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Maniac Mansion

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.

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

Maniac Mansion

Lucasfilm Games
Jaleco (NES)

Ron Gilbert
David Fox
Carl Mey

Gary Winnick

Chris Grigg
David Lawrence
October 5, 1987
  • C64, Apple II
    October 5, 1987[1]
    MS-DOS
    March 12, 1988
    December 31, 1989 (enhanced version)
    NES
    • JP: June 23, 1988
    • NA: September 18, 1990
    • EU: October 22, 1992
    Amiga, ST
    July 26, 1989

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 Mansion's 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.[5]


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.

Impact and legacy[edit]

In 2010, the staff of GamesTM dubbed Maniac Mansion a "seminal" title that overhauled the gameplay of the graphic adventure genre. Removing the need to guess syntax allowed players to concentrate on the story and puzzles, which created a smoother and more enjoyable experience, according to the magazine.[17] Eurogamer's Kristan Reed agreed: he believed that the design was "infinitely more elegant and intuitive" than its predecessors and that it freed players from "guessing-game frustration".[42] Designer Dave Grossman, who worked on Lucasfilm Games' later Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island, felt that Maniac Mansion had revolutionized the adventure game genre.[19] Although 1985's Uninvited had featured a point-and-click interface, it was not influential. Maniac Mansion's implementation of the concept was widely imitated in other adventure titles. Writing in the game studies journal Kinephanos, Jonathan Lessard argued that Maniac Mansion led a "Casual Revolution" in the late 1980s, which opened the adventure genre to a wider audience.[74] Similarly, Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy called the game a contributor to its genre's subsequent critical adoration and commercial success.[13]


Reed highlighted the "wonderfully ambitious" design of Maniac Mansion, in reference to its writing, interface, and cast of characters.[42] Game designer Sheri Graner Ray believed the game to challenge "damsel in distress" stereotypes through its inclusion of female protagonists.[75] Conversely, writer Mark Dery argued that the goal of rescuing a kidnapped cheerleader reinforced negative gender roles.[76] The Lucasfilm team built on their experiences from Maniac Mansion and became increasingly ambitious in subsequent titles.[16] Gilbert admitted to making mistakes—such as the inclusion of no-win situations—in Maniac Mansion, and he applied these lessons to future projects. For example, the game relies on timers rather than events to trigger cutscenes, which occasionally results in awkward transitions: Gilbert worked to avoid this flaw with the Monkey Island series.[17] Because of Maniac Mansion's imperfections, Gilbert considers it his favorite among the games he made.[18]


According to writers Mike and Sandie Morrison, Lucasfilm Games became "serious competition" in the adventure genre after the release of Maniac Mansion.[77] The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as one of the leading producers of adventure games:[17] authors Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Wilson described it as a "landmark title" for the company. In their view, Maniac Mansion—along with Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards—inaugurated a "new era of humor-based adventure games".[78] This belief was shared by Reed, who wrote that Maniac Mansion "set in motion a captivating chapter in the history of gaming" that encompassed wit, invention, and style.[42] The SCUMM engine was reused by Lucasfilm in eleven later titles;[17] improvements were made to its code with each game.[18] Over time, rival adventure game developers adopted this paradigm in their own software. GamesTM attributed the change to a desire to streamline production and create enjoyable games.[17] Following his 1992 departure from LucasArts—a conglomeration of Lucasfilm Games, ILM and Skywalker Sound formed in 1990—Gilbert used SCUMM to create adventure games and Backyard Sports titles for Humongous Entertainment.[18][79]


In 2011, Richard Cobbett summarized Maniac Mansion as "one of the most intricate and important adventure games ever made".[70] Retro Gamer ranked it as one of the ten best Commodore 64 games in 2006,[80] and IGN later named it one of the ten best LucasArts adventure games.[81] Seven years after the NES version's debut, Nintendo Power named it the 61st best game ever.[82] The publication dubbed it the 16th best NES title in 2008. The game's uniqueness and clever writing were praised by Nintendo Power:[83] in 2010, the magazine's Chris Hoffman stated that the game is "unlike anything else out there — a point-and-click adventure with an awesome sense of humor and multiple solutions to almost every puzzle".[84] In its retrospective coverage, Nintendo Power several times noted the ability to microwave a hamster,[82] which the staff considered to be an iconic scene.[84] In March 2012, Retro Gamer listed the hamster incident as one of the "100 Classic Gaming Moments".[85]


Maniac Mansion enthusiasts have drawn fan art of its characters, participated in tentacle-themed cosplay and produced a trailer for a fictitious film adaptation of the game.[18] German fan Sascha Borisow created a fan game remake, titled Maniac Mansion Deluxe, with enhanced audio and visuals. He used the Adventure Game Studio engine to develop the project, which he distributed free of charge on the Internet.[86][87] By the end of 2004, the remake had over 200,000 downloads.[88] A remake with three-dimensional graphics called Meteor Mess was created by the German developer Vampyr Games,[89][90] and, as of 2011, another group in Germany produced one with art direction similar to that of Day of the Tentacle.[91] Fans have created an episodic series of games based on Maniac Mansion.[92] Gilbert has said that he would like to see an official remake, similar in its graphics and gameplay to The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge. He also expressed doubts about its potential quality, in light of George Lucas's enhanced remakes of the original Star Wars trilogy.[93] In December 2017, Disney, which gained rights to the LucasArts games following its acquisition of Lucasfilm, published Maniac Mansion running atop the ScummVM virtual machine to various digital storefronts.[94] Physical re-releases of the NES and PC versions are scheduled for release by Limited Run Games.[95] A musical that parodied the main arc of the video game, Mansión Maniática, Pablo Flores Torres was released in Argentina in 2023.[96]

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Maniac Mansion at c64-wiki.com

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Images of Maniac Mansion box and manual

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Maniac Mansion

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Official trailer for the Enhanced EGA version of Maniac Mansion