It’s tough to genuinely change a genre in gaming these days. Finding a new audience is difficult, especially when games cost a cool sixty wing-wangs each. With production costs as high as they are, how can you justify the risk it takes to upend the apple cart? Being different is both a blessing and a curse.
Tens of years ago, before the dawn of three-dimensional graphics as we knew them, most home computers had extremely limited graphical capabilities. Some machines, like the original IBM PC, had crude video interfaces that could only display monochrome text. A perfectly acceptable cost-saving measure for machines meant only for Lotus 1-2-3, but not so much for creating time-wasting implements. Thankfully, mainframe programmers and technology students alike decided to take their limitations and run with them, inventing the interactive text adventure genre.
Text adventures, like the eponymous Adventure and the classic Zork, used their limitations of text-based inputs and display to do the best they could at the time. Your only input was the keyboard, chum – make use of it! Think of it as an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book – except instead of turning pages, you issued sentence-like commands to a text parser to advance. Command lines were how you interacted with them, and for this subset of people, it was as it should be. The audience for these games was primarily the nerds and geeks who toiled behind terminals.
Games like Zork consisted entirely of text.
It was all well and good for MIT students playing Zork on a mainframe, but when the popularity of home computers grew in the early eighties, the text adventure was a slam-dunk port. After all, these computers all had robust text displays of their own, so migrating from one platform to another was, relatively speaking, easy. Countless entrants into the text adventure market sprung up to give graphically challenged computer users something to spend time on.
Over and over the text based adventures were praised for their excellent storytelling and descriptive environments. There was just one problem – actually experiencing that story could be a very unpleasant experience. Ease of use was not a goal in playing these games. Much like the DOS that the games ran upon, you had to have either a reference or memorization of all of the commands necessary to play the game. This also includes knowledge on how the text parser interprets those commands. Text adventures were primarily written by programmers for fellow nerds and geeks who often had lots of time and inclination to learn text inputs. The rest of the world of gaming? Not so much. We don’t like banging our head against the wall of bad user interface.
Experimenting and learning the text parser wouldn’t have been so bad if the games weren’t absolutely brutally punishing. One wrong mistake in Zork would result in you having an untimely run-in with a grue, ending your game and neutralizing all of the work you did to get that far in the story. Punishing the player doesn’t often endear them to your creation, even if high challenge is one of the points of the game.
The addition of graphics did not actually change much at all in the early part of adventure games. Many games wound up being text adventures with static pictures to give you a little more context, or a hint about a puzzle, but this wasn’t much of an overall improvement. The user still plucked away at text commands in a parser, and the developer succeeded in basically putting lipstick on a pig. Early graphical adventures like King’s Quest required a lot of trial and error text input, with many times the reward being your own death. Due to the nature of early PC graphics, you couldn’t really tell that the several gray pixels on the screen were a stone, for instance. They could be a piece to a machine, or a weapon, or a key. In effect, you were still doing things the old Zork way – by trial and error. The logic was computer logic, not human logic.
King's Quest basically added window dressing to the standard text parser adventure.
Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick disagreed with the current state of the art, and set off to create an adventure game that would usher in a new range of interactivity and storytelling in gaming. What better way to do it than in an homage to B-movies? Thus, with their new game called Maniac Mansion they birthed the next step of adventure game – the point and click graphical adventure – which would render the then-current state of adventure gaming obsolete.
The philosophy behind Maniac Mansion is fairly straightforward. You interact with the game by building together action statements. The goal is not unlike how you worked old adventure games with a text parser. The main difference was the structure and logic set up by the game’s scripting engine. It was very simple, but powerful. Your action statements consisted of a verb and a noun. Use KEY in DOOR, for example. On its face, that idea is not all that different than how you solved text-based adventures in past. The real difference is how discovery, logic, and rules are presented to the player.
Maniac Mansion eschewed the keyboard altogether – the only reason you’d use a keyboard in the original platform (Commodore 64) is to invoke the save game screen. The only tool you needed to play the game was the joystick, gamepad, or mouse, because you composed your action statements by pointing and clicking. Let’s take a look at the game screen to see how this worked.
Maniac Mansion put all of your commands in front of you.
The most obvious gameplay element, aside from the graphical view of your character and the room they were in, is the list of commands at the bottom of the screen. No manual was required to play Maniac Mansion (save for the copy-protection password list used in some versions). All of your available commands were right in front of you, and they were plain English, too. Instead of convoluted programmer logic, the recipe for success in Maniac Mansion was elementary school English grammar.
Unlike King’s Quest, which gave you absolutely zero idea to any of the interactive elements on the screen, Maniac Mansion tells you what objects are interactive and which ones are not, simply by hovering your cursor over the object. There’s no more confusion over whether that gray series of pixels is a key or a rock – the game says it’s a key. By giving the player an easy way to explore the world without committing his character to actions, a game plan can be formulated for solving the multitude of puzzles inside Fred Edison’s house.
The last crucial element besides the command list was the inventory. The game kept track of the inventory for you – there was no need for pen and paper to keep a list of all of your items. If it’s not in any of the three characters’ pockets, you don’t have it. Not all game objects can be kept in an inventory, and not all inventory objects are useful, but it at least takes away the player needing to do his own management.
