Classic Game Postmortem: Maniac Mansion

okay I think we're probably about ready to start first of all I'd like to thank everyone for coming my name is Ron Gilbert and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about maniac mansion the GDC people wanted me to remind everybody to please fill out your evaluation forms they also whether to let me tell you that due to a bug in their database excellent is the only possible choice that you can fill out so they're just on an on teller way that so I'm going to talk a little bit about maniac mansion and maniac mansion was really one of the defining graphic adventure games of the 80s and 90s and I started working on maniac mansion about 25 years ago and I just curious a quick show of hands how many people in this room weren't even alive 25 years ago now don't don't worry about making me feel bad from an incentive or for the next hour and ramp like a bitter old man about how much better things were back in the day and how we had pixels the

size of your head and we liked it that way so when I started to thinking about this talk you know it started out really being a you know a post-mortem on a game that was 25 years old and you're looking back at its creation and looking back of this development and what we did right and what we did wrong but as I was putting together the talk started to become more of this trip down memory lane for me and I got together with Gary winix who had co-created and designed the game with me and we spent hours lapping at all the odd things that we did back then in reminiscing what it was like to work at Lucasfilm in those early days and I met with David Fox so I'd not seen in years we chatted about programming in the scum system for the first time we talked about the ups and downs of the project we talked about the good times and the bad times so this talking is up less being a post-mortem and just an odd collection of memories that are hopefully entertaining and amusing to more people than just myself

now maniac mansion is in a graphic adventure and it came out in 1987 it was for the Commodore 64 and it was one of the first point-and-click adventure games Maniac Mansion allowed players to choose three these seven possible kids to go into this creepy old mansion in search of a friend the game featured different several endings and different puzzles depending on which are the kids that you chose now over the years maniac mansion has become somewhat of a cult hit for fans around the world maniac mansions inspired countless pieces of fan art there's the green and purple technical ID knitting there's one of my favorites this is the maniac mansion LEGO minifigs this is this very odd plastic olive raised or that I find oddly compelling this is a 256 color fan remake the maniac mansion this is some of the kids done in plastic bead art it

was also one of my favorites this is dr. Fred Inder Sedna done it as a cross stitch this is a fan-made maniac mansion poster there was even a fan remake of maniac mansion all done in 3d this was really interesting people put together a live-action movie trailer for maniac mansion which was a great fun people first love to cosplay the green and purple tentacles or the green and purple tentacles this is why I make video games well well it's not the first to do it maniac mansion has really been credited at the game that really popularized point-and-click interface the LucasArts really became famous for in the 80s and 90s a maniac mansion was the game that coined the word cutscene that we used inside and outside the industry today now of all the games that I have worked

on over the years maniac mansion is without a doubt my favorite it's a very personal game for me and not because it's a great game but because it's a very flawed game and it's those flaws that make it so interesting and special for me now when I started working in Lucasfilm I started there in 1984 and it was a programmer working on the Commodore 64 version of coronis rift now the Lucasfilm games division was a small seven person team that was a part of the Lucasfilm computer division and it looks film computer division would go on to become Pixar at some point and it was there working working the games group that I met Gary Winnick and we became really good friends now Gary and I both really enjoyed or old horror movies we like things like reanimate er you love things like the fly there was this movie called Creepshow which starred Steven Kane and he played this farmer and a meteor crashing into his farm and slowly started to take him over and this is

really where we got the idea for the purple meteor that crashes and you know takes over dr. Fred really kind of came from this movie so as Christmas was finishing up Gary and I started talking about making some kind of a comedy horror game and the Little Shop of Horrors it just came out we're really big fans of that game and you can see where we kind of stole the idea for the man-eating plant in maniac mansion now around the time we were thinking about about maniac mansion the Lucasfilm games group moved from our offices in this industrial park up to Skywalker Ranch now Skywalker Ranch is large falling ranch the George Lucas built and the hills of Marin and the ranch was designed to look like a big family ranch but it would actually house his company Lucasfilm now you can see to the several buildings where there was the main house which was housed George's office and behind it there was a collection of much smaller buildings in the very back is a

stable house and the stable house is what house the Lucasfilm games group I've decided has been using that we were in the stable house you know back with the horses and stuff with it would have been now a lot of the inspiration for the mansion of maniac mansion I came from the main house this is the main house and Skywalker Ranch and George's office is up there on the third floor and you can see a lot of similarity in the main house and the mansion Gary and I were always poking fun of things that were you know going on at the ranch and this was just kind of our way of your poking fun of that stuff a little bit the main house also had a library in it may you see the picture of the spiral staircase it was in the library at the main house and the spiral staircase that is in maniac mansion the main house also had a media room with a large screen TV and back then that was actually a very large TV the main house had a grand piano in it we also had a

