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167-454: 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

334-498: A floppy disk of the game's latest version each week. All adventure games of the time required typing, and this is understandable given that most of them were text based. A few games, most notably the Sierra ones, had graphics but they still required typing. I never understood this and felt that it was only taking it halfway. Ron Gilbert on the then-common input method in adventure games The Maniac Mansion team wanted to retain

501-642: A minigame from another video-game genre, which adventure-game purists do not always appreciate. Hybrid action-adventure games blend action and adventure games throughout the game experience, incorporating more physical challenges than pure adventure games and at a faster pace. This definition is hard to apply, however, with some debate among designers about which games classify as action games and which involve enough non-physical challenges to be considered action-adventures. Adventure games are also distinct from role-playing video-games that involve action, team-building , and points management. Adventure games lack

668-469: A quest , or is required to unravel a mystery or situation about which little is known. These types of mysterious stories allow designers to get around what Ernest W. Adams calls the "Problem of Amnesia", where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without their knowledge and experience. Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical, new elements in

835-536: 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". 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. The SCUMM engine

1002-612: A "respected designer" felt it was impossible to design new and more difficult adventure puzzles as fans demanded, because Scott Adams had already created them all in his early games. Another factor that led to the decline of the adventure game market was the advent of first-person shooters , such as Doom and Half-Life . These games, taking further advantage of computer advancement, were able to offer strong, story-driven games within an action setting. This slump in popularity led many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison. Notably, Sierra

1169-515: A backstory, and jokes. An MS-DOS port was released in early 1988, developed in part by Lucasfilm employees Aric Wilmunder and Brad Taylor. Ports for the Amiga, Atari ST and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) followed, with the Amiga and Atari ST ports in 1989 and the NES port in 1990. The 16-bit versions of Maniac Mansion featured a copy protection system requiring the user to enter graphical symbols out of

1336-408: A broad category of action games, referring to a variety of games that are driven by the physical actions of player characters. The term dates back to the golden age of arcade video games in the early 1980s, when the terms "action games" and "character games" began being used to distinguish a new emerging genre of character-driven action games from the space shoot 'em ups that had previously dominated

1503-540: A code book included with the game. This was not present in the Commodore 64 and Apple versions due to lack of disk space, so those instead used an on-disk copy protection. There were two separate versions of the game developed for the NES. The first port was handled and published by Jaleco only in Japan. Released on June 23, 1988, it featured characters redrawn in a cute art style and generally shrunken rooms. No scrolling

1670-404: A comedy-horror game set in a haunted house. They drew inspiration from a film whose name Winnick could not recall. He described it as "a ridiculous teen horror movie", in which teenagers inside a building were killed one by one without any thought of leaving. This film, combined with clichés from popular horror movies such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street , became the basis for

1837-459: A deflated inner tube on a cactus to create a slingshot, which requires a player to realize that an inner tube is stretchy. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long duration before they prove useful, and thus it is normal for adventure games to test a player's memory where a challenge can only be overcome by recalling a piece of information from earlier in the game. There is seldom any time pressure for these puzzles, focusing more on

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2004-477: A fashion in the title realMyst . Other puzzle adventure games are casual adventure games made up of a series of puzzles used to explore and progress the story, exemplified by The Witness , Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective , and the Professor Layton series of games. Narrative adventure games are those that allow for branching narratives, with choices made by the player influencing events throughout

2171-475: A fellow Lucasfilm employee named Wendy. According to Winnick, the Edison family was shaped after characters from EC Comics and Warren Publishing magazines. The sentient meteor that brainwashes Dr. Fred was inspired by a segment from the 1982 anthology film Creepshow . The man-eating plant is similar to that of Little Shop of Horrors . The developers sought to strike a balance between tension and humor with

2338-409: A graphics window with interactive clickable hotspots and occasional animations, drop-down menus for the player to select actions from, and a text window with a text parser and a log describing the results of the player's actions. Planet Mephius , released in 1983, had a keyboard-driven point-and click interface (see § Early point-and-click adventures (1983–1995) below), but Enchanted Scepters

2505-621: A group of player characters for the player to choose from, allowing the player to control one of them at a time. Where more than one player character is available, the characters may have distinctive abilities and differing styles of play. A player character may sometimes be based on a real person, especially in sports games that use the names and likenesses of real athletes. Historical figures and leaders may sometimes appear as characters too, particularly in strategy or empire building games such as in Sid Meier 's Civilization series. Such

2672-474: A huge hit" commercially. In 2011, Hunt wrote that "as so often tends to be the way with cult classics, the popularity it saw was slow in coming". Keith Farrell of Compute!'s Gazette was struck by Maniac Mansion ' s similarity to film, particularly in its use of cutscenes to impart "information or urgency". He lauded the game's graphics, animation and high level of detail. Commodore User ' s Bill Scolding and three reviewers from Zzap!64 compared

2839-488: A larger number of player characters to choose from, with some basic moves available to all or most characters and some unique moves only available to one or a few characters. Having many distinctive characters to play as and against, all possessing different moves and abilities, is necessary to create a larger gameplay variety in such games. Similarly to MOBAs, hero shooters emphasize pre-designed "hero" characters with distinctive abilities and weapons that are not available to

3006-423: A list of on-screen verbs to describe specific actions in the manner of a text adventure, but newer games have used more context-sensitive user interface elements to reduce or eliminate this approach. Often, these games come down to collecting items for the character's inventory, and figuring when is the right time to use that item; the player would need to use clues from the visual elements of the game, descriptions of

3173-463: A list of questionable content to Jaleco. When the company replied that the content was reasonable, Lucasfilm Games submitted Maniac Mansion for approval. One month later, Nintendo of America was concerned that its content was objectionable, believing it was inappropriate for children, and contacted Lucasfilm Games to request they tone down the inappropriate content, particularly profanity and nudity. Crockford censored this content but attempted to leave

3340-622: A mainstream adult audience. Myst held the record for computer game sales for seven years—it sold over six million copies on all platforms, a feat not surpassed until the release of The Sims in 2000. In addition, Myst is considered to be the "killer app" that drove mainstream adoption of CD-ROM drives, as the game was one of the first to be distributed solely on CD-ROM, forgoing the option of floppy disks. Myst ' s successful use of mixed-media led to its own sequels, and other puzzle-based adventure games, using mixed-media such as The 7th Guest . With many companies attempting to capitalize on

3507-480: A means of achieving funding. The 2000s saw the growth of digital distribution and the arrival of smartphones and tablet computers , with touch-screen interfaces well-suited to point-and-click adventure games. The introduction of larger and more powerful touch screen devices like the iPad allowed for more detailed graphics, more precise controls, and a better sense of immersion and interactivity compared to personal computer or console versions. In gaming hardware,

