Maniac Mansion

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.

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.

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. There is only one scenario in which you can actually "lose" the game; meaning all three of your characters are dead without destroying the mansion and, consequentially, Dr. Fred and the meteor. In this case two characters are drowned in the pool, leaving the last to confront Ed with the hamster remains.

The game was somewhat notorious for featuring famous '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. 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, 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.

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

Other characters

Unlike most adventure games, Maniac Mansion had several possible playable characters. The player controls Dave and two other characters, chosen from six additional characters, each of whom has their own distinct skills and quirks:

Bernard Bernoulli, a nerd capable of disassembling complex electronics but suffering from overwhelming cowardice (he runs away from Green Tentacle until another character makes friends with it). His presence in the game, although optional, like of the rest of the kids, is significant since he reappears in Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle as the main playable character.
Razor is a sexy female punk rocker, talented on many instruments. She was based on Gary Winnick's girlfriend. http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2005/07/the_making_ofma.php
Wendy is an aspiring novelist with talent for writing. Sheri Graner-Ray. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. p. 24, Charles River Media. Sep 1, 2003. ISBN 1584502398.
Jeff Woodie is a surfer (the most useless of the characters, as his only ability is to repair the telephone, which Bernard can also do).
Syd a New Wave musician, with the same abilities as Razor.
Michael F. Stoppe a photographer.

Dave, however, has no special talents of any kind on his own, and is only required on account of being Sandy's boyfriend.

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, lusty nurse into S&M, 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 macropalegic son, is a survivalist paramilitary maniac with a hair-trigger temper and an obsession with his pet hamster. In one notorious sequence, the player can actually steal the hamster, microwave it, and then give its remains to Ed--prompting Ed to kill the offending character. (In the NES version of the game, a glitch allows the character that Ed has killed to come back as a "ghost"-- the character's sprite does not appear, but can still be moved around the screen. It is possible to complete the game with this "ghost" character. However, in some later versions, particularly the NES PAL release, it is not possible to microwave the hamster).
Dead Cousin Ted, Edna's cousin, is a mummified corpse with his own private gym, nudie magazine collection, and a sarcophagus equipped with a television set.
Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle, a pair of ambulatory talking, brightly colored tentacles, are probably the two most memorable of the mansion residents; the second game is named for the latter. Green is an aspiring rock-and-roll musician and a manic depressive, and Purple is Doctor Fred's easily-impressed henchman. They may possibly be a spoof of Thing, the ambulatory hand from The Addams Family
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; the exact means of dealing with the Meteor remain up to the player: amongst his several fates are death, life imprisonment by an alien police, or an appearance on late-night television with a Johnny Carson parody

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.

Maniac Mansion was ported to the PC with EGA graphics in 1988 (though it was also compatible with CGA graphics). 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.

In 1988, Maniac Mansion was ported by Jaleco to the Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan. In 1990, Lucasfilm published the North American and European localizations, heavily censored (for example, "brains sucked out" changed to "brains removed", graphic of nude sculpture removed, etc.). However, Nintendo initially overlooked the microwavable hamster trick. Many thousand copies of Maniac Mansion had shipped before Nintendo censored it from the game. However, as there was no second printing of the game, all North American cartidges are capable of the hamster trick. In the early 90s, programmer Douglas Crockford, the man in charge of porting the game to the Nintendo, wrote an essay entitled The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion, which detailed his struggles with Nintendo 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 arguably absurdist policy Nintendo held in the early 1990s regarding its videogames; essentially, the policy held that all videogames 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).

Jaleco had released an uncensored version of the game for the Famicom in Japan two years earlier; 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 cartoony, 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). However, this version used excessively long passwords which were 104 characters long to save progress.

In 2004, a free 256-color fan-made remake entitled Maniac Mansion Deluxe was released by a group called LucasFan Games, however the company and their website have since shut down.

There was also 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 the series, Dr. Fred Edison (Joe Flaherty) is a scientist with a meteor in his basement which has turned his four-year-old son Turner (George Buza) into a very large man and his brother-in-law Harry (John Hemphill) into a fly with a human head. Rounding out the cast were Fred's wife Casey (Deborah Theaker), their other children Tina (Kathleen Robertson) and Ike (Avi Phillips), and Harry's wife Idella (Mary Charlotte Wilcox). Much of the cast and crew, including creator Eugene Levy, were alumni of SCTV and as a result the two shows share a similar style of comedy.

An interesting notation: Maniac Mansion, although including many horror/science fiction elements, is the only series of LucasFilm adventures that occurs in a real world, present day setting, and doesn't belong to the future (Full Throttle, The Dig, Zak McKracken), the past ( The Graphic Adventure), or an alternate version of reality (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango).

References

External links

Maniac Mansion Amiga version info page
ScummVM - A replacement interpreter for SCUMM engine games
The Untold Story : The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Douglas Crockford, who participated to the conversion of the game for the NES
Untold Story of Maniac Mansion by Douglas Crockford on ^*
The Maniac Mansion Fan Site
A FAQ for the NES version of the game
The Unofficial Maniac Mansion Fan Site Fan site for the TV show

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Maniac Mansion

Plot summary

Other characters

Versions and ports

References

External links