nuclear reactor Skywalker it's actually true you know you only get so much power from he walks but you've got those little legs and so gary and i did some early concept art we did these out posters for the game just kind of showing you know what a movie poster the game might look like just to get the feel of everything coming out we also did some early concepts of the kid and I often call those seven characters I call them the kids but they're not really kids in the game but they actually did start out as kids and they were these young kids and there's a brother and his sister and you know their friend and then the little brother and they were the ones that were going to be going into the mansion but someone mentioned that maybe this might push the game a little bit young and maybe we should do something of making the kids actually older so we started working with making them little older and this is some again

some early concept art and see an early version of raised or and Bernard down there and dead cousin Ted and that was weird ed and the tentacle and in this in the early versions of the game we're dad was much more of a friendly character that was really helping the kids out and he became you know a little bit more human lying with his with the family as the game kind of went on here's some of the artwork had the intro a to the house the Gary did so the infamous dungeon you get thrown into some more stuff going around the edge of the house entryway there's another one of a weird ed and he changed a lot this was some very early stuff that we were doing just trying to get a feel for what things were like this is the context for what the box might look like this is a little bit later in the process where after the game was getting closer being finished and Gary was just doing some mock-ups of

what what this types what the box might look like so besides this concept art we we really didn't have a story besides these kids that just go into this creepy old house I think we kind of figured that the game would just write itself after that we didn't even really know what the genre of the game was going to be at this point it was not an adventure game the idea that being an adventure game really hadn't even occurred to us yet it was just justice a Morpheus game we just went around and you did stuff but we really do didn't no one at that point and I clearly remember sitting around trying to imagine what the gameplay was going to be like and it just wasn't making a lot of sense to me I just I really didn't know what the players were going to do we had we had fun ideas but that was about it certainly to my Christmas vacation that year I went to see my aunt and uncle and my eight-year-old cousin had a RadioShack color computer name is playing this game

called King's Quest now I spent a lot of time playing colossal cave on my University's mainframe and I played all the Scott Adams adventure games and the infocomm text adventure games but and I really love the genre adventure adventure games but it was watching my eight year old cousin play King's Quest they really made maniac mansion just completely fall into place it was like of course while making an adventure game and it was this murica moment where everything just made sense like all those we're disconnected ideas that Gary and I hate just all completely instantly fell into place now I spent a lot of time playing King's Quest over that Christmas vacation just to see what they were doing it was my first exposure to a text adventure that had graphics but they weren't just simple static pictures they actually had animation on them but there was one aspect of the game that I did not like at all and that was a text parser there was these graphics it was more than just a slideshow but I still felt it from level there's just I was

playing a text adventure that was getting very frustrated playing as a game that I called second-guess the parsers you see a bush on the screen you wouldn't know what to call it you type pick up plants and which I don't know what a plant is so you type pick up you know bush and if I don't know what a bush is you pick up shrubbery and say I don't know what a shrubbery is so eventually it's like you on there and it was you know you really need to swear and I'm like yes yes I really do need this really so I'm looking at this bush or this plants to this shrub and I can't really figure out what the game designers calling it this is a not game play to me this is not fun it's like why can't I just plain it this thing I can just see it right there on the screen I should be able to just point at it and if I'm able to click on objects on the screen the next logical step is why can't I just click on the verbs that are also on the screen and really what despite you know the backs of the boxes and the marketing departments were telling us there really was only a very

limited set of verbs that these games actually understood now the Commodore 64 headed joystick so I mean it so you move the joystick around and you would you know hover over an object and you click on it and would select it and you could go down you could select the verbs so now the Gary and I really knew the maniac mansion was this adventure game it was going to be completely visual there was and there was not going to be a parser we were really often running now now with the other idea that we had whether you played the game not just with three characters or not just with one character but with three and you could switch off between them even better than that there were seven different characters that you could choose from and you got to pick any three of these the characters are in Dave who was the first one he was loosely modeled after me just because I dressed a lot like that back then there was stay'd he was the New Wave musician a new way with all the raids we had to have new ways there was Michael the photographer there was Wendy

the writer and Wendy was actually modeled after a real person my neighbour Wendy who worked in the Lucasfilm games group and she did all over accounting and it was Bernard or anything just represents the geek in all of us there was raised or the raised or is named after gays girlfriend whose name was Ray so we took that from there and then there was Jeff who was the surfer dude and I guess we're from California so I guess we had to have surfer people in the game so playing the game with these three characters there is a group of seven it was this genius idea that we would come to completely regret later on and again so to get the design off and running Garry and I made this large map of the mansion we had each room laid out as a little box on this big giant piece of cardboard with all these lines extending from each box showing how one room connected to another we had these layered sheets of acetate that you would lay over the top of this thing and we had every object written on the acetate we had all these colored arrows representing the different characters