Now it’s time to swizzle all of these elements together into actual gameplay. Take the opening puzzle of the game, for instance. My three characters are stuck outside of Fred Edison’s horrible mansion, and need to bust in to save Dave’s kidnapped girlfriend, Sandy Pantz. I can construct the command OPEN DOOR, but it doesn’t work – being a paranoid individual, Doctor Fred always keeps his door locked. How do I solve that puzzle?
Earlier games would have a very harsh punishment for failing even this early in the game. Fortunately, the details you can experiment with on that first screen are not game overs in the waiting. There is a rusty grating near the steps, but the player cannot open it just yet as my characters is not strong enough. I won’t cut myself, get tetanus, and die a horrible death. I could ring the doorbell, thinking I could reason with whoever answered. This proves futile, as Weird Ed Edison simply slams the door in my face upon realizing I am not the mailman. Even though I didn’t solve the puzzle at hand, these two bits of reaction are very important to remember for the future, as future puzzles depend on these elements!
Still, the introductory puzzle of the game is solved through a little human reasoning, and a bit of cliché. Locking yourself out of your house or otherwise losing your main keys is a common enough occurrence. Maybe Doctor Fred has a spare key laying around? Poking around at the environment reveals a small key hidden underneath the doormat. Perfect! One USE KEY WITH DOOR statement later and I’m already on the path to committing the cool crime of burglary!
You could say that Maniac Mansion is a kinder, gentler adventure. For the most part, you’d be right, but the game was a parody of the horror film, after all, and it wanted to be suspenseful and dangerous. You can still die, often in hilarious ways. One of my fondest memories, and I’m sure this goes for many other players too, is what the less scrupulous characters like Syd or Razor could do. If you were morbid enough, you could cook Weird Ed’s pet hamster in the family microwave. What other game let you explore the logic in such crazy ways? Beware, though – don’t let Weird Ed find out that you did this – or you’ll wind up pushing up daisies outside the Edison family home.
Maniac Mansion was the first LucasArts graphic adventure, so death or game overs hadn’t been completely taken out of the game’s design philosophy yet. It was possible to fall into a few traps and render the game unwinnable – but the number and scope of these traps was minuscule compared to its contemporaries. The net result is the user was punishable more by the plot and not by his well-meaning attempts to actually play the game. My frustration level was way down compared to playing Zork, a game with which I had a love-hate relationship.
Instead of most events being punished with death, your character is simply thrown into the dungeon. This doesn’t just serve as punishment for walking in on one of Nurse Edna’s erotic phone calls – you can use it to your advantage. After all, a character has to leave his or her room to get to the dungeon – so why not send Dave in to be a sacrificial lamb? By using the dungeon as the failure mode instead of death, the player doesn’t quit the game in frustration because they have to completely redo all of their steps to get back to where they were. Plus, you can escape the dungeon using various methods, like pushing a loose brick to open the door temporarily or finding the key. The game over failure modes are so few and far between that they turn to comedic events in their own. After all, failing in King’s Quest means your character dies. Oh well. Failing in Maniac Mansion means you’ve killed everyone in a five mile radius thanks to the fallout of a nuclear meltdown, thanks to Doctor Fred’s home reactor. Hey, if you’re going to go out, might as well go out in style, right?
Maniac Mansion’s unique experience struck a chord with me, and I’ve been playing some form of adventure game derived from its core gameplay ever since. Part of it is, of course, the scenery and motif of the game. I loved all of the gags and even the creepy parts. I spent hours trying to find gasoline for the chainsaw, only to come up snake eyes. When we procured the NES version, I recorded some of the game’s very catchy music to cassette tape to listen to whenever I wanted.
Every character in Maniac Mansion had unique skills that could help save the day.
It was also my first experience with a non-linear game with multiple paths or branches. Because there are more available characters than slots to use them, you can ramp up or down the challenge of the game simply by changing who you use. Bernard was an easy button to win the game, because he opened up many paths to win, while the other characters have either missable or screwup-able solutions. Future games pared down the character selection, but I liked being able to pick and choose my party. Even if I did use the same party, I could replay the game over and over to figure out more puzzles and solve the game slightly differently.
Maniac Mansion’s irreverent humor and innovative gameplay set forth a style of gameplay that would bring some of gaming’s biggest names to light. Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Sam and Max, and Grim Fandango all owed their roots to Maniac Mansion not just in gameplay, but also in code, as the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion engine powered all of these games. The legacy still lives on today with Telltale Games’ point and click adventure games which carry on the spirit of Maniac Mansion’s gameplay.
Even though I’ve beaten Maniac Mansion multiple times over and filled out almost every possible puzzle, I enjoy revisiting it now and then. It’s like reading a good book or watching a familiar movie. I know how it ends, and it’s not much of a surprise anymore. It’s a testament to how well crafted this game was that it still holds up twenty-odd years after it was originally published. Thankfully, you can still play it on modern PCs thanks either to ScummVM or Maniac Mansion Deluxe, and the spirit of saving Sandy from the clutches of the evil slimy purple meteor lives on.
Jay Zawrotny
Steve Gallant
William Carpenter
Robert Russell