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3674-440: A new audience to adventure games. Player character A player character (also known as a playable character or PC ) is a fictional character in a video game or tabletop role-playing game whose actions are controlled by a player rather than the rules of the game. The characters that are not controlled by a player are called non-player characters (NPCs). The actions of non-player characters are typically handled by

3841-454: A novel "verb-object" interface, showing all possible commands the player could use to interact with the game along with the player's inventory, which became a staple of LucasArts' own adventure games and in the genre overall. Graphical adventure games were considered to have spurred the gaming market for personal computers from 1985 through the next decade, as they were able to offer narratives and storytelling that could not readily be told by

4008-498: A number of hybrid graphical adventure games, borrowing from two or more of the above classifications. The Zero Escape series wraps several escape-the-room puzzles within the context of a visual novel. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series has the player use point-and-click type interfaces to locate clues, and minigame -type mechanics to manipulate those clues to find more relevant information. While most adventure games typically do not include any time-based interactivity by

4175-654: A player character is more properly an avatar as the player character's name and image typically have little bearing on the game itself. Avatars are also commonly seen in casino game simulations. In many video games, and especially first-person shooters , the player character is a "blank slate" without any notable characteristics or even backstory . Pac-Man , Crono from Chrono Trigger , Link from The Legend of Zelda , Chell from Portal , and Claude from Grand Theft Auto III are examples of such characters. These characters are generally silent protagonists . Some games will go even further, never showing or naming

4342-413: A player typically creates or takes on the identity of a character that may have nothing in common with the player. The character is often of a certain (usually fictional) race and class (such as zombie , berserker , rifleman , elf , or cleric ), each with strengths and weaknesses. The attributes of the characters (such as magic and fighting ability) are given as numerical values which can be increased as

4509-406: 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. Similarly, Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy called

4676-519: A publisher right now and pitch an adventure game, they'd laugh in my face." Though most commercial adventure game publication had stopped in the United States by the early 2000s, the genre was still alive in Europe. Games such as The Longest Journey by Funcom as well as Amerzone and Syberia , both conceived by Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds , with rich classical elements of

4843-452: A response from the game character. These conversations are often designed as a tree structure , with players deciding between each branch of dialog to pursue. However, there are always a finite number of branches to pursue, and some adventure games devolve into selecting each option one-by-one. Conversing with characters can reveal clues about how to solve puzzles, including hints about what that character wants before they will cooperate with

5010-402: A scene in which the player, without prior warning, may encounter a game over screen simply by picking up a shard of glass. He characterized such game design as "sadistic", and he commented: "I know that in the real world I can successfully pick up a broken piece of mirror without dying". Because of the project's nonlinear puzzle design , the team struggled to prevent no-win scenarios , in which

5177-482: A scene, to which players responded by moving a joystick and pressing a button, and each choice prompted the game to play a new scene. The video may be augmented by additional computer graphics; Under a Killing Moon used a combination of full-motion video and 3D graphics . Because these games are limited by what has been pre-rendered or recorded, player interactivity is limited in these titles, and wrong choices or decisions may lead quickly to an ending scene. There are

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5344-418: A separating point. Its development was considered a break-through in technology, utilizing the first fixed-camera perspective in a 3D game, and now recognized as the first 3D survival horror game, going on to influence games such as Fatal Frame , Resident Evil , and Silent Hill , with its influence seen within other titles such as Clock Tower and Rule of Rose . Myst , released in 1993 by Cyan Worlds ,

5511-444: A sequel to Maniac Mansion . Gilbert and Winnick initially assisted with the project's writing. The team included voice acting and more detailed graphics, which Gilbert had originally envisioned for Maniac Mansion . The first game's nonlinear design was discarded, and the team implemented a Chuck Jones -inspired visual style, alongside numerous puzzles based on time travel. Bernard and the Edison family were retained. The sequel Day of

5678-690: A side-scrolling playfield. Examples include beat 'em ups like Kung-Fu Master and Double Dragon , ninja action games like The Legend of Kage and Shinobi , scrolling platformers like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog , and run and gun shooters like Rolling Thunder and Gunstar Heroes . "Character action games" is also a term used for 3D hack and slash games modelled after Devil May Cry , which represent an evolution of arcade character action games. Other examples of this sub-genre include Ninja Gaiden , God of War , and Bayonetta . Fighting games typically have

5845-476: 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. Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game in which

6012-475: A step in the right direction, but these games still require the player to type, and to guess which commands must be input. In response, Gilbert programmed a point-and-click graphical user interface that displays every possible command. Fox had made a similar attempt to streamline Lucasfilm's earlier Labyrinth: The Computer Game and he conceived the entirety of Maniac Mansion ' s interface, according to Gilbert. Forty input commands were planned at first, but

6179-457: A swimsuit calendar, a classical sculpture and a poster of a mummy in a Playmate pose. After a brief fight to keep the sculpture, the team ultimately removed all three. The phrase "NES SCUMM System" in the credits sequence was censored. Lucasfilm Games re-submitted the edited version of Maniac Mansion to Nintendo, which then manufactured 250,000 cartridges. Each cartridge was fitted with a battery-powered back-up to save data. Nintendo announced

6346-400: A variety of input types, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces. Graphic adventure games will vary in how they present the avatar. Some games will utilize a first-person or third-person perspective where the camera follows the player's movements, whereas many adventure games use drawn or pre-rendered backgrounds, or a context-sensitive camera that is positioned to show off each location to

6513-483: A whole subgenre informally entitled "Russian quest" emerged following the success of Red Comrades Save the Galaxy (1998) and its sequels: those games often featured characters from Russian jokes , lowbrow humor , poor production values and "all the worst things brought by the national gaming industry". Israel had next to a non-existent video gaming industry, nevertheless Piposh (1999) became extremely popular, to

6680-458: 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. 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

6847-403: Is also a popular tool known for adventures such as MOTAS and the escape the room genre entries. Following the demise of the adventure genre in the early 2000s, a number of events have occurred that have led to a revitalization of the adventure game genre as commercially viable: the introduction of new computing and gaming hardware and software delivery formats, and the use of crowdfunding as

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7014-567: Is being given a mission briefing or debriefing; the player is usually addressed as "general", "commander", or another military rank. In gaming culture, such a character was called Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person, abbreviated as AFGNCAAP; a term that originated in Zork: Grand Inquisitor where it is used satirically to refer to the player. Character action games (also called character-driven games, character games or just action games) are

7181-414: Is considered one of the genre's more influential titles. Myst included pre-rendered 3D graphics, video, and audio. Myst was an atypical game for the time, with no clear goals, little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead

