Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. Initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, it was Lucasfilm’s foray into video game publishing. The game follows teenager Dave Miller as he ventures into a mansion and attempts to rescue his girlfriend from an evil mad scientist, whose family has been controlled by a sentient meteor that crashed near the mansion 20 years earlier. The player uses a point-and-click interface to guide Dave and two of his friends through the mansion while avoiding its dangerous inhabitants and solving puzzles.
>Maniac Mansion takes place in the mansion of the Edison family: Dr. Fred, Nurse Edna, and their son Weird Ed.Living with the Edisons are two large, disembodied tentacles – one purple and the other green.The intro sequence shows that a meteor crashed near the mansion twenty years earlier.The sentient meteor took control of the family and caused Dr. Fred to start sucking out human brains for use in experiments; his family supported and encouraged him in these efforts. One day, main protagonist Dave Miller’s girlfriend, cheerleader Sandy Pantz, disappears without a trace, and he suspects that Dr. Fred has kidnapped her.After the game’s introduction, Dave and his two companions prepare to enter the mansion to rescue Sandy; the game starts with a prompt for the player to select two of six characters to accompany Dave.
>Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game in which the player uses a point-and-click interface to guide characters through a two-dimensional (2D) game world and to solve puzzles.Players can select from fifteen different commands with this scheme;examples include “walk to”, to move the characters; “new kid”, to switch between the three characters; and “pick up”, to collect objects. Each character possesses unique abilities; for example, Syd and Razor can play musical instruments, while Bernard can repair appliances. The game may be completed with any character combination, but because many puzzles can be solved only with specific skills, the game can be finished in different ways, depending on the characters the player has chosen.
Trivia
- No matter for which solution method you will decide – what could you do with a chain saw, for which there is not a drop of petrol in the whole adventure? Around this puzzle entwine myths. The “answer” to this can not be found until Zak McKracken on the mars. But only in the first fan project Zak McKracken II (only for PC) is it possible to fuel it – accompanied by applause and shouts of joy.
- There is also another adventure, Lords of Doom where you find a chain saw that has exactly the same problem …
- The spiral stairs in the library and the “Out of order” sign at the stairs: this comes from the Skywalker Ranch, the place where the group around Ron Gilbert programmed the game (the stair really existed there). Against all rumors, it is only a misguidance and has no function.
- The small hamster of inhabitant Ed: David Fox had a rather loony idea during the design phase. The player can direct some of the characters to put the hamster into the microwave oven – and also to switch it on….
(This does not work in all conversions, on the NES you can in return drown the hamster in the toilet – also not much better…). The hamster-in-the-microwave was also “warmed up” in the follower “The Day of the Tentacle” – in the truest sense of the word.
- The number 1138 appears many a time in the game. This is an allusion to Georg Lucas’s first movie “THX-1138”. The letters THX btw. stand for a by now rather known quality ensuring system for cinemas and home users. The speakers in the room of the green tentacle comply with this standard already since 1987…
- If one turns the telescope into the wrong direction, you see a raging monster. It stems from the earlier Lucasfilm game Rescue on Fractalus and made for some adrenaline pushs in the players by turning up surprisingly.
- Green and Purple Tentacle stem from an octopus which is held in the biological tract of Dave’s school. Dr. Fred made them what they are. (See poster that was enclosed to the US first release, here you can read that the school octopus had been cut off and stolen two tentacles. In “Day of the Tentacle” Dr. Fred himself states, that the tentacles are his invention.)
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