and what puzzle they could solve and what object went went to solution and and all of these different things and and we were really really proud of this map we were so proud of this map the Gehry actually added it to where dad's bedroom and it was complicated and it was a virtually unintelligible map but it was the only way that we knew how to keep this game strength post Garry and I had never designed an adventure game before I mean really how hard can this be so after a few weeks of frantic programming it became clear to me that I was never going to complete maniac mansion writing the whole thing in 6502 assembly language now another programmer Lucas Thames film by name is chip Morningstar suggested that I create a scripting language this would allow the logic of the game to be done in a scripting language and the engine itself could be done in blazingly fast 6502 now I played

around with using a lisp like language because I was kind of all the rage for AI but I eventually settled on a languages more stielike and structure now chip wrote that first version of the scum compiler and I wrote the interpreter and the rest of the engine and a scum system was really born now scum dance for script creation utility for maniac mansion now several aspects of maniac mansion really hard-coded into the scum language at that point like the actual names of the kids were hard-coded into the engine the color that they use their text was displayed the actual verbs is well hard-coded really hard-coded in into the engine at that point now all of this all of this would become abstracted out when Zack McCracken came out and then Indiana Jones and then also with loom a lot of the system became a lot more independent and the whole notions of verbs were completely removed from the scum engine

and they were coated in the language and not all really started with the loom because Brian didn't really have verbs in the conventional sense we had to remove them from the engine they became a lot more abstracted so during this time Gary was producing a lot of art and it had no place to go yet and we continued to work on the design now I want to talk a little bit about the art maniac mansion now it may look very clean and the unsophisticated by today's standards but at the time this was really state of the art stuff the Commodore 64 screen had a resolution of 320 by 200 pixels and it had 16 predefined colors now one of the innovations that Maniac Mansion had over the Sierra games were scrolling screens as the character moved from left to right the camera tracked them by scrolling the screen and we use this to great effect to reveal characters and objects in the game as the edison family moved around and the screen would scroll to reveal them this presented a big

technical challenge for me the Commodore 64 had a tree bitmap screen where each pixel B could be addressed individually but at 16 K for one screen that was just way way too much memory to actually scroll the really sad thing is I spent months months hand tuning 6502 assembly language to get that screen to scroll and now I can just do it in PowerPoint but the Commodore 64 also had what was called a programmable character set that allowed for the creation of custom characters meaning that we could redefine Li to the characters look like to be anything we wanted and then by using this we could create all the screens using these eight pixel by pixel tiles and it reduce the amount of memory that we needed to scroll from 16 K down to just 1 K but this presented a big problem for Gary in his art creating the images for all these rooms out of little tile was going to remove a lot of the

charm that we saw in Gary's art so I wrote this graphics editor where Gary could paint on the Commodore 64 screen and treat it like a real bitmap they would press a key and would go through and it would try to reduce that screen into into the character set now the downside of using character sets is are the limit of only 256 characters a lot of Gary's art would get compressed down to 3 4 500 characters so then the program would go through and try to find 2 characters that look similar not exactly similar and we just force one to look exactly like the other and after multiple minutes of crunching it would have reduced this image to 256 characters there would be a lot of glitches so then Gary would go in and he would touch up those glitches back in bitmap mode and after several iterations of this we had images they've been crunched down to 256 characters but they still retained a lot of the charm of Gary's original art now another one of the things that this found in maniac

mansion also came about from a technical limitation and that was the large headed characters that you see here and the Commodore 64 had these 24 pixel by 24 pixel sprites and they would all done in hardware and by using scanline interrupts we were able to reuse the sprites vertically down the screen so we have these vertical sprites that were 24 pixels wide but they were as tall as we wanted and Gary one of the characters really read well and especially the spaces so he meant the heads as large and as wide as he could if you really look at a lot of the animation in maniac manager you'll see that as the characters walk and move nothing ever extends outside of that 24 pixel box which was and strain of the sprites so after close to a year working on the score cordless come engine this was less to the consternation of looking so management I might add it's actually time to start programming the game now the ultimate purpose of this gum system was now time to really put that to the test now I was

originally going to be the only programmer on the project but that was just no longer realistic so David Fox came on to do a lot of the spring scum programming work now I've done some of the basics on programming mostly to test the engine and the constructs of the language and just set things up and make sure it was working but most of the actual work for the actual scum scripting so it really felt the David Fox now one of the first things or one of the things I'm really proud of about the scum system is that it was completely multitasking back in the day of the Commodore 64 this allowed the scum programmers to focus on a single object or character encode it to run in his own process and it's really eliminated the need for complex state engines and one of the first things that ever animated in the game the first thing they got working was that clock that will pendulum that move left and right and that little clock was a 10 line scum script and it ran in its own process and that and we