7348-425: Is controversial, and many developers now either avoid it or take extra steps to foreshadow death. Some early adventure games trapped the players in unwinnable situations without ending the game. Infocom 's text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been criticized for a scenario where failing to pick up a pile of junk mail at the beginning of the game prevented the player, much later, from completing

7515-450: Is expected to be known and used by the player to overcome the challenges. This sets the puzzles apart from Logic puzzles where all the information needed to solve said problem is presented within the context of the situation, such as combination locks or other machinery that the player must learn to manipulate, though lateral thinking and conceptual reasoning puzzles may include the use of logical thinking. Some puzzles are criticized for

7682-420: Is present, leading to rooms larger than a single screen to be displayed via flip-screens. Many of the background details are missing, and instead of a save feature a password, over 100 characters long, is required to save progress. In September 1990 Jaleco released an American version of Maniac Mansion as the first NES title developed by Lucasfilm Games in cooperation with Realtime Associates. Generally, this port

7849-835: Is reactive to the player. Most Telltale Games titles, such as The Walking Dead , are narrative games. Other examples include Sega AM2 's Shenmue series, Konami 's Shadow of Memories , Quantic Dream 's Fahrenheit , Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls , Dontnod Entertainment 's Life Is Strange series, Supermassive Games ' Until Dawn , and Night in the Woods . Walking simulators, or environmental narrative games, are narrative games that generally eschew any type of gameplay outside of movement and environmental interaction that allow players to experience their story through exploration and discovery. Walking simulators feature few or even no puzzles at all, and win/lose conditions may not exist. The simulators allow players to roam around

8016-509: Is regarded as being far closer to the original game than the Japanese effort. Company management was occupied with other projects, and so the port received little attention until employee Douglas Crockford volunteered to direct it. The team used a modified version of the SCUMM engine called "NES SCUMM" for the port. According to Crockford, "[one] of the main differences between the NES and PCs

8183-423: Is that the NES can do certain things much faster". The graphics had to be entirely redrawn to match the NES's display resolution . Tim Schafer , who later designed Maniac Mansion ' s sequel Day of the Tentacle , received his first professional credit as a playtester for the NES version of Maniac Mansion . During Maniac Mansion ' s development for the Commodore 64, Lucasfilm had censored profanity in

8350-504: The Monkey Island series . Because of Maniac Mansion ' s imperfections, Gilbert considers it his favorite among the games he made. According to writers Mike and Sandie Morrison, Lucasfilm Games became "serious competition" in the adventure genre after the release of Maniac Mansion . The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as one of the leading producers of adventure games: authors Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Wilson described it as

8517-651: The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford at the time, to modify and expand the game, eventually becoming Colossal Cave Adventure . Colossal Cave Adventure set concepts and gameplay approaches that became staples of text adventures and interactive fiction. Following its release on ARPANET, numerous variations of Colossal Cave Adventure appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened Colossal Adventure or Colossal Caves . These variations were enabled by

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8684-465: The arcades in the late 1970s. Classic examples of character action games from that period include maze games like Pac-Man , platformers like Donkey Kong , and Frogger . Side-scrolling character action games (also called "side-scrolling action games" or "side-scrollers") are a broad category of character action games that were popular from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, which involve player characters defeating large groups of weaker enemies along

8851-544: The player characters into the dungeon—or, in some situations, kill them—if they see them. When a character dies, the player must continue with the remaining of the three selected characters; the game ends if all characters are killed. Maniac Mansion has five possible endings, based on which characters are chosen, which survive, and what the characters accomplish. Maniac Mansion was conceived in 1985 when Lucasfilm Games employees Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick were assigned to create an original game. Gilbert had been hired

9018-515: The "100 Classic Gaming Moments". 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. 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

9185-402: The 1970s text computer game Colossal Cave Adventure , often referred to simply as Adventure , which pioneered a style of gameplay which many developers imitated and which became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre , which is defined by the subject it addresses: the activity of adventure. Essential elements of

9352-852: The Internet. By the end of 2004, the remake had over 200,000 downloads. A remake with three-dimensional graphics called Meteor Mess was created by the German developer Vampyr Games, and, as of 2011, another group in Germany produced one with art direction similar to that of Day of the Tentacle . Fans have created an episodic series of games based on Maniac Mansion . 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

9519-442: The NES release, Entertainment Weekly named it the #20 greatest game released that season: "The graphics are merely okay and the music is Nintendo at its tinniest, but Maniac Mansion's plot is enough to overcome these faults. In this command-driven game — adapted from the computer hit — three buddies venture into a sinister haunted mansion and wind up juggling a bunch of wacky story lines". British magazine Mean Machines commended

9686-807: The Rapture , and What Remains of Edith Finch . A visual novel ( ビジュアルノベル , bijuaru noberu ) is a hybrid of text and graphical adventure games, typically featuring text-based story and interactivity aided by static or sprite -based visuals. They resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Most visual novels typically feature dialogue trees , branching storylines , and multiple endings . The format has its primary origins in Japanese and other Asian video game markets, typically for personal computers and more recently on handheld consoles or mobile devices. The format did not gain much traction in Western markets, but started gaining more success since

9853-432: The Tentacle was released in 1993, and came with a fully playable copy of Maniac Mansion hidden as an Easter egg within the game. 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

10020-523: The Wumpus (1973), but lacked a narrative element, a feature essential for adventure games. Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), written by William Crowther and Don Woods , is widely considered to be the first game in the adventure genre, and a significant influence on the genre's early development, as well as influencing core games in other genres such as Adventure (1980) for the action-adventure video game and Rogue (1980) for roguelikes . Crowther

10187-530: The action-oriented gameplay concepts. The foremost title in this genre was Adventure , a graphic home console game developed based on the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure , while the first The Legend of Zelda brought the action-adventure concept to a broader audience. The origins of text adventure games are difficult to trace as records of computing around the 1970s were not as well documented. Text-based games had existed prior to 1976 that featured elements of exploring maps or solving puzzles, such as Hunt

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10354-460: The base code for the engine, which Gilbert then built on. Gilbert hoped to create a "system that could be used on many adventure games, cutting down the time it took to make them". Maniac Mansion ' s first six-to-nine months of production were dedicated largely to engine development. The game was developed around the Commodore 64 home computer , an 8-bit system with only 64 KB of memory. The team wanted to include scrolling screens, but as it

10521-693: The best effect. Text-and-graphics adventure games (also called illustrated or graphical text adventures) combine interactive fiction-style text descriptions with graphic illustrations of locations. These games sometimes use a text parser, as in the Magnetic Scrolls games; a point-and-click interface, such as the MacVenture games; or a combination of both (e.g., Tass Times in Tonetown ; Enchanted Scepters and other World Builder games). Point-and-click adventure games are those where

