Maniac Mansion

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Maniac Mansion is a video adventure game developed by Lucasfilm Games in 1987. Initially released for Commodore 64 and Apple II, it was the first video game that Lucasfilm Games launched on the market. The game follows the adventures of young Dave Miller in a mansion as he tries to rescue his girlfriend from a mad scientist controlled by a meteorite that collided near the mansion twenty years ago. The game was conceived in 1985 by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who were inspired to develop the story in the class B movie cliches and horror films plus some elements of humor.

The characters of the game were developed on the basis of characters from the comics, movies, horror magazines or people they knew. The design of the mansion is based on the main house of the Skywalker Ranch. Maniac Mansion uses an engine created specifically for the game called SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion"), that supposed a revolution in the game interfaces for graphic adventures of its time and that was very used by Lucas in later developments of adventures graphs

Maniac Mansion takes place in the mansion of the Edison family; occupied by Dr. Fred, nurse Edna and his son Ed Weird. Living with the Edison there are two large tentacles without a body, one purple and the other green created as the result of a genetic experiment.

During the introduction sequence of the game it is shown how a meteorite crashes near the mansion twenty years ago. This symbiote takes control of the family and causes Dr. Fred to start sucking human brains to use in his experiments, while his family encourages and supports him in these efforts. One day, Sandy Pantz, girlfriend of David Miller (the protagonist), disappears without a trace and he suspects that Dr. Fred has kidnapped her. After the introductory scene of the game, Dave and two of his companions prepare to enter the mansion and rescue Sandy. The game begins with a selection screen in which you must choose two of the six characters available to accompany Dave (this selection will condition the development and outcome of the story).

Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game with a point-and-click interface to guide characters through a two-dimensional world in which they must solve riddles. Players can select fifteen different commands with this scheme; for example "Walk to" to move the characters, "New Kid" to alternate between the three characters and "Pick up" to collect objects. Each character has unique abilities, for example, Syd and Razor can play musical instruments; while Bernard can repair appliances. The game can be completed with any combination of characters. Because many riddles can only be solved with specific abilities, the game will offer different outcomes depending on the characters chosen by the player.

The gameplay is interrupted regularly by "cutscenes" (a term coined by Ron Gilbert), which advance in the story and show the player the actions of the non-playable characters. Including the green tentacle, the inhabitants of the mansion are a threat and will put the playable characters in the dungeon - or try to kill them - if they see them. It is also possible that the player himself causes the death of one of his characters. In any case, if one of the characters dies, the player may choose among the remaining ones. Finally, the game ends when all the characters die. Maniac Mansion has five possible successful endings, which will depend on the combination of characters made by the player, who survive and what events they generate.

Maniac Mansion was conceived in 1985, when Lucasfilm Games assigned its employees Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick the task of creating an original video game. Gilbert had been hired by Noah Falstein to work at Lucasfilm Games for three months programming the game Koronis Rift. Meanwhile, Winnick was working on Labyrinth: The Computer Game. By joining together for the development of this project, Gilbert and Winnic discovered that they shared a similar humor and equal tastes about film and television. To complete the project, Gilbert was hired full time. The success of this video game and its predecessors is attributed by Gilbert to the fact that Lucasfilm Games executives carried out very little supervision of the development process.

Although Gilbert and Winnick are the main designers and co-writers, they worked separately in the art and game programming respectively. In the brainstorming held to define the history of the game, the love they felt for the B movie came out and they decided to create a video game of a horror comedy set in a haunted house. Winnick called this idea "a ridiculous teen horror movie," where a group of young people are sacrificed one by one while trying to escape the house. This creative duo made use of clichés of po[CENSORED]r horror films such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street to set the game.