Maniac Mansion

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

Maniac Mansion
Developer(s)	Lucasfilm Games Realtime Associates (NES Version)
Publisher(s)	Lucasfilm Games
Designer(s)	Ron Gilbert (design, concept, story) Gary Winnick (art, concept, story)
Engine	SCUMM
Release date(s)	1987
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC and NES
Media	Floppy 2-megabit NES cartridge
System requirements	PC: Intel 8086
Input	Joystick, Keyboard, Mouse

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.

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Other characters 3 Versions and ports 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] 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 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, or feed him to the mutant plant. Unusual for Lucas games, it is quite possible to get the player characters killed (though largely only from severe mistakes on the player's part) and the loss of all characters also loses the game.

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?". 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.

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.

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.

[edit] 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 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 of the rest of the kids, is significant (and perhaps canonical) since he reappears in Day of the Tentacle as a playable character.
• Razor is a female punk rocker, talented on many instruments. She was based on Gary Winnick's girlfriend. ^[1] Her band, Razor and the Scummettes, is referenced in Zak McKracken.
• Wendy Wells is an aspiring novelist with talent for writing and editing documents. ^[2]
• Jeff Woodie is a surfer. He is the least talented character of the group after Dave, as his only ability is to repair the telephone, which Bernard can also do.
• Syd, a New Wave musician, is an old friend of Razor, and has the same musical abilities as her.
• Michael F. Stoppe is a photographer for the school newspaper.

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. Green is an aspiring rock-and-roll musician and manic depressive, who doesn't really want to follow Doctor Fred's orders and 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; 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, and an appearance on late-night television with a David Letterman parody.

[edit] 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 graphics).

In 1988, Maniac Mansion was ported by Jaleco to the Famicom in Japan.

In 1989, an enhanced version of Maniac Mansion with higher resolution EGA graphics for the PC was released.

In 1990, a NES version was published in North American and Europe, but in a heavily censored form in order to comply with Nintendo's policy. For example, the line "brains sucked out" was changed to "brains removed", the graphic showing Michelangelo's 'Dawn' sculpture was removed, and other such changes were made. However, Nintendo initially overlooked the infamous ability to microwave the hamster to death. Many thousand copies of Maniac Mansion had shipped before Nintendo 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".

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). 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.

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 would run under Windows, features heavily enhanced graphics, music throughout the whole game and fixes some bugs and inconsistencies found in the original release of the game.

[edit] See also

• Maniac Mansion (TV Series)

[edit] References

1. ^ http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2005/07/the_making_ofma.php
2. ^ Sheri Graner-Ray. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. p. 24, Charles River Media. Sep 1, 2003. ISBN 1-58450-239-8.

[edit] External links

• Maniac Mansion at MobyGames
• Maniac Mansion at the Internet Movie Database
• Maniac Mansion Amiga version info page
• Maniac Mansion Entry of the Amiga version in HOL
• 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
• The Untold Story of Maniac Mansion by Douglas Crockford on Wired.com
• The Maniac Mansion Fan Site
• An FAQ for the NES version of the game
• Compmike19's Maniac Mansion Page