use this technique throughout the game to control different characters in logic now being able to fully multitask and think about the game as small independent chunks and objects really became a mainstay of how you programmed in the in the scum system so other than this big map for the mansion so we had a hanging rated bedroom there was no design document for maniac mansion we had nothing that was not in our heads or on that particular map and this presented a really big problem for David Fox so teams are going to be tasked with a lot of the scum programming so before David was started working on a room he would sit down with Jay and I and we talked about what was supposed to happen and then he program it up in this come language we call this wiring up rooms now we called the screens rooms because they were rooms of the mansion this was a terminology that would follow the scum system all the way through and even in Monkey Island we still called them rooms even though they were most of them took place outside now one of the

opening lines a maniac mansions were dateless to Bernard don't be a tuna head and it's a really odd line and people often ask me about it and originally this line was supposed to be don't be a now the head of Lucasfilm games told us to take it out that we could not swear in the Lucasfilm game and Gary and I felt very strongly the Dave needed to say I guess we were young and swearing was probably still cool then we protested we argued about the industry contiguous a game and probably how our vision was being destroyed by censorship if we couldn't say then this whole game just wasn't even worth making anymore so our boss said look you could go up and if you come back with a really good reason but you need to say we'll leave it so in think long and hard about why you need to swear so we did

Gary and I thought thought about you just we thought about we thought about it a lot and we really couldn't come up with a good reason an arrest respect it really was kind of silly and pointless and come you know in a little bit juvenile so I changed don't be a to don't be a tuna head I think I did it out of protest and there's at the time I figured well if I couldn't swear then I was going to say something confusing and maybe a little bit stupid just to make a point but it was the line that actually caught on in an odd way then you talk to your maniac mantric band and you say don't be a tuna head and they know exactly what you're talking about so as the game was finally coming together we're getting a chance to play it we started to realize that we had made a huge mistake having seven characters that all had their own set of interconnected puzzles and endings with a hell of a lot of work and it was far more complex than we'd anticipated and we were constantly dealing with dead-end situations an odd unsolvable puzzle

it is short this was a complete and 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 for this game we were way behind schedule there's this point where you're in so deep you just want to scream and there just seems to be absolutely no way out and this is where we found ourselves in maniac mansion but we've stuck with it we worked out all the pod puzzle issues and we explode through the programming we kept the seven characters and all the solutions an arrest rest respect I think it really was the right decision maniac mansion is really defined by these seven characters being able to pick the three you wanted to play with allowed players to really customize the game in a way players often had dream teams that they would go into the mansion with and having different endings based on the kids that you chose was a great way to get replay replayability players would talk to each

other about the different puzzles they had to solve and the different endings or the different kids and they'd really want to play it again now of course none of this was planned we just thought it would be fun to have seven characters in the game and one of the other defining elements of maniac mansion are really the cutscene and it's probably one of the first games to really truly use cutscenes the other games had themes that played out when you started or finished a level but not that happened throughout the game really is a way to tell a story now the reason I called them cutscene was that they were scenes that cut away from the game and there was even a command in the scum language called cutscene and this command automatically saved the state of the game and then restored it when the cutscene was over this meant that they were easy to be triggered off of timers or other events and we didn't really have to worry about the state that the game was in before that happened I'm also you know it's hard sometimes being the programmer half of an artist programmer zero so I I couldn't resist to show my source code up here since

you've seen all of Gary's great art now maniac mansion triggered a lot of you cutscene simply based on timers so you can be right in the middle of doing company the name would cut away and show you a cut we later refined us in the Last Crusade in Winky island and we had the cutscenes triggered off of events or progressions of the player so they're really splints so jarring so we're frantically working on the game we are way way behind schedule at this point we're very worried the gorge is going to show up one day and throw us in this garbage compactor we're pretty sure that he has outside his office gary is cranking out art and I'm working on the scum engine and David is scum programming like mad is a seven day a week job is late into the night for many months and many many weekends and we're thinking is this going to work is this a good game or are we just wasting our time so one day David asked me to come into his office you want to show me something and Gary is standing there with this odd smirk on its face David has the kitchen room up

and running on his Commodore 64 and Razer standing there next to the microwave there's a hamster in here inventory go ahead david says but the hamster in the microwave so I put the hamster in the microwave thinking David is going to show me some bug in the scum system that any defense and then the unit says go ahead turn on the microwave so after a few seconds the humming sound and a perfectly timed ding and we just completely laughed our asses off about so if you're upset about that hamster in a microwave thing that was David and Gary I love canisters but what this really does point out is really the power of this gum system for us it only took a few minutes to draw and script that gag and it was fast as funny to put

things into scum games and you really see that pay off in Monkey Island where we were able to make that game in this almost improv fashion was just trying things and taking them out and trying lots of different ideas now one of the drawbacks they're being able to a scripted vent so quickly is we wanted to make everything work we made it so you could use any object with any other object if we thought it made logical sense to let the player do it we would let them do it now what this did mean is we wired up a lot of dead ends things that the players might think to do we'd wire up and let them screw themselves over some of the examples of this you can pour the developer fluid on the plant killing it preventing you from ever being able to climb up into the attic you can shoot the ethyl off into space without putting the meteor into it letting weird edge of this package makes the game unwinnable with certain combinations of kids if you open the undeveloped film and the lights are on

