Ron foresaw future

Bloody Eugene

From ( Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It ) written by Ron Gilbert in 1989:

"For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for their money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve. If I could have my way, I'd design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I'd just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players patience. "

Do anyone recognize Telltale's dogma?

pilouuuu

I think Telltale is fairly good in presenting a concentrated experience. Maybe they just need to get rid of the mazes and it seems no one noticed but they already got rid of the mini games from Sam & Max concentrating solely in the puzzles, which are fairly logical and well designed IMO.

Sir Pantalones

This is very familiar outside of the adventure genre to me. Braid and Portal are just like that; short, intense and varied in puzzle solving.
Yet even though you could probably finish both during the same day, they're both games that I would recommend to anybody, and look back at and appreciate.

Short, intense and less expensive games for the win.

Iron Curtain

For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for their money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve.

It sounds like he's talking about LeChuck's Revenge.

Yes, I went there.

Will

Bloody Eugene wrote: »

From ( Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It ) written by Ron Gilbert in 1989:

"For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for their money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve. If I could have my way, I'd design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I'd just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players patience. "

Do anyone recognize Telltale's dogma?

I'd say Ron himself accomplished this goal before we even existed, albeit for a slightly different audience. Go back and play the Humongous games and you will see that most of them fit into this description remarkably well.

I suppose that's part of the benefit of dealing video games for youngish children; they don't have any sort of preconceived notion of what a game is. To then a game doesn't have to be 40 hours long and use this particular UI for that particular genre. It is what it is. This of course has it's own benefits and advantages, but that's a discussion for another college degree.

Lennie Melvin

Ahhh, I used to play Freddi Fish all the time when I was a kid... never suspecting that Mr. Gilbert had anything to do with it - until today!

That's actually kinda weird now that I think about it.