When Ron Gilbert revealed his upcoming rogue-like RPG Death By Scrolling at Gamescom Opening Night Live earlier this year, we have to say we were a little confused.
Prior to the announcement, the Monkey Island creator had previously teased on social media that he was working on a new Zelda-like RPG that he was describing as "Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park". However, upon seeing Death By Scrolling in action for the very first time in the game's initial trailer, it was clear that the title had undergone some noticeable changes behind the scenes, instead becoming more of an action-oriented title than was originally conceived.
Until now, we had simply assumed that Gilbert had experienced a change of heart behind the scenes and had retooled the design to match this bold new vision, but according to the developer, in a new interview with Ars Technica, it appears that there were also some economic reasons responsible for this change, with the developer being unable to raise the cash to fund the original idea.
Speaking to the Ars Technica senior gaming editor Kyle Orland, Gilbert said, “I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that. You know, it’s either a passion project you spent 10 years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
Gilbert apparently tried to get external funding from a publisher to help ease the financial burden, but apparently, this proved much harder than he had originally anticipated, with a top-down action RPG proving a tricky game to sell to potential investors at this moment in time.
Gilbert said, "Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘We’re gonna make $100 million, and it’s worth investing in'. The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this.”
As a result, Gilbert ended up having to make some changes to increase the game's commercial appeal, which is when he remembered an old prototype he created back in 2019, called Runner, which focused on the player having to outrun the bottom of the screen.
Believing this to be just the ticket, he set about combining some of the same core concepts from this prototype with art recycled from his failed RPG, in order to create something he felt would have a better chance of selling.
This is what has finally resulted in Death By Scrolling, a game where the player has to race through purgatory, killing enemies, and collecting items, while outrunning the Grim Reaper.
Death By Scrolling is out now on Steam and is priced at £6.69. You can read more of Ars Technica's interview with Gilbert here.