the wrong way to go."

Instead, Gilbert argues, game designers should look back at the adventure games of old and understand how they told stories. "The way adventure games work with puzzles, it's just a wonderful skeleton to hang a story on. I think a lot of designers today don't understand it or they forgot it. Deathspank and Penny Arcade Adventures are going back to those roots."

If people liked those old adventure games so much, why isn't the genre as strong today? "It's not stories that people don't want. We as human beings crave stories," says Gilbert. "Adventure games did a really good job of telling them, but as graphics got better, the games industry became more action-oriented." The solution, he believes, is to blend core adventure game elements with other genres, such as RPG. "When you start to see the melding of that in a lot more genres, the story really can work."

If anyone can kickstart the adventure game genre, it ought to be the man who made some of its most popular titles. You know, Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series. At this stage, it looks like Penny Arcade Adventures will satisfy the demands of Gabe and Tycho fans, if not hardcore adventure gamers. For them there's Deathspank - but we'll need to see the game in action before judging whether Gilbert has still got it.