the film is exposed making the game unwinnable with Michael if you waste the paint remover on anything else other than the plaint blocks in the room with the mandating house or if you waste all your dimes in the telescope room or if you scene irrelevant information to mark eater the marketing guy you won't be able to send anything else to making the game unwinnable and if you only have one of the kids inside the house who doesn't have the old rusty key and they get caught in the dungeon you're pretty much screwed now there are countless other examples of this and it's not that we were trying to be cruel or vindictive we were just naive and I was so easy to wire this stuff up that we really didn't think about a lot of the implications of what we were doing now the worst part of the dead ends is you don't know you've really screwed up it's so much farther in the game you just happily play along before you realize what you did a long time ago just completely boxed you in now some of that was just accepted gameplay back

then you treating the save game as a gameplay mechanic but a lot of it was just us not thinking things through now today a lot of this would be caught by tests but other than myself David and Gary there was only one other full-time member of the maniac mansion team and he was the sole tester at Lucasfilm games and he said in his back room and he played maniac mansion all day long we had no bug database he would just jot down notes and he'd give him to either David or Gary and I to fix we had no regression testing we had no focus testing we had no test plan at all so other than David and I playing this game that was the extent of the testing which i think is pretty amazing learning the complexity of the game and all the different endings and the characters that isn't as dead ends I guess it all worked out there were no major bugs found in the game this was long before the days of being able to treat paying customers as beta testers and just patch the game as you go so we're getting to

the end of the gap project and Lucas um was responsible not only for the game but also for the box and the marketing for maniac mansion this was the first game Lucas himself published the games they did before this were published by other companies like like Atari or Activision or other companies aren't even in business anymore so this whole thing was very very new to us now one of the things we need is cover art and Gary knows this artist named Ken Macklin so he's contracted to cover the paint the cover of the box and Lucasfilm a just hired somebody to do marketing for their games who looks a lot like Mark eater I might add absolutely no coincidence they're the part of markings job includes doing the copy for the box so Gary and I threw out a bunch of ideas that we had and one of them involves putting this a story of followed by just

a whole long list of funny things this is another idea that would come back to bite us now another great things about the games from the 80s and 90s where all the cool things that you got in the box besides just the clock again and Gary and I made this mock-up of a bulletin board that appears in the college drawing where the kids that go into the mansion live and it's filled with lots of in jokes there's the town that I grew up in so there's a lot of backstory is being told on this and there's hence two puzzles like how like that radioactive water will make a plant grow so this thing has just filled with lots of really really useful information and also Gary and I made all this stuff so if you're ever looking to you know get my handwriting sample for something you just copy it off of here and a problem whatsoever now the original maniac mansion okay so the box is finished right and we have this professionally written back of the box copy the game is finally done now the original maniac mansion fit on two sides of a Commodore 64 disc with each

side holding 160 K so the entire game fit in 320 K now a few years later or doing Winky or doing monkey island with this little celebration with Steve Purcell did a single animation there was 380 K so this one animation of Monkey Island is larger than the entire game of maniac mansion and the sequel the maniac mansion day of the tentacle you can actually play the original maniac mansion on the computer and we're dad's bedroom so the gang goes off to be manufactured we're very tired we're very happy to finally be done with this now one of the places the game is being sold as Toys R Us in addition to computer stores they're becoming a big seller of games and it's one of the way the games are starting to work their way into the mass market they are very very important to us now after a few weeks Toys R Us pulls maniac mansion from their shelves

because of offensive content this is our largest retailer and they are no longer selling maniac mansion so what is this offensive content does razor's death dress too short that they discover the exploding hamster in the microwave gay no apparently a customer wrote Toys R Us a rather nasty letter complaining that she didn't think it was appropriate for a game to have are you ready for this the word Lux on the back of the lungs so that long list of words the Garry and I came up with she included it what became offensive now mind you I don't think she even played the game she probably didn't even own a computer she probably just saw the box on the shelf and she's she wrote this letter so those are some redesigns the back of the visible maniac mansion box removing the offensive word in the process now maniac mansion was then ported to the