10688-478: The company during this time. Sierra developer Lori Ann Cole stated in 2003 her belief that the high cost of development hurt adventure games: "They are just too art intensive, and art is expensive to produce and to show. Some of the best of the Adventure Games were criticized they were just too short. Action-adventure or adventure role-playing games can get away with re-using a lot of the art, and stretching

10855-503: The company's co-founder Roberta Williams and programmed with the help of her husband Ken , the game featured static vector graphics atop a simple command line interface, building on the text adventure model. Roberta was directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure as well as the text adventure games that followed from it. Sierra continued to produce similar games under the title Hi-Res Adventure . Vector graphics gave way to bitmap graphics which also enabled simple animations to show

11022-425: The control system's limited options, he hailed it as "one of the most comfortable ever devised". Writing for VideoGames & Computer Entertainment , Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worley stated that the game's plot and premise were typical of the horror genre, but they praised the interface and execution. Reviewing Maniac Mansion ' s Amiga version four years after its release, Simon Byron of The One Amiga praised

11189-406: The early hits of Electronic Arts . As computers gained the ability to use pointing devices and point-and-click interfaces, graphical adventure games moved away from including the text interface and simply provided appropriate commands the player could interact with on-screen. The first known game with such an interface was Enchanted Scepters (1984) from Silicon Beach Software , which combined

11356-400: The experience. Comedy is a common theme, and games often script comedic responses when players attempt actions or combinations that are "ridiculous or impossible". Since adventure games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay. The player often embarks upon

11523-406: The first sound films , games that featured such voice-overs were called "Talkies" by all the major adventure game companies, including LucasArts, and Sierra . Use of the term continues to this day, for example by GOG.com on its page about Revolution Software 's Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon . Mark J.P. Wolf, professor at CUW , in his Encyclopedia of Video Games : In some genres,

11690-445: The first half of the 90s. Non-commercial text adventure games have been developed for many years within the genre of interactive fiction . Games are also being developed using the older term 'text adventure' with Adventuron, alongside some published titles for older 8-bit and 16-bit machines. The first known graphical adventure game was Mystery House (1980), by Sierra On-Line , then at the time known as On-Line Systems. Designed by

11857-401: The first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements. For markets in the Western hemisphere, the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s to mid-1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, but it had become a niche genre in the early 2000s due to

12024-494: The form of visual novels , which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan. Asian countries have also found markets for adventure games for portable and mobile gaming devices. Japanese adventure-games tend to be distinct, having a slower pace and revolving more around dialogue, whereas Western adventure-games typically emphasize more interactive worlds and complex puzzle solving, owing to them each having unique development histories. The term "adventure game" originated from

12191-498: The format. As a result, he decided to develop his and Winnick's ideas into a graphic adventure game. Maniac Mansion ' s story and structure were designed before coding commenced. The project's earliest incarnation was a paper-and-pencil board game , in which the mansion's floor plan was used as a game board, and cards represented events and characters. Lines connected the rooms to illustrate pathways by which characters could travel. Strips of cellulose acetate were used to map out

12358-654: The franchise sold by 2006, enjoying great commercial and critical success while the genre was otherwise viewed as in decline. Similar to the fate of interactive fiction, conventional graphical adventure games have continued to thrive in the amateur scene. This has been most prolific with the tool Adventure Game Studio (AGS). Some notable AGS games include those by Ben Croshaw (namely the Chzo Mythos ), Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator , Time Gentlemen, Please! , Soviet Unterzoegersdorf , Metal Dead , and AGD Interactive 's Sierra adventure remakes. Adobe Flash

12525-418: The game a contributor to its genre's subsequent critical adoration and commercial success. Reed highlighted the "wonderfully ambitious" design of Maniac Mansion , in reference to its writing, interface, and cast of characters. Game designer Sheri Graner Ray believed the game to challenge " damsel in distress " stereotypes through its inclusion of female protagonists. Conversely, writer Mark Dery argued that

12692-567: The game environment and discover objects like books, audio logs, or other clues that develop the story, and may be augmented with dialogue with non-playable characters and cutscenes. These games allow for exploration of the game's world without any time limits or other forced constraints, an option usually not offered in more action-oriented games. The term "walking simulator" had sometimes been used pejoratively as such games feature almost no traditional gameplay elements and only involved walking around. The term has become more accepted as games within

12859-411: The game for retaining "charm and humour", but suggested that its art direction had become "tacky" compared to more recent titles. Stephen Bradly of Amiga Format found the game derivative, but encountered "loads of visual humour" in it, adding: "Strangely, it's quite compelling after a while". Michael Labiner of Germany's Amiga Joker considered Maniac Mansion to be one of the best adventure games for

13026-412: The game itself in video games, or according to rules followed by a gamemaster refereeing tabletop role-playing games . The player character functions as a fictional, alternate body for the player controlling the character. Video games typically have one player character for each person playing the game. Some games, such as multiplayer online battle arena , hero shooter , and fighting games , offer

13193-503: The game only for a month, but he remained with the team for six months. With Gilbert, he wrote the characters' dialog and choreographed the action. Winnick's concept art inspired him to add new elements to the game: for example, Fox allowed the player to place a hamster inside the kitchen's microwave. The team wanted to avoid punishing the player for applying everyday logic in Maniac Mansion . Fox noted that one Sierra game features

13360-556: The game play style different. Characters can learn new abilities or augment existing ones over the course of a match by collecting experience points. Choosing a character who complements the player's teammates and counters their opponents opens up a strategy before the beginning of the match itself. Playable characters blend a variety of fantasy tropes, featuring numerous references to popular culture and mythology . In both tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing video games such as Final Fantasy ,

13527-414: The game play." Traditional adventure games became difficult to propose as new commercial titles. Gilbert wrote in 2005, "From first-hand experience, I can tell you that if you even utter the words 'adventure game' in a meeting with a publisher you can just pack up your spiffy concept art and leave. You'd get a better reaction by announcing that you have the plague." In 2012 Schafer said "If I were to go to

13694-523: The game to The Rocky Horror Picture Show . Further comparisons were drawn to Psycho , Friday the 13th , The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , The Addams Family and Scooby-Doo . Russ Ceccola of Commodore Magazine found the cutscenes to be creative and well made, and he commented that the "characters are distinctively Lucasfilm's, bringing facial expressions and personality to each individual character". In Compute! , Orson Scott Card praised

13861-538: The game's animation and depth, but he noted that fans of text-based adventures would dislike the game's simplicity. PC Computing in 1988 wrote that Maniac Mansion for the PC had a clever story but "grade B animation", concluding that "the result falls short of the magic we expect from George Lucas". Reviewing the MS-DOS and Atari ST ports, a critic from The Games Machine called Maniac Mansion "an enjoyable romp" that

