Maniac Mansion: Revisiting a LucasArts Point and Click Classic

Join Kosta Andreadis as he plays through some of the most seminal adventure games of all time over the course of 2014. Previous instalments took us through King's Quest 1-3 and Space Quest 1-2. You can read them all here.

In the mid-1980s Apple, IBM, and Atari were a big deal, but they weren’t the only kids on the block. There was another mass market computer available, and it was outselling all of them. That device - the Commodore 64 - was a modular computer that could be expanded in a number of ways - from floppy drives to printers - and could even plug directly into TV sets, where it operated as a sort of home computer/console hybrid.

Great system... (less so for those of us lumped with the tape drive).

First released in 1982, the Commodore 64 survived throughout most of the decade, and was home to many classic game releases, including two notable adventure games from Lucasfilm Games. Still a relatively small studio – and a few years away from being renamed LucasArts - its adventure games would feel and play very differently compared to those from other developers like Sierra.

When the Lucasfilm Games division opened in the early ‘80s, its objective was to create new interactive gaming experiences autonomously, without utilising any of the brands associated with its bearded benefactor, such as Star Wars or Indiana Jones. You may find yourself shocked to hear this fact, and indeed, you may now be wondering whether this was a nobler time; a time when Mr Beardy was more artistically and creatively inclined.

You’d be wrong, of course, as one of the key reasons the studio couldn’t touch these franchises was because they’d already been licensed elsewhere. Hardly a surprising approach for George Lucas, as anyone who lived through the Star Wars prequel hype can attest. Before The Phantom Menace’s film release in 1999 you could buy everything from Darth Maul-branded Official Pyjamas of the Sith Lords (TM) through to a bewildering array of Jar Jar Binks Mesa No Wanta a Baby Jimmy Hats (TM).

We should be thankful - it could easily have been another part of his anatomy as a lollipop.

The man is no stranger to the cash-in, in other words, but hey, it worked out well for Lucasfilm Games. Instead of releasing a string of obvious Star Wars branded games, the studio worked on experimental prototypes; games that featured players flying spacecraft without the option to fire at enemies (Rescue on Fractalus!), and others that fused soccer, basketball and the 25th century (Ballblazer). This autonomous creative focus within Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts would last well into the ‘90s, and many of the studio’s critical and commercial successes would come from its adventure games.

Funnily enough, Lucasfilm Games’ first foray into the genre was actually based on a license – Labyrinth. This 1986 film was the quintessential Jim Henson creation and ripe for adaptation as an adventure game. For those that haven’t seen it, Labyrinth starred David Bowie as the evil Goblin King (although his rather revealing tights were arguably the real star of the show), a young Jennifer Connelly, a urinating Muppet, and a bog of eternal stench.

This cover clearly needs more Bowie.

The creatively-titled Labyrinth: The Computer Game had a slightly different interface to many of its peers, allowing players to cycle through the available verbs and the resulting nouns on-screen to perform in-game actions - as opposed to typing them out.

This would serve as something of a precursor to the studio’s well-known SCUMM engine, where a list of actions and available items are represented at the bottom of the screen, all selectable via the mouse or joystick. In a text parser if the player got the naming wrong the desired outcome could be missed entirely, with a command like “Push Grey Round Thingy” returning a message like “You can’t do that” or “I do not understand” or “What in the heck are you talking about bub?” because you didn’t type “Push Boulder” or “Push Rock”.

By introducing a cursor to uncover key hotspots around the screen, this would alleviate any confusion as to what players could interact with, and in turn coined the phrase “point-and-click”.

It would also help those with vocabulary problems, like the dude in that one example a few sentences ago; the one who didn’t even know what a boulder was.

FYI.

The Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion, or SCUMM, was developed by Lucasfilm Games employee Ron Gilbert as a tool to create a graphical adventure game using this point-and-click approach within a reasonable timeframe and with a very small team. The idea for Maniac Mansion existed well before it was to become an adventure game, however, as designers Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick looked to create something set within a large mansion based on their mutual love of horror films and B-movies from the 1950s.

With the Lucasfilm Games division moving to Skywalker Ranch in the mid-80s they were able to use its architectural design in very literal ways as they mapped out the different rooms that would be available to players. Having only worked on porting other Lucasfilm Games up to this point they went about creating outlandish scenarios involving meteors, radioactive material, evil scientists and countless objects all without knowing how the game would actually play… other than the fact that players could walk around a mansion and do various things with a cast of multiple characters.

Looks like a good group.

It was when Ron Gilbert came across the original King’s Quest that the idea to turn all their disparate ideas into a single adventure game took shape, albeit one without the parser interface. In the mid-‘80s the adventure game was still better known for being primarily text-based so this introduction to a graphical adventure where the character could move around the screen was a revelation, and Maniac Mansion became an exploration-driven, puzzle-oriented game as a result.

Working with the Commodore 64 hardware, creating the SCUMM engine and wrangling the surprising complexity of the initial game design into a playable form took a lot longer than expected. In the end, Maniac Mansion took over two years to develop and release, but the groundwork was laid, and subsequent SCUMM games would benefit greatly.

One of the key differences between a LucasArts adventure game during the studio's heyday (that being most of the ‘90s) and those of, say, Sierra, was the fact that you couldn’t die or miss picking up an item, forcing the player into some sort of an endgame scenario. If you've read any of the previous entries in this series you'll know how big a deal that was for the genre.

Maniac Mansion, being one of Lucasfilm Games’ first forays into the genre and featuring three playable characters that you choose to control from a pool of seven (many with their own distinct traits), had a foot in both worlds. There are at least a couple of endgame scenarios you can come across, with characters you control even able to die – albeit humorously. Strangely, this is not a huge detriment to the overall experience, thanks to the non-linear design and focus on experimentation.