Apple 2 a few months later Gary would redo all the graphics and high-res which at the time in a mind-blowing 640 by 480 there we gain some extra vertical pixels we add a link for two lines of text at the top of the screen maniac mansion was then ported to the Atari ST and the Amiga and the Mac was also ported to the Nintendo NES now then NES version a maniac mansion had to go through Nintendo's approval process and it became heavily censored on things like renaming some of the in-game arcade machines like kill thrill there was this statue depicting the horrors of nudity that had to be moved there was this poster showing a other nudity that had to be removed but I think my favorite thing that Nintendo censored in the game was in the credits for the game it says NES comes system by and then it listed the people who worked on it a Nintendo was confused why we referring

to their NES system as scum why would we insult their console machine like that we tried to explain to them there was just the name of our development system but in the end we just shake our heads and we just removed it oddly enough Nintendo had no problem with putting a hamster in a microwave now one of the great things about the scum system was it was so easy to port the game code or the code that drives the logic of the game didn't change from court to court and if it did it was very very slight and this allowed maniac mansion in all future scum games to be ported to a wide variety of platforms and now thanks to the scummvm project which is a fan driven project most of the scum based adventure games have been ported to platforms that hadn't even been invented yet all while running the exact same code that the originals did now maniac man sure was on the first games to use the scum engine it was far from the last the

next game it was built in scum was Zack McCracken followed by loom an Indiana Jones adventure game and then Monkey Island 1 & 2 and the dig Sam & Max the sequel to my anemic Mansion they had a tentacle and full throttle now after I left the Cathars as they were now called I started as a company called humongous entertainment and we continue to use the scum system to make adventure games for kids like putt-putt and Freddy fish in pajama Sam the scum system even powered an entire line of backyard sports games like backyard baseball football and soccer now a lot of lessons were learned in making maniac mention the dead ends and the death would all but disappear by the time when the island came around puzzle structure would get refined and we now had rules and guidelines for what made a good puzzle and how players should discover problems and solutions replacing the convoluted mat and mess of

the map the Garry and I had from maniac mansion with these well structured puzzle dependency graphs you could look at the entire flow of the design in a single glance now it's really easy to look back at games like maniac mansion or any of the classic games presented this year this is a lens of nostalgia it's easy to look at what they became and really make assumptions about what they were before they were anything but for us maniac mansion was just a game it was a game that we spent many long months and late nights and seemingly endless weekends working on now we loved it we hated it and our only dream for it was they really Wilden one the company out of business McGary and I started making maniac mansion we had a bunch of fun ideas but we didn't have a vision for the future we were not out to change the face of graphic adventures we just wanted to make a game not get fired and I think if there's anything to learn from this talk I think it's that we had no idea what we

were doing none whatsoever and I think that's an important lesson because sometimes you just need to do things but sometimes it's thinking too much and knowing too much can sometimes hurt more than it could help because sometimes I think it really is important to just be too stupid to know that it can't be done anyway thank you very much [Music] [Applause] [Applause] I'd agree I think we have some time for some questions so if anybody has any questions I am happy to answer them all right I so game development has changed a lot since the 80s and I was wondering how long did main invention take to make and in the typical day how many hours you guys spend working on the game before you went home it took about two

years to make the game from beginning to end and a lot of that first year was just getting this gum system working and we worked a lot of hours I you know I probably work 12 hours a day and kind of at the core of the thing we were working seven days a week on it it it really was a grueling grueling project to get done okay thanks thank you for that amazing so I could i completely agree that sometimes not knowing what you're doing can result in great innovation and the fact that you guys didn't hadn't made adventure games and then came to adventure games slowly turned out great but obviously a lot of the time people who don't know what they're doing don't create great that's all they just create crap right so I wondered if you could if you had any insight into what you think what it was about you guys that meant you could come to adventure games and do something really great rather than just come and make a really

bad adventure game yeah well you know a lot of that I really credit to the early Lucasfilm games group it was a very small group of people when I started there were seven people in the group and by the time maniac mansion was really going you know there were maybe ten or eleven people and it was a really very tight-knit group of some of the smartest people that I have ever worked with and we had this very open free flow of ideas and we we did a lot of things where we did these little one-page design concepts and we'd write these things and we pass them around the office and everybody would comment on them and it was just it was just an interesting environment to be a part of and a lot of that I think a lot of what you see in those early Lucasfilm games really came from that that environment and I credit that a lot for you know what maniac mansion became because it really wasn't just Gary and I sitting by ourselves figuring everything out it was this a highly intelligent group of people that were constantly challenging us on every

single thing that we did you talk to the start about problems you had with King's Quest and I guess you may have noticed that's coming back so I just wonder what your thoughts were on that and also perhaps you could talk a little bit about your thoughts in the future of maniac mansion and all of these old properties coming back again yeah when I you know when I play King's Quest I really did not like the parser it really turned me off to the game a lot there which you know was one of the reasons that you know I did the whole point click thing for for maniac mansion and you know we had a back of Lucasfilm we had a really big rivalry with Sierra online because they they always sold more copies than us every game we did they always sold more copies than we did we were always like in second place with them and then so it was this there was this kind of almost friendly rivalry in a way that we had with them what was the second part of your question of the