14028-419: The game's essence intact. For example, Nintendo wanted graffiti in one room, which provided an important hint to players, removed from the game. Unable to comply without simultaneously removing the hint, the team simply shortened it. Sexually suggestive and otherwise "graphic" dialogue was edited, including a remark from Dr. Fred about "pretty brains [being] sucked out". The nudity described by Nintendo encompassed

14195-426: The game's humor, cinematic storytelling and lack of violence. He called it "compellingly good" and evidence of Lucasfilm's push "to make computer games a valid storytelling art". In describing Maniac Mansion as Lucasfilms' "breakthrough game", Matthew Castillo of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine praised the "B-movie" horror elements, the use of cutscenes and the visuals. German magazine Happy-Computer commended

14362-435: The game's presentation, playability, and replay value. The publication also noted undetailed graphics and "ear-bashing tunes". The magazine's Julian Rignall compared Maniac Mansion to the title Shadowgate , but he preferred the former's controls and lack of "death-without-warning situations". Writers for Germany's Video Games referred to the NES version as a "classic". Co-reviewer Heinrich Lenhardt stated that Maniac Mansion

14529-507: The game's puzzles by tracking which items worked together when used by certain characters. Impressed by the map's complexity, Winnick included it in the final game as a poster hung on a wall. Because each character contributes different skills and resources, the pair spent months working on the event combinations that could occur. This extended the game's production time beyond that of previous Lucasfilm Games projects, which almost led to Gilbert's firing. The game's dialogue, written by David Fox ,

14696-599: The game's setting. Early work on the game progressed organically: according to Gilbert, "very little was written down. Gary and I just talked and laughed a lot, and out it came". Lucasfilm Games relocated to the Stable House at Skywalker Ranch during Maniac Mansion ' s conception period, and the ranch's Main House was used as a model for the mansion. Several rooms from the Main House received exact reproductions in

14863-484: The game's story. Initially, Gilbert and Winnick struggled to choose a gameplay genre for Maniac Mansion . While visiting relatives over Christmas, Gilbert saw his cousin play King's Quest: Quest for the Crown , an adventure game by Sierra On-Line . Although he was a fan of text adventures, this was Gilbert's first experience with a graphic adventure, and he used the holiday to play the game and familiarize himself with

15030-458: The game, Schafer and his team at Double Fine made this puzzle's solution more obvious. More recent adventure games try to avoid pixel hunts by highlighting the item, or by snapping the player's cursor to the item. Many puzzles in these games involve gathering and using items from their inventory. Players must apply lateral thinking techniques where they apply real-world extrinsic knowledge about objects in unexpected ways. For example, by putting

15197-420: The game, so the player usually knows that only objects that can be picked up are important. Because it can be difficult for a player to know if they missed an important item , they will often scour every scene for items. For games that utilize a point and click interface, players will sometimes engage in a systematic search known as a "pixel hunt", trying to locate the small area on the graphic representation of

15364-403: The game, such as a library with a spiral staircase and a media room with a large-screen TV and grand piano . Story and characters were a primary concern for Gilbert and Winnick. The pair based the game's cast on friends, family members, acquaintances, and stereotypes. For example, Winnick's girlfriend Ray was the inspiration for Razor, while Dave and Wendy were based, respectively, on Gilbert and

15531-418: The game. Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles , including decoding messages, finding and using items , opening locked doors, or finding and exploring new locations. Solving a puzzle will unlock access to new areas in the game world, and reveal more of the game story. Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking Puzzles form the majority of the gameplay, where extrinsic knowledge gained in real life

15698-425: The game. The adventure games developed by LucasArts purposely avoided creating a dead-end situation for the player due to the negative reactions to such situations, despite this, some fans of the genre enjoy dead ends and player death situations, resulting in divergent philosophies in adventure games and how to handle player risk-reward. Text adventures convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to

15865-472: The game. While these choices do not usually alter the overall direction and major plot elements of the game's story, they help personalize the story to the player's desire through the ability to choose these determinants – exceptions include Detroit: Become Human , where players' choices can bring to multiple completely different endings and characters' death. These games favor narrative storytelling over traditional gameplay, with gameplay present to help immerse

16032-413: The gamer progresses and gains rank and experience points through accomplishing goals or fighting enemies. In many sports games , player characters are often modelled after real-life athletes , as opposed to fictional characters. This is particularly the case for sports simulation games , whereas many arcade-style sports games often have fictional characters instead. A secret or unlockable character

16199-490: The genre gained critical praise in the 2010s; other names have been proposed, like "environmental narrative games" or "interactive narratives", which emphasizes the importance of the narration and the fact the plot is told by interaction with ambient elements. Examples of walking simulators include Gone Home , Dear Esther , Firewatch , The Vanishing of Ethan Carter , Proteus , Jazzpunk , The Stanley Parable , Thirty Flights of Loving , Everybody's Gone to

16366-406: The genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Marek Bronstring, former head of content at Sega , has characterised adventure games as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework; such games may involve narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time. While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, those that do not pull the player out of

16533-511: The genre still garnered high critical acclaims. Even in these cases, developers often had to distance themselves from the genre in some way. The Longest Journey was instead termed a "modern adventure" for publishing and marketing. Series marketed to female gamers, however, like the Nancy Drew Mystery Adventure Series prospered with over two dozen entries put out over the decade and 2.1 million copies of games in

16700-529: The goal of rescuing a kidnapped cheerleader reinforced negative gender roles . The Lucasfilm team built on their experiences from Maniac Mansion and became increasingly ambitious in subsequent titles. 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

16867-469: The gradual adoption of three-dimensional graphics in adventure games, the critically acclaimed Grim Fandango , Lucasarts' first 3D adventure. Alone in the Dark , released in 1992, and which is now referred to as a "survival horror" game, was originally considered among other graphic adventure games by critics of the time, and significantly influenced the development of then new genre, being looked at now as

17034-465: The group's composition. Maniac Mansion features cutscenes , a word coined by Ron Gilbert , that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events. The game takes place in the mansion of the fictional Edison family: Dr. Fred, a mad scientist ; Nurse Edna, his wife; and their son Weird Ed. Living with the Edisons are two large, disembodied tentacles, one purple and

17201-493: The handheld Nintendo DS and subsequent units included a touch-screen, and the Nintendo Wii console with its Wii Remote allowed players to control a cursor through motion control . These new platforms helped decrease the cost of bringing an adventure game to market, providing an avenue to re-release older, less graphically advanced games like The Secret of Monkey Island , King's Quest and Space Quest and attracting

