December 4, 2025
He outran Death, not the drama
After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning Death
Fans freak over the title, mourn a scrapped RPG, and argue if anyone reads game dialogue
TLDR: Ron Gilbert, the Monkey Island creator, canned a too-big Zelda-like idea and launched a fast action game called Death by Scrolling. Comments swung from headline panic to mourning the scrapped RPG, while fans debated whether gamers skip stories or simply read fast, sharing classic Gilbert blog links.
The headline alone gave the internet a headline heart attack. “Outrunning Death” sounded like an obituary, and one fan confessed, “I thought he was dying,” before realizing it’s just Ron Gilbert’s new action game, Death by Scrolling—a fast, try-again shooter, not another chatty adventure. Then came the plot twist: Gilbert once chased a big, Zelda-style role-playing game but scrapped it when a tiny team couldn’t make the dream work. Cue instant grieving in the comments—“too bad… cancelled!”—for the epic that never was.
But the hottest brawl wasn’t about genres—it was about reading. Gilbert noted many players blast through dialogue; some took that as “people don’t care about story.” Commenter kentm struck back with a spicy counter: maybe gamers just read fast, especially those raised on text-heavy Japanese RPGs. In other words, speed doesn’t equal apathy.
Amid the drama, the nostalgia squad turned the thread into a guided tour, dropping links to Gilbert’s snarky home base grumpygamer.com and his delightful Thimbleweed Park dev blog. The vibe: laughter, whiplash, and love for a legend trying something new. The real question echoing through the comments: can the king of witty puzzles win hearts with pure reflexes?
Key Points
- •Ron Gilbert released Death by Scrolling in October, a rogue-lite action-survival pseudo-shoot-em-up.
- •He discussed the pivot from adventure games in an interview conducted from his home in New Zealand.
- •Gilbert’s prior reflex-oriented work includes Humongous Entertainment’s Backyard Sports and 2010’s Deathspank.
- •Modern action titles like Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and Dead Cells influenced his return to action design.
- •He prototyped a large open-world RPG inspired by The Legend of Zelda for about a year before shelving it due to limited resources.