Maniac Mansion

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

Maniac Mansion
Maniac Mansion (Commodore 64) boxart
Developer(s)	Lucasfilm Games Realtime Associates (NES Version)
Publisher(s)	Lucasfilm Games, Jaleco (NES version)
Designer(s)	Ron Gilbert (programming, design, concept, story) Gary Winnick (art, design, concept, story)
Engine	SCUMM
Released	1987
Genre	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	IBM PC, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom
Media	Floppy 2-megabit NES cartridge
System requirements	PC: Intel 8086
Input methods	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. It was the game for which the SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion") engine was created and named after, which went on to be used by LucasArts for ten more years to create 13 original titles.

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, disembodied 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 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. Also, in the second "enhanced" PC version of the Maniac Mansion game, the heroes can read a poster of the Zak McKracken game in the arcade room, upon which they will comment, "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. What a great game!! I never did figure out what to do with the can of gas on Mars." Another red herring is the staircase in the library (with a sign reading "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, Maniac Mansion: 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.

Cast

Playable characters

Maniac Mansion has a total of seven possible player characters. The player controls Dave, the main protagonist, and two other characters, chosen from six additional characters, each of whom has their own distinct skills and quirks:

• Syd, a New Wave musician. He specializes in musical instruments.
• Michael F. Stoppe, a photographer for the school newspaper. He is able to develop film.
• Wendy Wells, an aspiring novelist with talent for writing and editing documents.^[1]
• 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. He cannot, however, open the security door in the copy protected version of the game - instead he tries to crack it, fails, and blows up the mansion. His presence in the game, although optional like the rest of the kids, is significant (and perhaps canonical) because he reappears in Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle as the main playable character.
• Razor, a female punk rocker. Her talents are identical to Syd's, even the ability to microwave Weird Ed's Hamster. She was based on Gary Winnick's girlfriend.^[2] Her band, Razor and the Scummettes, is referenced in Zak McKracken.
• Jeff Woodie, 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. However, the game is still completable as Jeff. The only other quality he has is that, as he lacks shoes, he doesn't make the same "walking sound" the other characters do.

The character selection screen.

The Edisons

The titular mansion is owned by Dr. Fred Edison and his bizarre family. Most of the Edisons pose a threat and will throw the player into the dungeon (or kill them, in some instances) if they are spotted. The exceptions are Weird Ed, who can be coerced into helping the player, and the (relatively) harmless Green Tentacle.

• Dr. Fred, the patriarch of the family and a mad scientist. Although he periodically wanders through the house to talk to other family members, the player can only reach him if they breach the inner lab at the basement of the mansion.
• Nurse Edna, Dr. Fred's wife, a gruesome, lusty nurse into S&M. 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.
• Dead Cousin Ted, Edna's cousin, is a mummified corpse with his own private gym, pornographic 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. It is possible to get Green Tentacle to kill one of the players, by having him listen to an audio recording of "Tentacle Mating Calls." Doing so causes Green Tentacle to go into a state of sexual mania; the screen will then cut to the dead player's tombstone, indicating that Green Tentacle killed them in the course of fornication. He can also be compelled to kill a character who presents a recording contract made out to them, rather than Green Tentacle. The Purple Tentacle is Doctor Fred's easily-fooled 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. Should the player try to approach the meteor without first having acquired a hazmat suit, the meteor will kill the player by firing a lethal dose of radiation at them. The exact means of dealing with the meteor remain up to the player; amongst his several fates are banishment to outer space, death, life imprisonment by an alien police, and an appearance on late-night television with a David Letterman parody.

Versions and ports

Screenshot from the Commodore 64 version

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.

Screenshot from the Enhanced PC version

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. 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 cartoon-like, 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 runs 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.

NES port and The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion

In 1990, a version was published for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America and Europe, but in a heavily censored form in order to comply with Nintendo of America (NoA) and Nintendo of Europe's policy. However, NoA initially overlooked the infamous ability to microwave the hamster to death. Many thousand copies of Maniac Mansion had shipped before NoA 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". The PAL region NES cartridges of Maniac Mansion have the hamster-microwaving ability removed. In the early 1990s, programmer Douglas Crockford, the man in charge of porting the game to the NES, wrote a memoir entitled The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion, which detailed his struggles with Nintendo of America 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 strict policy that NoA enforced in the early 1990s regarding its video games; essentially, the policy held that all video games 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).^[3] Whereas Crockford expressed an agreement or even understanding with removing some material—notably, Edna's sexual oriented threats to male characters—he documents other demands of Nintendo's as either absurd or inconsistent; for example, Crockford spends a good deal of time documenting how he justified keeping in a nude statue in the Edison's art gallery by pointing out that it was modeled on a real Michelangelo sculpture; NoA acquiesed, on the grounds that Crockford remove non-existent pubic hair from the statue. When Crockford pointed out that the statue had no pubic hair, NoA insisted that there was, indeed, pubic hair on the statue; ultimately, Crockford was forced to remove the image. In the memoir, Crockford notes that a screenshot of the statue coincidentally ended up in an issue of Nintendo Power promoting the game, and that the picture clearly demonstrated that there was no pubic hair on the statue.^[3] In another instance, Crockford expressed his disbelief at Nintendo's demands that all instances of the word "suck" (each in reference to mechanical suction) be deleted, lest they be construed as veiled references to oral sex.^[3]

Glitches

• 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.
• If Syd or Razor put the hamster in the microwave and use the command, "GET HAMSTER", they will have a copy of the hamster in their inventory.
• Also in the NES version, the player can halt any character (except Purple Tentacle) who can throw them in the dungeon. The glitch involved switching to a new kid while the enemy is chasing you, waiting approx. 8 seconds, then switching back. This glitch allowed players to go to Edna's room with all the time they needed. It also works while Green Tentacle is in the hallway, but it only stops him for 3 seconds.
• A similar glitch allows the player to bypass Purple Tentacle. If a cutscene appears an instant after walking into the lab door, Purple Tentacle will simply stand there and will not run after the character.
• Normally, the player must fix the arcade machines and wait for Dr. Fred to play them so they can read his score to open the inner lab door. However, by entering the code, "0000" in the door, the door will open, thus saving the player a few minutes of time and effort.
• By selecting a character on the starting screen and quickly pressing start before the music starts, one of two things will happen: The selection will begin to garble into images of Dave's face, or Dave will have said kid's music in gameplay. If the latter happens, you can switch to the kid who's music you are listening to, press pause, and unpause and they will be playing Dave's music.

See also

• Maniac Mansion (TV Series)
• Day of the Tentacle

References

External links

• Maniac Mansion at MobyGames
• Maniac Mansion at the Internet Movie Database
• 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 in the conversion of the game to 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
• Maniac Mansion Deluxe