How Maniac Mansion Made Adventure Games Playable

25 years later, we take a look at how Maniac Mansion started a legacy and transformed a genre.

By: Bob Mackey
February 9, 2012

Okay, so maybe the classic PC adventure game isn’t dead after all. When a company like Double Fine can put together a kickstarter campaign and meet their one-month goal in just eight hours, even the most cynical among us have to acknowledge the growing demand for point-and-click adventures could make this very particular type of game profitable once again. So, as we (possibly) stand on the brink of an adventure Renaissance, there’s no better time to take a look back at the game that sparked our love in the first place: Maniac Mansion, the Rocky Horror-esque classic that singlehandedly gave birth to Lucasfilm Games’ successful blend of cartoony humor and mind-bending puzzles.

Undoubtedly, Maniac Mansion is one of Lucasfilm Games’ (now LucasArts) most popular creations; from the late ’80s to the early ’90s it saw ports on nearly everything capable of producing an image, and even received a cutesy makeover for the Japanese Famicom. But why, you may ask, was this adventure game so much more popular than its contemporaries?

The answer lies in Lucasfilm’s direct competitor, Sierra; while they made their share of impressive titles, their games had a tendency to be downright malicious to the player. Common features of the Sierra line included linguistic trickery via the traditional input of a text parser, instant deaths caused by simple player curiosity, and the always-great situation of “you forgot to pick up item X at the beginning of the game, so tough luck, chump.” Maniac Mansion, while not as forgiving as Lucasfilm’s later games, shook adventure gamers out of their Stockholm Syndrome by giving them an experience uniquely funny and downright playable at the same time.