At PAX 2008, I had the honor of meeting Ron Gilbert, which was very exciting on both professional and personal levels; after all, he designed some of my favorite games, and had a huge influence on my childhood. Ron gave me a shirt for his upcoming game, DeathSpank (which is awesome to wear in public, since it says DeathSpank and has a picture of a thong on it); I was told that DeathSpank would be “a cross between Diablo and The Secret of Monkey Island”, making it a contender for best game ever. Nearly a year has passed, and there hasn’t been any news about the game’s development, so I was kind of worried that it would never actually come out.

While DeathSpank still hasn’t gotten a release window or anything of the sort, Ron Gilbert stated on his blog that footage of the game would be shown at PAX 2009. “And when I say ‘showing’, I really mean ‘showing’, like in ‘actual’ ‘game play’.” I suspected as much when it was announced that Gilbert would be giving the keynote at this year’s Penny Arcade Expo, but now it appears that Hothead is really moving forward with DeathSpank. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get a release date out of Gilbert and Hothead at PAX. We’ll find out in a few short weeks.