Under the American Surface: Early Explorations of Thimbleweed Park

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When I first sit down with Ron Gilbert to get a look at Thimbleweed Park, I have to take a moment to tell him that one of the formative gaming experiences of my life was 1988’s Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a Lucasfilm adventure game which David Fox, Ron Gilbert, and Gary Winnick, all people who are working on Thimbleweed Park, also worked on in various capacities. Not as beloved at the time or today as classics like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, it was McKracken’s somewhat off-putting oddity that drew me to it. 

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In Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the phone company is part of the aliens’ evil plot.

Predating the television series The X-Files by several years, McKracken tapped in to a similar sense of things rumored but unspoken, lurking under the surface of ordinary American life, that would later make that TV show so exciting. It was a world in which all the stuff on the cover of the supermarket tabloids was actually true: Elvis was alive (sort of), alien abductions were real, and that rock formation on Mars that looked like a face was indeed evidence of intelligent life on the red planet. This game influenced the way I saw the world. I became taken with the idea of much of American culture as a kind of façade, covering up all this unacknowledged strangeness underneath.

There’s a moment in my demo of Thimbleweed Park that gives me a similar feeling. Poking around the titular town in which two federal agents have arrived to investigate a body (a setup that makes Thimbleweed Park itself feel informed by The X-Files or perhaps by Twin Peaks), we enter a store whose signage suggests they sell cakes. But the store’s shelves display nary a cake. Instead, they’re filled with vacuum tubes, of all things. Immediately, I’m intrigued. I want to know what’s going on in this odd little town.

Gilbert says that it’s fun for him to write the story for a game like Thimbleweed Park, where “you have all these little threads going on and you’re trying to connect them in interesting ways.” While it’s obvious from looking at Thimbleweed Park’s interface that the game is deliberately trying to evoke the feel of games like Maniac Mansion, Gilbert hopes that the storytelling and game design will be significantly better. 

“We’re trying to create these games that feel like you remember those games,” he says, “not how they actually were.” Gilbert suggests that retaining the classic interface can give Thimbleweed Park a playful quality that’s lacking in some more modern adventure games, and when he talks about the pleasure of selecting verbs, and the presence of funny responses to some of your attempts to interact with the game world, I’m inclined to agree. 

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It’s a balancing act, though. Make things too modern and you lose the unique charm of early adventure games that Thimbleweed Park is striving for. “I think the challenge for us is, let’s take all the charming parts of those older games but let’s try to get rid of all the stupid stuff,” Gilbert says. “Let’s take a more modern approach to storytelling and puzzle-solving. I think players today, although they enjoy being challenged, they don’t want to be frustrated. I think you can do things even as simple as, when you get a piece of information from somebody, in the old games, you’d get that information and nobody would ever repeat it again. I think today, gamers expect that if they go back, information will be repeated for them, maybe something will be hinted a little bit. So we’ve done a lot of that stuff to move design and story elements in a more modern direction.”

Naturally Gilbert thinks about design issues like this a lot, but in addition, he and other members of the Thimbleweed Park team regularly share their thoughts and their progress in the game’s development blog. This post from last January, for instance, has Gilbert ruminating on the vastly different reactions to repetition from players of 1987’s Maniac Mansion and 2013’s The Cave, and considering how these changing sensibilities should impact the story structure of Thimbleweed Park

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Structure is a challenge when you’re designing a game with five playable characters, though you start out the game with access to just two: Ray, the more experienced, hard-boiled federal agent, and Reyes, the younger, seemingly more naïve junior officer. “The story is really about these two detectives,” Gilbert says. “They show up in the town of Thimbleweed because this body has been found under the river, and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. But the game isn’t really a detective game. It’s not a game where you’re hunting around finding clues. The body is just kind of this MacGuffin that gets everything rolling. As a matter of fact, the body is so unimportant that it stays in the river for the entire game and nobody bothers to come get it.”

The more interesting mystery may be why Ray and Reyes have really come to town, and in fact each of the five playable characters has their own story. The three key characters Ray and Reyes meet in Thimbleweed are all first introduced in playable flashbacks that set up their stories; then, later, they become characters you can switch to at will, and each has his or her own special talents. I play through the flashback that introduces us to Ransome the clown, whose insult humor is so insulting, Don Rickles might tell him to tone it down. As part of a performance that occurs during the flashback, Ransome turns his humor on the wrong target, and she curses him to never be able to take off his clown makeup or leave Thimbleweed.

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“In the game itself there are actually six stories going on,” Gilbert says. “There’s the main story of the game. Then each of the characters have their own story, and you can complete the main story without ever completing any of those stories. But if you want to, you can bring all the stories to completion and figure out, you know, can we redeem Ransome? Is he perpetually an asshole?”

For me, the most intriguing question is, How will Thimbleweed Park rise to the challenge of feeling the way I remember games like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, not how they actually were? I appreciate that Gilbert’s giving it a lot of thought, and I’m eager to see the results. At the risk of making a reference nobody will get, I’ll say that a game like Thimbleweed Park has the potential for me to be the game equivalent of a great Guided by Voices album: distinctly American, strange and beautiful, quirky and funny and haunting, daring and challenging and warm and accessible all at once.

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Near the end of the demo, agent Ray walks to the top of a vista from which we can see Thimbleweed Park sprawling below. “The town itself has ten or twelve locations,” Gilbert says, “but the whole world is huge. There’s this mansion that Delores lives in, there’s the pillow factory, the hotel, the circus, the radio station. All of these are areas you can explore.” The truth is that I’m not too concerned about the size of the game. What I like is the contrast, the way that from up here, the town looks lovely and almost normal, but when you’re down in it, you know it’s not. You can feel something strange in the air around you.

And I want to know what the deal is with those vacuum tubes.