Tales of Monkey Island interview - Ron Gilbert involved but no Tim Shaffer, still not set release for WiiWare version

A portion of a Eurogamer interview with Telltale’s Dave Grossman…

Eurogamer: You mentioned Ron Gilbert there who, along with Tim Schafer, played a key role in the Monkey Island series. What have they had to say about Tales of Monkey Island? Are they helping?

Dave Grossman: Ron did. As soon as I was allowed to tell anyone I called Ron on the phone, because I know the series does mean a lot to him, and he was the original guiding force behind the first games. He looked around and said, “Could I come down there and brainstorm with you?” And I was like, “Great! That is absolutely the best thing you could do.”

So he came down and spent the better part of a week with us, just tossing around ideas. We bounced the broad-story stuff off of him; he had some comments about how we were handling Elaine in our first draft that got us to make some changes; and probably a few of his bubbles are in there as well. He had to go back to his regular job as the creative director at Hothead where he’s doing his own game Deathspank, which also looks pretty cool. But he did get his chance to put his two-cents in.

I didn’t wind up calling Tim because getting Ron involved turned out to be so much trouble - there’s a lot of legal wrangling around that. I figured if I’m just going to be able to pick one of them, then it’s going to be Ron.

Eurogamer: The first episode, “Launch of the Screaming Narwhal”, launches for PC on 7th July. When are they going to appear on WiiWare?

Dave Grossman: We don’t actually have a WiiWare date yet. We’re shooting to make them as close to simultaneous as possible. There are many factors involved with that as there’s a third party involved, so I’m not exactly sure how that will turn out.