Maniac Mansion

This article is about the video game. For the television series, see Maniac Mansion (TV series).

Maniac Mansion
Artwork of a vertical rectangular box. The top portion reads "Maniac Mansion" with a group of five teenagers in the foreground and dark landscape in the background. The first teenager is a blond male dressed in a black suit, the second a brunette male in a denim jacket and pants, the third, a black-haired male with glasses and a flashlight, the fourth a red-haired female in a black dress and spiked choker, and the fifth a male with long, blond hair holding a surfboard.
Ken Macklin's cover artwork depicts five of the playable characters: Syd, Dave, Bernard, Razor, and Jeff.
Developer(s)Home computers
Lucasfilm Games
NES
LucasArts[2]
Realtime Associates[3]
Publisher(s)Lucasfilm Games
Jaleco (NES and Famicom)
Designer(s)Ron Gilbert
Gary Winnick
Programmer(s)Ron Gilbert
David Fox
Carl Mey
Artist(s)Gary Winnick
Composer(s)Chris Grigg
David Lawrence
NES
David Warhol
George Sanger
David Hayes
Dave Govett
Tsukasa Tawada (Famicom)[4]
Amiga
Brian Hales
EngineSCUMM
Platform(s)Commodore 64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, NES, Famicom, Classic Mac OS
ReleaseC64, Apple II
October 5, 1987[1]
MS-DOS
March 12, 1988
December 31, 1989 (enhanced version)
NES
  • JP: June 23, 1988
  • NA: September 18, 1990
  • EU: October 22, 1992
Amiga, ST
July 26, 1989
Genre(s)Graphic adventure
Mode(s)Single-player

Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It follows teenage protagonist Dave Miller as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sandy Pantz from a mad scientist, whose mind has been enslaved by a sentient meteor. The player uses a point-and-click interface to guide Dave and two of his six playable friends through the scientist's mansion while solving puzzles and avoiding dangers. Gameplay is non-linear, and the game must be completed in different ways based on the player's choice of characters. Initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, Maniac Mansion was Lucasfilm Games' first self-published product.

The game was conceived in 1985 by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who sought to tell a comedic story based on horror film and B-movie clichés. They mapped out the project as a paper-and-pencil game before coding commenced. While earlier adventure titles had relied on command lines, Gilbert disliked such systems, and he developed Maniac Mansion's simpler point-and-click interface as a replacement. To speed up production, he created a game engine called SCUMM, which was used in many later LucasArts titles. After its release, Maniac Mansion was ported to several platforms. A port for the Nintendo Entertainment System had to be reworked heavily, in response to Nintendo of America's concerns that the game was inappropriate for children.[5]

Maniac Mansion was critically acclaimed: reviewers lauded its graphics, cutscenes, animation, and humor. Writer Orson Scott Card praised it as a step toward "computer games [becoming] a valid storytelling art". It influenced numerous graphic adventure titles, and its point-and-click interface became a standard feature in the genre. The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as a serious rival to adventure game studios such as Sierra On-Line. In 1990, Maniac Mansion was adapted into a three-season television series of the same name, written by Eugene Levy and starring Joe Flaherty. A sequel to the game, Day of the Tentacle, was released in 1993.

  1. ^ "Retrodiary". Retro Gamer (120). Bournemouth, United Kingdom: Imagine Publishing: 13. September 2013.
  2. ^ Crockford, Douglas. "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion". Archived from the original on October 12, 2007. Retrieved August 3, 2005.
  3. ^ "Past Projects: Maniac Mansion". Realtime Associates. Archived from the original on February 7, 2011.
  4. ^ Maniac Mansion (FC) Credits Screenshot - VGMPF
  5. ^ "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion". www.crockford.com. Archived from the original on 2007-10-12. Retrieved 2016-05-30.