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Maniac Mansion
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Maniac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games (now known as LucasArts). 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.
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Encyclopedia
Maniac Mansion is a graphical adventure game originally released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games (now known as LucasArts). 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. It was the game for which the SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion") engine was created and named after, which went on to be used by LucasArts for ten more years to create 13 original titles. It is the first game to feature Chuck the Plant (who is found in the library). The character appears in two other LucasArts adventure games, as well as several games by other publishers.
Plot summary
It has been twenty years, to the day, since a mysterious purple meteor came hurtling out of the sky and made a large crater in the front lawn of a huge Victorian-era mansion belonging to the Edison family. Dr. Fred, his wife Nurse Edna, and their son Edward "Weird Ed" Edison were reclusive people who left the house very rarely, but the meteor's arrival brought about a strange change in Dr. Fred and the family were seen even less, and even their mansion has fell into disrepair. Lately, patients from the local hospital have begun to disappear without trace.
Now, a local teenage cheerleader, Sandy Pantz, has been kidnapped. Dave Miller, her boyfriend, saw her being carried off to the Edison's mansion and has gathered a few of his college pals on a rescue mission to invade the mansion and save Sandy. 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 a parody of the horror B-movie genre, featuring a secret lab, disembodied tentacles, and an evil mastermind.
Gameplay
Maniac Mansion was notable for its multiple possible endings, depending on which characters the player used (and which ones survived) and what those characters did. For instance, you can send the adversary off into space, or have him arrested by the Meteor Police, or make him famous by having his autobiography published, or, in some versions, feed him to the mutant plant. Unusual for Lucas games, it is possible to get the player characters killed, and the loss of all characters also loses the game.
The game was somewhat notorious for featuring red herrings, such as a chainsaw for which there was no fuel, despite many wishful rumours to the contrary. 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. Another red herring is the staircase in the library (with a sign reading "staircase out of order") that appears to be a puzzle, but in fact there is no way to fix it or cross it.
The manual for the NES version is available online.
Cast
Playable characters
Maniac Mansion has a total of seven possible player characters. The player controls Dave, the main protagonist, and two other characters, chosen from six additional characters, each of whom has their own distinct skills and quirks:
- Dave Miller, a James Dean-type character; in some artwork for the game he resembles Michael J Fox from the Back to the Future films. Dave, although not particularly talented or useful, is Sandy's boyfriend and has organized the rescue and as such is a mandatory character and is automatically selected.
- Syd, an aspiring New Wave musician. He specializes in musical instruments.
- Michael F. Stoppe, an African-American amateur photographer, aspiring to be a professional photographer. He works for the college newspaper and is able to develop film.
- Wendy, an aspiring novelist with talent for writing and editing documents.
- Bernard Bernoulli, a nerd suffering from overwhelming cowardice (he runs away from Green Tentacle until another character makes friends with it). He has the most skills of any character in the game, as he can disassemble the radio in the den, fix the HAM radio, and fix the telephone in the library. His presence in the game, although optional like the rest of the kids, is significant (and perhaps canonical) because he reappears in Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle as the main playable character.
- Razor, a female punk rocker. Her talents are identical to Syd's, even the ability to microwave Weird Ed's Hamster. She was based on Gary Winnick's girlfriend. Her band, Razor and the Scummettes, is referred to in Zak McKracken. She reappears as a member of "The Vultures" biker gang in the 1995 SCUMM game Full Throttle.
- Jeff Woodie, a "surfer dude", is the least talented character of the group after Dave, as his only ability is to repair the telephone, which Bernard can also do. However, the game is still completable as Jeff. The only other quality he has is that, as he lacks shoes, he doesn't make the same "walking sound" the other characters do.
The Edisons
The titular mansion is owned by Dr. Fred Edison and his bizarre family. Most of the Edisons pose a threat and will throw the player into the dungeon (or kill them, in some instances) if they are spotted. The exceptions are Weird Ed, who can be coerced into helping the player, and the relatively harmless Green Tentacle.
- Dr. Fred, the patriarch of the family and a mad scientist. Although he periodically wanders through the house to talk to other family members, the player can only reach him if they breach the inner lab at the basement of the mansion. Formerly a quack with medical degrees from correspondence courses, some of his greatest creations are living, disembodied tentacles, and the Zom-B-Matic machine, which the Murderous Purple Slimy Meteor uses to control him through mind control.
- Nurse Edna, Dr. Fred's wife, a gruesome, lusty nurse in to S&M. 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 macropalegic son, is a survivalist paramilitary maniac with a hair-trigger temper and an obsession with his pet hamster. In one notorious sequence (which is not needed to complete the game), the player can actually steal the hamster, microwave it, and then give its remains to Ed; prompting Ed to kill the offending character.
- Dead Cousin Ted, Edna's cousin, is a mummified corpse with his own private gym, pornographic magazine collection, and a sarcophagus equipped with a television set.
- Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle, a pair of ambulatory talking, brightly colored tentacles. Green is an aspiring rock-and-roll musician and manic depressive, who doesn't really want to follow Doctor Fred's orders. It is possible to get Green Tentacle to kill one of the players, by having him listen to an audio recording of "Tentacle Mating Calls". Doing so causes Green Tentacle to go into a frenzy; the screen will then cut to the dead player's tombstone. He will also react badly to anyone who presents a recording contract made out to them (by killing that character out of jealousy) or a publishing contract made out to the meteor. The Purple Tentacle is Doctor Fred's easily-fooled henchman who guards the lab.
- The Murderous Purple Slimy Meteor is an evil, intelligent meteor from outer space who is on the run from the "Meteor Police" for the past two decades, during which time it has been hiding out in the Edison's mansion. It is also ultimately revealed to have coerced Doctor Fred into a life of villainy via mind control through his Zom-B-Matic machine. Should the player try to approach the meteor without first having acquired a hazmat suit, the meteor will kill the player by firing a lethal dose of radiation at them. The exact means of dealing with the meteor remain up to the player; amongst his several fates are banishment to outer space, death, life imprisonment by the "Meteor Police", and an appearance on late-night television with a David Letterman parody.
Reception
Maniac Mansion was well received by critics. Computer Gaming World praised the game for being "composed in the best comic horror tradition".
Versions and ports
The game was originally released for the Commodore 64 and was the first game to use the SCUMM engine, allowing relatively quick ports to other platforms. The project leader was Ron Gilbert, and the game was designed by Gilbert and Gary Winnick. The game was scripted by Ron Gilbert and David Fox. Versions for the Apple II, Amiga, and Atari ST computers were also released.
Maniac Mansion was ported to the PC with EGA graphics in 1988 (though it was also compatible with CGA and Hercules graphics).
In 1988, Jaleco released an uncensored version of the game for the Famicom in Japan; this version, however, featured vastly inferior graphics, with simplified non-scrolling backgrounds (many of the rooms, which featured elaborate details such as photographs and wallpaper patterns in Western versions of the game, were here presented as solid-colored screens devoid of anything except objects necessary to complete the game) and characters redrawn in a more cartoon-like, super deformed style (apparently an attempt to make the game more palatable to Japanese audiences; many of the characters ended up looking like blocks with faces). Due to the nature of the Famicom market in Japan, Jaleco was a game cartridge manufacturer, and Nintendo's censorship was never needed. However, this version used excessively long passwords which were 104 characters long to save progress.
In 1989, an enhanced version of Maniac Mansion for the PC with improved graphics was released.
There was a sitcom of the same name, very loosely based on the game, which aired from 1990 to 1993 on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel in the United States.
In 2004, fans released a remake called Maniac Mansion Deluxe, which runs under Windows, features heavily enhanced graphics, music throughout the whole game (borrowed from Day of the Tentacle), and fixes some bugs and inconsistencies found in the original release of the game. Furthermore, some changes were implemented, such as a slightly harder puzzle to remove the paint blotch on the fourth floor.
NES port and The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion
In 1990, a version was published for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America and Europe, but in a heavily censored form in order to comply with Nintendo of America (NoA) and Nintendo of Europe's policy. However, NoA initially overlooked the ability to microwave the hamster to death. Many thousand copies of Maniac Mansion had shipped before NoA noticed and demanded its removal. However, as there was no second printing of the game, all North American cartridges include the "hamster" and the "microwave". The PAL region NES cartridges of Maniac Mansion have the hamster-microwaving ability removed.
In the early 1990s, programmer Douglas Crockford, the man in charge of porting the game to the NES, wrote a memoir entitled , which detailed his struggles with Nintendo of America during the process of converting the game. Throughout the early 1990s, the essay turned up in photocopy form and on numerous electronic mailing lists, eventually becoming widely available on several websites. In the essay, Crockford details the strict policy that NoA enforced in the early 1990s regarding its video games; essentially, he felt the policy held that all video games had to be completely family oriented, and could not contain anything that anyone could find offensive in any way (such as religious references, foul language, violence, or sexuality). While Crockford expressed an agreement or even understanding with removing some material—notably, Edna's sexually-oriented threats to characters—he documents other demands of Nintendo's as either absurd or inconsistent; for example, Crockford claims that most Nintendo games contain violence, including the Super Mario games, “and the only motivation [for killing enemies] is that they are there.” He also documents how he justified keeping in a nude statue in the Edisons' art gallery by claiming that it was modeled on a real Michelangelo sculpture; NoA acquiesced, on the condition that Crockford remove non-existent pubic hair from the statue; because this could not be done, Crockford was ultimately forced to remove the image.
See also
External links
- Entry of the Amiga version in HOL
- ScummVM
- by Douglas Crockford, who participated in the conversion of the game to the NES
- by Douglas Crockford on
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