future yeah you know I don't know I mean I don't work at LucasArts right now I would love for them to rerelease maniac mansion the same way that they did with the Monkey Island games I think that would be really neat I've often thought that it might be fun to go through the game and fix a lot of these problems that I mentioned so you know get the puzzle structure and everything more like you know we had done in in Monkey Island but other times I think well do I really want to do that like maybe the game really needs to have those flaws in it so that a little bit like George Lucas going back and fixing all the problems with Star Wars you know so maybe you know maybe the game really does just need to be what it actually was back then but I would love to see them rerelease maniac mansion yes just once thank you for the game and sounds like it was an amazing development process with lots of challenges and I was just wondering if you'd be willing to recognize the name of that one tester you in that back room just waving away and trying to provide the best sort of

feedback you could to make it a great game his first name was Tim and I don't remember his last name do you have questions what so actually this is a question more about humungous than about maniac mansion button software for kids what's happening with that and what's WOD you you know stop doing humongous and stuff like that well I think software for kids is kind of in a sorry States in some ways and you know what I wanted to do with the among us entertainment is really just make adventure games for kids not educational stuff not things that talk kids how to read or write or curriculum they just wanted to do adventure games because adventure games are about puzzle solving they're about thinking your way through things and and I thought those are really important things for kids to be able to know and

so we very purposely did not make our games educational we just made them really really good adventure games for kids so yes I mean I would like to see some stuff like that you know come around again but really what happens the humungous is that as games became a lot more popular licenses just took over it was all about Disney product it was all about Pixar product it was all about Nickelodeon stuff and you know they had these 300 million-dollar commercials they were running on television every day and it was just very very hard to compete with that at some level thank you so when I hear and read about the the environment at LucasArts at the time it reminds me a lot of like the environment when they were making Looney Tunes like way they'll back which is you know a creative pool of people being funded by a rich guy who's smart enough to just leave them alone and let them do

their thing and I'm wondering if you think that's an environment that will we will ever see again in video game development yeah it would really be nice to see that it really would and when I started working a look at some George Lucas told us three things he said stay small be the best and don't lose any money and that was really all that he told us to do and the other thing that was a huge boon to us back then was that we couldn't make Star Wars games because Lucas Combe had licensed that to other game companies so here we were working at Lucasfilm and we couldn't make Star Wars games and we really wanted to but I think what that really did was it was it opened it up for us because now we had to create our own IP we had to create our own ideas in our own game and that was there was a big benefit for us not being able to make Star Wars games well thank you hi even destank

and it was an action game with with adventure elements do you think that the graphic adventure game is is truly dead or do you think that it'll you know in its purest sense do you think will experience resurgence to be popular again I would certainly like to think that there is and I guess my hope for that is that as the market expands and we in the game start to attract a much broader range of people that adventure games will kind of make a comeback and adventure games are kind of odd because adventure games to me like the magic of an adventure game is staring at the screen wondering what to do next it's that quiet contemplation and a lot of games today it's really not about that and I think a lot of gamers have very short attention spans they need tutorials to move them through things they don't they they're not you know what they want to do is they want to know where to go and they want to know what to do and then they want to get

really good at that at adventure games are about not knowing where to go not knowing what to do and figuring it out and I think there's just a conflict there but my hope is that as the market grows because there certainly are audit adventure game fans we were selling more adventure games today than we were selling back in the LucasArts days we really are it's just that the other part of the market grew so much faster that it just really dwarfed with adventure games were that when you started doing this a huge part of your job was dealing with gum in the game industry I'm just kidding dealing with a scripting language and back then you pretty much you didn't have a choice Aida - how do you feel about scripting languages now with the more modern programming languages and the need and use of limitations I think scripting languages are great I think they are the perfect way to build things if you're if you're building games in languages like C or C or C++ it's very very hard to rapidly iterate

with those things and scripting language was provide this wonderful abstraction layer in all of Death Bank that an entire game was all done in a scripting language that I created you know very very much like much like scum so there was the core engine which ran you know the 3d graphics in the world and everything but every single piece of logic for that game was all done in the scripting language so I didn't scripting languages are huge and I think we should always be using them because of that rapid prototyping they allow just last Thanks for writing something inspired me to get into this industry I'm sorry [Applause] hi hey Ron do you have any advice for us other adventure game developers out there advice for adventure game developers well I think that adventure games right now as I said earlier that it's a niche market it's not the huge mainstream

you're seeing with other things and so the key to doing that is that you can do quite well at a niche market right there's nothing that says you can't you know sell a good number of games in a niche market but I think it's about identifying that niche it's coming up with something that's very unique and interesting that'll really spark their imagination with things and there's also a dancing stuff you know a lot of people you know build you know fan base point-and-click adventures today but I think we need to take adventures beyond that you know in some ways and and your games like limbo are actually a very to me a very interesting look at maybe where adventure games you know could go because there's a lot of incredibly brilliant things in limbo and I looked at that game and it just explored me when I played it but it's very linear you know so what you know is there a way to take a lot of that and open open that up a little bit but people were in you enjoyed limbo a lot so and you know it's looking at things like that I think is a key I think that I want to join the the

