Ron Gilbert gives new details about The Cave

The Cave was announced to be in development for the Wii U a few months ago and will be available on the Wii U eShop. Game director Ron Gilbert recently participated in a reader Q and A session about the platformer, revealing a few details about the story and gameplay. Here are a few excerpts.



I see that [The Cave] will have dragons and a climate medieval, but at the same time with technology and soda machines. What is the storyline of the game?
Ron Gilbert: The story is about a sentient talking cave that draws people to it so they can enter and hopefully discover something about themselves. Of course, we should all be careful what we ask about ourselves. We might not like what we find. As to why there is soda machines and dragons in the same game? Prove they didn’t exist at the same time. Exactly.


How did the concept for this game come about?
Ron Gilbert: It’s an idea I’ve had for going on 25 years and predates Maniac Mansion. The original idea was about three explorers that find this odd cave and go inside and learn some dark things about who they are. Over the years I’ve slowly worked on the story and I’ve always wanted to revisit choosing three characters from a group of seven like I did in Maniac Mansion.


We’ve heard a bit about the character of the Timer Traveler — did you always know you wanted to incorporate ‘time’ as a way to deal with puzzles, and did that open up other avenues in the game design?
Ron Gilbert: I wanted to have The Time Traveler just because I thought it would be fun to have a time traveler. Once we start designing the game it became clear we need to play with her ability to travel in time. When you play her, you get to travel to the prehistoric past and into the far future and explore how the causality of time really works.


The Cave will be released on the Wii U, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in "early 2013." If you want to read the Q & A session in its entirety, you may do so via the source link below.

Source: Sega