17368-580: The idea for a television adaptation of Maniac Mansion , the rights to which were purchased by The Family Channel in 1990. The two companies collaborated with Atlantis Films to produce a sitcom named after the game , which debuted in September of that year. It aired on YTV in Canada and The Family Channel in the United States. Based in part on the video game, the series focuses on the Edison family's life and stars Joe Flaherty as Dr. Fred. Its writing staff

17535-440: The increase in microcomputing that allowed programmers to work on home computers rather than mainframe systems. The genre gained commercial success with titles designed for home computers. Scott Adams launched Adventure International to publish text adventures including an adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure , while a number of MIT students formed Infocom to bring their game Zork from mainframe to home computers and

17702-403: The interactive medium and may eschew complex puzzles associated with typical adventure games. Readers or players of IF may still need to determine how to interact appropriately with the narrative to progress and thus create a new type of challenge. Graphic adventures are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner may have

17869-672: The key from the desk". Notable examples of advanced text adventures include most games developed by Infocom , including Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . With the onset of graphic adventures, the text adventure fell to the wayside, though the medium remains popular as a means of writing interactive fiction (IF) particularly with the introduction of the Inform natural language platform for writing IF. Interactive fiction can still provide puzzle-based challenges like adventure games, but many modern IF works also explore alternative methods of narrative storytelling techniques unique to

18036-421: The late 2000s. Some adventure games have been presented as interactive movies; these are games where most of the graphics are either fully pre-rendered or use full motion video from live actors on a set, stored on a media that allows fast random access such as laserdisc or CD-ROM . The arcade versions of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are canonical examples of such works. The game's software presented

18203-400: The location on screen that the developers defined, which may not be obvious or only consist of a few on-screen pixels. A notable example comes from the original Full Throttle by LucasArts , where one puzzle requires instructing the character to kick a wall at a small spot, which Tim Schafer , the game's lead designer, had admitted years later was a brute force measure; in the remastering of

18370-416: 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". In its retrospective coverage, Nintendo Power several times noted the ability to microwave a hamster, which the staff considered to be an iconic scene. In March 2012, Retro Gamer listed the hamster incident as one of

18537-437: The magazine. 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". 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. Although 1986's Uninvited had featured

18704-448: The most intricate and important adventure games ever made". Retro Gamer ranked it as one of the ten best Commodore 64 games in 2006, and IGN later named it one of the ten best LucasArts adventure games . Seven years after the NES version's debut, Nintendo Power named it the 61st best game ever. The publication dubbed it the 16th best NES title in 2008. The game's uniqueness and clever writing were praised by Nintendo Power : in 2010,

18871-443: The narrative are considered examples of good design. Combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games; this distinguishes them from action games . In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design , the authors state that: "this [reduced emphasis on combat] doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games ... only that combat is not the primary activity." Some adventure games will include

19038-497: The number was gradually reduced to 12. Gilbert finished the Maniac Mansion engine—which he later named "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion" ( SCUMM )—after roughly one year of work. Although the game was designed for the Commodore 64, the SCUMM engine allowed it to be ported easily to other platforms. After 18 to 24 months of development, Maniac Mansion debuted at the 1987 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago . The game

19205-601: The numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games (RPGs), and seldom have an internal economy. These games lack any skill-system, combat, or "an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics". However, some hybrid games do exist and are referred to as either Adventure games or Roleplaying games by the respective communities. Finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle video games . While puzzle video games revolve entirely around solving puzzles, adventure games revolve more around exploration and story, with puzzles typically scattered throughout

19372-483: The obscurity of their solutions, for example, the combination of a clothes line , clamp , and deflated rubber duck used to gather a key stuck between the subway tracks in The Longest Journey , which exists outside of the game's narrative and serves only as an obstacle to the player. Others have been criticized for requiring players to blindly guess, either by clicking on the right pixel, or by guessing

19539-553: The original Star Wars trilogy. 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. Physical re-releases of the NES and PC versions are scheduled for release by Limited Run Games . A musical that parodied the main arc of the video game, Mansión Maniática, Pablo Flores Torres

19706-420: The other characters. Hero shooters strongly encourage teamwork between players on a team, guiding players to select effective combinations of hero characters and coordinate the use of hero abilities during a match. Multiplayer online battle arena games offer a large group of viable player characters for the player to choose from, each of which having distinctive abilities, strengths, and weaknesses to make

19873-439: The other green. The intro sequence shows that a sentient meteor crashed near the mansion twenty years earlier; it brainwashed the Edisons and directed Dr. Fred to obtain human brains for use in experiments. The game begins as Dave Miller prepares to enter the mansion to rescue his girlfriend, Sandy Pantz, who had been kidnapped by Dr. Fred. With the exception of the green tentacle, the mansion's inhabitants are hostile, and will throw

20040-449: The player character at all. This is somewhat common in first-person videogames, such as in Myst , but is more often done in strategy video games such as Dune 2000 , Emperor: Battle for Dune , and Command & Conquer series. In such games, the only real indication that the player has a character (instead of an omnipresent status), is from the cutscenes during which the character

20207-426: The player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, Colossal Cave Adventure or Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb - noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, use natural language processing to enable more complex player commands like "take

20374-458: The player into the game's story: gameplay may include working through conversation trees, solving puzzles, or the use of quick time events to aid in action sequences to keep the player involved in the story. Though narrative games are similar to interactive movies and visual novels in that they present pre-scripted scenes, the advancement of computing power can render pre-scripted scenes in real-time, thus providing for more depth of gameplay that

20541-508: The player to figure out how to escape a room using the limited resources within it and through the solving of logic puzzles. Other variants include games that require the player to manipulate a complex object to achieve a certain end in the fashion of a puzzle box . These games are often delivered in Adobe Flash format and are also popular on mobile devices. The genre is notable for inspiring real-world escape room challenges. Examples of

20708-450: The player typically controls their character through a point and click interface using a computer mouse or similar pointing device, though additional control schemes may also be available. The player clicks to move their character around, interact with non-player characters, often initiating conversation trees with them, examine objects in the game's settings or with their character's item inventory. Many older point-and-click games include

20875-434: The player unexpectedly became unable to complete the game. As a result of this problem, Gilbert later explained: "We were constantly fighting against the desire just to rip out all the endings and just go with three characters, or even sometimes just one character". Lucasfilm Games had only one playtester , and many dead-ends went undetected as a result. Further playtesting was provided by Gilbert's uncle, to whom Gilbert mailed

21042-706: The player uses a point-and-click interface to guide characters through a two-dimensional game world and to solve puzzles. Fifteen action commands, such as "Walk To" and "Unlock", may be selected by the player from a menu on the screen's lower half. The player starts the game by choosing two out of six characters to accompany protagonist Dave Miller: Bernard, Jeff, Michael, Razor, Syd, and Wendy. 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 combination of characters; but, since many puzzles are solvable only by certain characters, different paths must be taken based on