guys things the same thing well you're getting that the reason I'm in the game making me feel bad hi so I was wondering if you could give something really like boys coming from I was wondering if you could give some insight even if it was only an opinion on the maniac mansion TV show yeah you know I totally forgot about the maniac mansion TV show that you know that was really an interesting thing because there were a couple of people at Lucasfilm and it was their job to start creating television shows and we had maniac mansion and it was a license that we completely owned so they first did that and Gary and I were thrilled to have a TV show based on our game and every week we would get these memos from the production people and every week they would change one thing about our game and it just became this joke after a while as you know one thing after

another was changed and I mean I've seen like two episodes of the TV show and I think they kept what dr. Fred I think he's like maybe the only remaining thing and the from the TV show but it was an interesting process I mean we were really thrilled to see it but I wish today have been more like the actual game now thank you hi so um since you were not the forefront of the whole point and click adventure games I was wondering if you could talk a bit about some of the more interesting steps in games that you've seen in life you know game interfaces and stuff particularly adventure games but beyond that that you've seen throughout your career what's really kind of stuck out to you as the as the most interesting advances well the adventure games started with the parser and when Gary and I decided that we were going to do the verbs to be point-and-click our original verb list was about 40 different verbs it was not

the 12 that you see up on the screen there was 40 of these things and we slowly paired that down to what we thought was the bare minimum of verbs that we could have on the thing but as games went on you know Monkey Island has less birds the maniac mansion has and eventually adventure games was whittled down to one verb which is the used verb and so to me that's kind of an interesting progression and if when maniac mansion came out if we had had just a single News verb which you easily could have done people would have screamed they wouldn't have liked that so it's this guy think it's a slow progression of sayings with you know changing the interfaces and and simplifying things down and making things a lot easier for players with interfaces coming off of games like qur'anis rift and idle on what lessons did you guys bring with you onto maniac mansion I mean they're obviously you couldn't confuse one of those games for

the other but there were certainly big puzzle elements in games like idle on was it was the question what license did you guys bring coming off of the games you worked on before the last mention I don't know minute that's a good question I mean we did the idle on and before that there was the labyrinth game which was based on the Jim Henson movie and that was really a kind of a first step into getting rid of a parser it had you know it had these wheels that you turned we kind of lined up verbs with it with nouns and so we did learn a lot from from that game and what that was doing with things but I think you know I think just one of the big things that we they were always very conscious of was just kind of how you tell stories and that was a part of that core group we were always very very fascinated with storytelling and storytelling in games and even something like Cronus risk

which is you know kind of a shooter type game there's still a big story there and that was a very important part of that to us so I think the storytelling was very strong element tell tales soon while with episodic games how you feel about that test I was doing what episodic games I think episodic games are great I I wish they were a lot more popular than they were I think episodic games I'll kind of allow you to tell these very bite-sized things to people and there's are a lot of gamers I like to sit down and play 30 40 hour games but there's a lot more people I think that would be into gaming if they could sit down and spend two hours playing a game and they could actually finish it and feel successful at that and episodic games I think is a good Avenue towards that stop so I you know I wish telltale all the success in the world with episodic gaming I was

wondering what your thoughts were on how to maybe make adventure games more than just single playthrough affairs as far as like keeping their lifespan - more than just whatever it takes to finish them one time well I think doing things like multiple endings with stuff with maniac mansion you could play the game once but there were five different endings to that game so you could then go back and play it again doing some things like that with games could be very interesting and I mean one of the things about an interactive story versus a linear story is that it you know in a best case it allows the player to explore the story a little bit more and I'd like to see games where you can get through them very quickly in just a couple of hours but you can then go back and play it again and not just for multiple endings but you can really explore that you can explore the characters you can explore the situation and really explore the world because if

people can get lost in a world like that just playing things over and over right I think that's a good thing you mentioned a lot of things that sort of did wrong and you didn't really know about when you're doing maniac mansion and I was wondering what sort of how long it was the point where you sort of realized all the mistakes you've made and all the things you didn't know uh you know it's kind of an ongoing gradual process as we like the thing with the with the seven characters you know that sounded great to carry or not yeah seven characters you know who were geniuses and then when we started doing the programming and it was really David Fox that brought a lot of stuff because he was really tasked with all this programming and he would come to us and go you know this is like really really complicated and we would go through and we think we'd have something solved and we didn't and you know it's like pulling a thread on a sweater you know just it just kind of unraveled at some point so it was definitely a slow process that we were realizing a lot of the mistakes

we've made forget it alright well thank you thank you very very much for coming [Applause]