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 Mansions 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.
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.
Overview
thumb|left|alt=A horizontal rectangular video game screenshot that is a digital representation of a domestic room. Two human characters stand beside a green tentacle in the middle of the room. Below the scene is a list of commands.|Bernard and Dave visit the green tentacle in the mansion. The game displays dialogue above the scene and the [[point-and-click command interface below it.]]
Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game in which the player uses a point-and-click interface to guide characters through a two-dimensional game world and to solve puzzles. Fifteen action commands, such as "Walk To" and "Unlock", may be selected by the player from a menu on the screen's lower half. The game may be completed with any combination of characters; but, since many puzzles are solvable only by certain characters, different paths must be taken based on the group's composition. Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Ron Gilbert, that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events. With the exception of the green tentacle, the mansion's inhabitants are hostile, and will throw the player characters into the dungeon—or, in some situations, kill them—if they see them. When a character dies, the player must continue with the remaining of the three selected characters; the game ends if all characters are killed. Maniac Mansion has five possible endings, based on which characters are chosen, which survive, and what the characters accomplish.
Development
Conception
thumb|upright|alt=A brown-haired man with a light brown plaid shirt stands behind a podium against a black background.|[[Ron Gilbert (pictured) co-wrote and co-designed Maniac Mansion with Gary Winnick; they were both puzzle and graphic adventure game fans. Gilbert had been hired the previous year as a programmer for the game Koronis Rift.
Gilbert and Winnick co-wrote and co-designed the project, and also worked separately with Gilbert on programming and Winnick on visuals. As both of them enjoyed B horror films, they decided to make a comedy-horror game set in a haunted house.
Story and characters were a primary concern for Gilbert and Winnick. The pair based the game's cast on friends, family members, acquaintances, and stereotypes. For example, Winnick's girlfriend Ray was the inspiration for Razor, while Dave and Wendy were based, respectively, on Gilbert and a fellow Lucasfilm employee named Wendy.
Maniac Mansions story and structure were designed before coding commenced. The project's earliest incarnation was a paper-and-pencil board game, in which the mansion's floor plan was used as a game board, and cards represented events and characters. The game's dialogue, written by David Fox, was not created until after programming had begun. He decided that a new game engine would have to be created. Lucasfilm employee Chip Morningstar contributed the base code for the engine, which Gilbert then built on. Gilbert hoped to create a "system that could be used on many adventure games, cutting down the time it took to make them". Because of the project's nonlinear puzzle design, the team struggled to prevent no-win scenarios, in which the player unexpectedly became unable to complete the game. As a result of this problem, Gilbert later explained: "We were constantly fighting against the desire just to rip out all the endings and just go with three characters, or even sometimes just one character". Lucasfilm Games had only one playtester, and many dead-ends went undetected as a result.