21209-403: The player with a secondary goal, and serve as an indicator of progression. While high scores are now less common, external reward systems, such as Xbox Live 's Achievements, perform a similar role. The primary failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is player death. Without the clearly identified enemies of other genres, its inclusion in adventure games

21376-428: The player's ability to reason than on quick-thinking. Adventure games are single-player experiences that are largely story-driven. More than any other genre, adventure games depend upon their story and setting to create a compelling single-player experience. They are typically set in an immersive environment , often a fantasy world , and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to

21543-546: The player, some do include time-based and action game mechanics. The Telltale Games licensed episodic adventure games , and some interactive movies, such as Dragon's Lair , include quick time events. Action-adventure games are a hybrid of action games with adventure games that often require to the player to react quickly to events as they occur on screen The action-adventure genre is broad, spanning many different subgenres, but typically these games utilize strong storytelling and puzzle-solving mechanics of adventure games among

21710-651: The player-character moving in response to typed commands. Here, Sierra's King's Quest (1984), though not the first game of its type, is recognized as a commercially successful graphical adventure game, enabling Sierra to expand on more titles. Other examples of early games include Sherwood Forest (1982), The Hobbit (1982), Yuji Horii 's The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), The Return of Heracles (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology ) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson 's Masquerade (1983), Antonio Antiochia's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984), and Adventure Construction Set (1985), one of

21877-418: The player. Other conversations will have far-reaching consequences, deciding to disclose a valuable secret that has been entrusted to the player. The primary goal in adventure games is the completion of the assigned quest. Early adventure games often had high scores and some, including Zork and some of its sequels, assigned the player a rank, a text description based on their score. High scores provide

22044-432: The point where 20 years later a reboot was released due to a grassroots fan movement. Whereas once adventure games were one of the most popular genres for computer games, by the mid-1990s the market share started to drastically decline. The forementioned saturation of Myst -like games on the market led to little innovation in the field and a drop in consumer confidence in the genre. Computer Gaming World reported that

22211-447: The point-and-click controls "tremendous" and the total package "innovative and polished". Shay Addams of Questbusters: The Adventurer's Newsletter preferred Maniac Mansion ' s interface to that of Labyrinth: The Computer Game . He considered the game to be Lucasfilm's best, and he recommended it to Commodore 64 and Apple II users unable to run titles with better visuals, such as those from Sierra On-Line. A writer for ACE enjoyed

22378-531: The point-and-click interface and likened it to that of Uninvited by ICOM Simulations . The publication highlighted Maniac Mansion ' s graphics, originality, and overall enjoyability: one of the writers called it the best adventure title yet released. Happy-Computer later reported that Maniac Mansion was the highest-selling video game in West Germany for three consecutive months. The game's humor received praise from Zzap!64 , whose reviewers called

22545-598: The popularity of first-person shooters , and it became difficult for developers to find publishers to support adventure-game ventures. Since then, a resurgence in the genre has occurred, spurred on by the success of independent video-game development , particularly from crowdfunding efforts, from the wide availability of digital distribution enabling episodic approaches, and from the proliferation of new gaming platforms, including portable consoles and mobile devices. Within Asian markets, adventure games continue to be popular in

22712-807: The port through its official magazine in early 1990, and it provided further coverage later that year. The ability to microwave a hamster remained in the game, which Crockford cited as an example of the censors' contradictory criteria. Nintendo later noticed it, and after the first batch of cartridges was sold, Jaleco was forced to remove the content from future shipments. Late in development, Jaleco commissioned Realtime Associates to provide background music, which no previous version of Maniac Mansion had featured. Realtime Associates' founder and president David Warhol noted that "video games at that time had to have 'wall to wall' music". He brought in George "The Fat Man" Sanger and his band, along with David Hayes , to compose

22879-513: The previous year as a programmer for the game Koronis Rift . He befriended Winnick over their similar tastes in humor, film, and television. Company management provided little oversight in the creation of Maniac Mansion , a trend to which Gilbert credited the success of several of his games for Lucasfilm. Gilbert and Winnick co-wrote and co-designed the project, and also worked separately with Gilbert on programming and Winnick on visuals. As both of them enjoyed B horror films , they decided to make

23046-403: 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

23213-666: The release of many adventure games from countries that had experienced dormant or fledgling video gaming industries up until that point. These games were generally inspired by their Western counterparts and a few years behind in terms of technological and graphical advancements. In particular the fall of the Soviet Union saw countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia release a string of popular adventure games including Tajemnica Statuetki (1993) and The Secret of Monkey Island parody Tajemství Oslího ostrova (1994), while in Russia

23380-561: The rich assets afforded by the CD format could be integrated more intricately into the gameplay, for example, "talkie" revised editions of popular adventure games with digitized voices, like King's Quest V (1992) or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1993), in which the queries or other conversations selected by the player were fully acted out. The 1990s also saw the rise of Interactive movies , The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery , and

23547-402: The right verb in games that use a text interface. Games that require players to navigate mazes have also become less popular, although the earliest text-adventure games usually required players to draw a map if they wanted to navigate the abstract space. Many adventure games make use of an inventory management screen as a distinct gameplay mode. Players are only able to pick up some objects in

23714-544: The score. Their goal was to create songs that suited each character, such as a punk rock theme for Razor, an electronic rock theme for Bernard and a version of Thin Lizzy 's " The Boys Are Back in Town " for Dave Miller. Warhol translated their work into NES chiptune music. According to Stuart Hunt of Retro Gamer , Maniac Mansion received highly positive reviews from critics. Nevertheless, Ron Gilbert noted that "it wasn't

23881-596: The script: for instance, the early line of dialogue "Don't be a shit head" became "Don't be a tuna head". Additional content was removed from the NES version to make it suitable for a younger audience, and to conform with Nintendo's policies. Jaleco USA president Howie Rubin warned Crockford about content to which Nintendo might object, such as the word "kill". After reading the NES Game Standards Policy for himself, Crockford suspected that further elements of Maniac Mansion could be problematic, and he sent

24048-477: The series on The Family Channel, given Flaherty's subversive humor. Discussing the series in retrospect, Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer criticized its generic storylines and lack of relevance to the game. The series lasted for three seasons; sixty-six episodes were filmed. In the early 1990s, LucasArts tasked Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, both of whom had worked on the Monkey Island series, with designing

24215-424: The state of graphical hardware at the time. Graphical adventure games continued to improve with advances in graphic systems for home computers, providing more detailed and colorful scenes and characters. With the adoption of CD-ROM in the early 1990s, it became possible to include higher quality graphics, video, and audio in adventure games. This saw the addition of voice acting to adventure games. Similar to

