Ron Gilbert

Early career

Ronald David Gilbert was raised in La Grande, Oregon. He is the son of David E. Gilbert, a physics professor and former president of Eastern Oregon University (then Eastern Oregon State College). Initially, he thought of himself going into a career for film direction. He became interested in games when he was thirteen years old, thanks to a HP-65 programmable calculator his father used to bring home. He found the ability to program games on the calculator interesting, citing an example of a Battleship-like game that was included on the calculator, leading him wanting to learn how to program other games. Gilbert saw the potential to program games as a creative outlet as he continued his studies towards the film industry. Another thing that made him approach the gaming world was the film Star Wars (1977). His fascination with programming technology, which allowed gamers to interact with characters and situations, mixed with his love for telling stories, like that of "Star Wars", were his main inspirations to start making games.

The impact of Star Wars and his love for telling stories was so big that Ron Gilbert, at the age of fourteen, and his good friend Tom McFarlane made a couple of films on a Super-8 camera. The first film they shot in 1978 was Stars Blasters; it was directed by Ron Gilbert and acted by McFarlane and friend Frank Lang. In 1979, they filmed another movie, Tomorrow Never Came, acted by Ron Gilbert, Tom McFarlane; it was also directed by Ron Gilbert.

In 1979, his parents purchased a NorthStar Horizon home computer. At the age of fifteen, he took his first steps in game programming. He used to study and analyze games for hours; capturing in his mind every frame of the layout of games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders or Robotron: 2084; taking notes of every detail and then trying to replicate them on his computer. Once the games were replicated, he would start doing experiments with them, adding changes. He also used to look at Atari 2600 games' advertisements in magazines, then imagined what the game was like to play and tried to make them on his computer. Once the games were finished, he used to bring his friends home to test the games and tell him what they did or did not like.