Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games. Maniac Mansion has become known among video game players and programmers for its highly acclaimed gameplay and its introduction of new ideas into gaming, including multiple possible endings, multiple user-selectable characters with significantly different abilities, and critical clues contained in numerous cut scenes.

Plot summary[]

At the start of the game, the hero, Dave Miller, finds that his girlfriend, Sandy Pantz, has been abducted by Dr. Fred Edison, and sets out to save her, with two of his friends. The player could select the friends from a group of six, and the game would play somewhat differently depending on which friends were selected. The game was clearly a parody of the horror B-movie genre, featuring a secret lab, leftover tentacles, and an evil mastermind.

Characters[]

Dave Miller is the main character, looking for his girlfriend.
Bernard Bernoulli is a nerd capable of disassembling complex electronics but suffering from overwhelming cowardice. He reappears in Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle as the main playable character.
Razor is a female punk rocker, talented on many instruments.
Wendy is an aspiring novelist with talent for writing.
Jeff Woodie is a surfer.
Syd is a New Wave musician.
Michael F. Stoppe is a photographer.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In addition to the playable characters, Doctor Fred and Sandy, a number of other colorful characters (metaphorically and literally) populate the mansion in the Maniac Mansion games.

Nurse Edna, a gruesome nurse, is Doctor Fred's wife. When one of the male characters is captured by her, she locks them in the dungeon while lamenting, "How silly of me. I should have tied you to my bed!" Female characters are given the ominous, "You're lucky you're not a boy, or you'd be in BIG trouble right now!"
Weird Ed, Fred and Edna's son, is a survivalist paramilitary maniac with a hair-trigger temper and an obsession with his pet hamster.
Dead Cousin Ted, Edna's cousin, is a mummified corpse with his own private gym.
Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle, a pair of talking, brightly colored tentacles, are probably the two most memorable of the mansion residents. Green is an aspiring rock-and-roll musician while Purple is Doctor Fred's easily impressed henchman.
Purple Meteor is an evil, intelligent meteor from outer space who is ultimately revealed to have coerced Doctor Fred into a life of villainy via mind control.

Easter Eggs[]

In the mansion's kitchen, a chainsaw for which there was no fuel can be found. In one of the in-jokes that are a hallmark of the LucasArts adventure games, the second SCUMM game, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, contains some fuel "for chainsaws only", but no chainsaw. Plus, in a later remake of the Maniac Mansion game, the heroes can read a poster of the Zak McKracken game in the arcade room, and say "I wonder what was the use of the gas can on Mars?".

In another reference, the entire game is contained within its sequel, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, on a computer in the bedroom of one of the characters.

Another is the staircase in the library (with a sign, 'staircase out of order') that appears to be a puzzle, but in fact there is no way to fix it or cross it (to fix it, a saw to procure some wood planks would have been needed...).

Maniac Mansion was also the first game to feature Chuck the Plant (found in the library); Chuck is later found in just about every other LucasArts adventure game, and several games by other publishers.

Development[]

The designers were Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick.^[1] Gilbert decided to create his adventure game for the single reason that he loved the premise of adventures but hated the practical implementation of contemporary text adventures that left much to be desired for. With his own adventure game, Gilbert wished to fix the things he hated: guess the verb situations, frequent accidental deaths, and other things that distract from the story and the puzzles.^[2]

The imagined game, having simultaneous events running, was too complex for conventional programming languages, and Gilbert proceeded with creating SCUMM as a design/scripting tool to ease its development.^[2] Gilbert initially had a concept for a sci-fi horror game with the proposed title I was a Teenage Lobot; the proposal (signed by Gilbert, David Fox and Noah Falstein) was given in late 1985 but it never materialized.^[3]^[4]

Gilbert and Winnick discussed about something out of their love for B movies; Winnick made a concept art of a creepy mansion with a warning sign "Trespassers will be horribly mutilated". Gilbert imagined a typical slasher story that parodies the clichéd of teen horror film, where the protagonists explore a dangerous place where they split up and are killed in sequence. After a playable paper version, they proposed their design to the company in 1986 and it was approved by Steve Arnold. While they were both co-designers of the game, Gilbert was involved in the programming while Winnick in the artwork. It was the first game-design credit for both.^[5]^[4]

Arnold, Gilbert and Winnick presented the idea to Electronic Arts, which was Lucasfilm Games's funding partner and disributor; the upper management was skeptical about a comedy-horror game and refused to fund it. Arnold however was confident to the idea and decided to self-publish the title. As such, Lucasfilm became a publisher with Maniac Mansion being the first self-published game.^[4]

Gilbert asked David Fox to do the scripting (programming what happens when a door opens or an object is taken or an llight switch is used, expecting to take 2-3 weeks, but the whole job took 4 months. The whole programming took 1.5 year.^[2]

One of the things Gilbert wanted to do to make the player's experience less distracting, was to make the characters walk directly to the place they were pointed at, walking around obstacles.^[2]

Gilbert wrote the game on a Lucasfilm computer named Kessel (after the w:c:starwars:planet of the same name mentioned in Star Wars).^[4] The game was developed for C64, DOS, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST and released also in German, Spanish and French languages.^[1]

For a reissued edition, the back of the box was to feature a photo of an eerie hallway, being from a constructed scale model. Steve Purcell was commissioned to do a tiny painting of the Edison family to be hung in the model. It was later considered cheaper to just make a full-sized painting and feature just this. Purcell created the 2x3ft oil painting (family portrait with the Man-eating plant and Green Tentacle in the background) inspired a bit by Disney's Haunted Mansion, and was used as box art for the back of the box.^[6]

There were further releases (some made by fans) for Windows (Deluxe, Meteor mess 3d), AmigaOS and MACOS

NES version[]

In early 1989 Lucasfilm Games contacted President of Jaleco USA Howie Rubin to convert it for Nintendo. Rubin found the request strange for the Nintendo market but found interesting some elements of the successful game interesting. For five days Rubin's sales director Carol Seitz and her admin assistant Doris Skaja played fervently for five days, until they agreed it would be a hit. The production of the cartridge was expensive as it needed to accomodate 2 megabits of data for all the rooms, sprites and alternate endings, and because of its length, it needed a lithium battery for save option.^[1]