24382-403: The story may also be triggered by player movement. Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialog, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialog or narration from voice actors. This genre of game is known for representing dialog as a conversation tree . Players are able to engage a non-player character by choosing a line of pre-written dialog from a menu, which triggers

24549-431: The story. This sub-genre is most famously used by the now-defunct Telltale Games with their series such as Minecraft: Story Mode and their adaptation of The Walking Dead . Escape room games are a further specialization of point-and-click adventure games; these games are typically short and confined to a small space to explore, with almost no interaction with non-player characters. Most games of this type require

24716-481: The structure of a text-based adventure game, but without the standard command-line interface . Gilbert and Winnick were frustrated by the genre's text parsers and frequent game over screens. While in college, Gilbert had enjoyed Colossal Cave Adventure and the games of Infocom , but he disliked their lack of visuals. He found the inclusion of graphics in Sierra On-Line games, such as King's Quest , to be

24883-493: The subgenre include MOTAS ( Mysteries of Time and Space ), The Crimson Room , and The Room . Puzzle adventure games are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on logic puzzles. They typically emphasize self-contained puzzle challenges with logic puzzle toys or games. Completing each puzzle opens more of the game's world to explore, additional puzzles to solve, and can expand on the game's story. There are often few to no non-playable characters in such games, and lack

25050-474: The success of Myst , a glut of similar games followed its release, which contributed towards the start of the decline of the adventure game market in 2000. Nevertheless, the American market research firm NPD FunWorld reported that adventure games were the best-selling genre of the 1990s, followed by strategy video games . Writer Mark H. Walker attributed this dominance in part to Myst . The 1990s also saw

25217-461: The system. He noted minor graphical flaws, such as a limited color palette, but he argued that the gameplay made up for such shortcomings. Writing for Datormagazin in Sweden, Ingela Palmér commented that the Amiga and Commodore 64 versions of Maniac Mansion were nearly identical. She criticized the graphics and gameplay of both releases but felt the game to be highly enjoyable regardless. Reviewing

25384-509: The text adventure genre and would also be used as an early form of copy protection . Other well-known text adventure companies included Level 9 Computing , Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House . When personal computers gained the ability to display graphics, the text adventure genre began to wane, and by 1990 there were few if any commercial releases, though in the UK publisher Zenobi released many games that could be purchased via mail order during

25551-434: The type of inventory puzzles that typical point-and-click adventure games have. Puzzle adventure games were popularized by Myst and The 7th Guest . These both used mixed media consisting of pre-rendered images and movie clips, but since then, puzzle adventure games have taken advantage of modern game engines to present the games in full 3D settings, such as The Talos Principle . Myst itself has been recreated in such

25718-549: The various items, and dialogue from other characters to figure this out. Later games developed by Sierra On-Line , including the King's Quest games, and nearly all of the LucasArts adventure games , are point-and-click-based games. Point-and-click adventure games can also be the medium in which interactive, cinematic video games comprise. They feature cutscenes interspersed by short snippets of interactive gameplay that tie in with

25885-595: 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. 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

26052-468: Was a commercial success. Infocom later released Deadline in 1982, which had a more complex text parser, and more NPCs acting independently of the player. Also innovative was its use of " feelies ", which were physical documents unique to the game itself which aided the player in solving the mystery, which also resulted in the higher cost of the game at the time of its release relative to other text adventures. These feelies would soon become standard within

26219-577: Was an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman , a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers , in the mid-1970s. As an avid caver and role-playing game enthusiast, he wrote a text adventure based on his own knowledge of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky . The program, which he named Adventure , was written on the company's PDP-10 and used 300 kilobytes of memory. The program was disseminated through ARPANET, which led to Woods, working at

26386-478: Was led by Eugene Levy . Gilbert later said that the premise of the series changed during production until it differed heavily from the game's original plot. Upon its debut, the adaptation received positive reviews from Variety , Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times . Time named it one of the year's best new series. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly questioned the decision to air

26553-422: Was normally impossible to scroll bitmap graphics on the Commodore 64, they had to use lower-detail tile graphics. Winnick gave each character a large head made of three stacked sprites to make them recognizable. Although Gilbert wrote much of the foundational code for Maniac Mansion , the majority of the game's events were programmed by Lucasfilm employee David Fox . Fox was between projects and planned to work on

26720-439: Was not created until after programming had begun. Gilbert started programming Maniac Mansion in 6502 assembly language , but he quickly decided that the project was too large and complex for this method. He decided that a new game engine would have to be created. Its coding language was initially planned to be Lisp -inspired, but Gilbert opted for one similar to C and Yacc . Lucasfilm employee Chip Morningstar contributed

26887-512: Was released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II in October 1987. While previous Lucasfilm Games products had been published by outside companies, Maniac Mansion was self-published. This became a trend at Lucasfilm. The company hired Ken Macklin, an acquaintance of Winnick's, to design the game's packaging artwork. Gilbert and Winnick collaborated with the marketing department to design the back cover. The two also created an insert that includes hints,

27054-699: Was released in Argentina in 2023. Graphic adventure game Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from

27221-580: Was reused by Lucasfilm in eleven later titles; improvements were made to its code with each game. 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. 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 . In 2011, Richard Cobbett summarized Maniac Mansion as "one of

27388-640: Was sold to CUC International in 1998, and while still a separate studio, attempted to recreate an adventure game using 3D graphics, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity , as well as Gabriel Knight 3 , both of which fared poorly; the studio was subsequently closed in 1999. Similarly, LucasArts released Grim Fandango in 1998 to many positive reviews but poor sales; it released one more adventure game, Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, but subsequently stopped development of Sam & Max: Freelance Police and had no further plans for adventure games. Many of those developers for LucasArts, including Grossman and Schafer, left

27555-453: Was structurally superior to later LucasArts adventure games . The writer noticed poor pathfinding and disliked the limited audio. Reviewers for The Deseret News lauded the audiovisuals and considered the product "wonderful fun". Computer Gaming World ' s Charles Ardai praised the game for attaining "the necessary and precarious balance between laughs and suspense that so many comic horror films and novels lack". Although he faulted

27722-412: Was the first true point-and-click game in the sense that the cursor was controlled through the computer mouse. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released Déjà Vu , the first of its MacVenture series, which utilized a more complete point-and-click interface, including the ability to drag objects around on the current scene, and was a commercial success. LucasArts ' Maniac Mansion , released in 1987, used

27889-402: Was unlike any other NES adventure game, and that it was no less enjoyable than its home computer releases. Co-reviewer Winnie Forster found it to be "one of the most original representatives of the [adventure game] genre". In retrospective features, Edge magazine called the NES version "somewhat neutered" and GamesTM referred to it as "infamous" and "heavily censored". Lucasfilm conceived

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