Ron Gilbert Wants to Make Another Pixel Adventure Game

It's been a long time since Ron Gilbert's made a classic adventure game, but that might be changing, assuming you want to help kick a few bucks his way. Gilbert and Gary Winnick co-created Maniac Mansion, and want to fund a spiritual successor called Thimbleweed Park on Kickstarter.

The duo are asking for $375,000 to develop Thimbleweed Park. It's slightly ambitious, given some recent high-profile misfires on the service. As of this writing, it's raised nearly $70,000. It'll probably be okay.

Thimbleweed Park is apparently a super weird place, and there's been a murder. Two detectives are sent to investigate, and players swap between the lives of five characters as the mysteries start to add up.

Unlike some other nostalgic trips on Kickstarter, Thimbleweed Park doesn't want to update adventure games for 2014 and beyond. No, Thimbleweed Park is meant to be a trip back to 1980s adventure game design in every sense of the word.

"Why do we want to make Thimbleweed Park?" reads the Kickstarter pitch. "Because we miss classic adventures and all their innocence and charm. They were fun and would put a smile on your face. We want to make one of those again and we want to do it right. We don’t want to make a game “inspired by,” or “paying homage to” classic point & click adventures, we want to make a real classic point & click adventure. Thimbleweed Park is a game for true lovers of adventure games. This is a Kickstarter for fans who loved Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and everything else that made that era great. It strips away all the cruft built up over the years and is distilled down to what we loved about the genre."

If funded, Thimbleweed Park's aiming for a release in June 2016 on PC, Mac, and Linux.

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