Games To Play Before You Die: #4 - Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion (1987)
Publisher: LucasFilm Games
Designer: Ron Gilbert & Gary Winnick

(“Hey, did anybody see that movie on television last night? These four kids
went into this strange house and... uh, never mind.” -- Michael F. Stoppe)

Interactive fiction has a long and, if you’ll pardon the pun, storied history. Generally acknowledged to be the first text adventure, ADVENT (also called Adventure and Colossal Cave) laid the groundwork for the genre in 1975, followed by Infocom’s legendary Zork (A.K.A. Dungeon) in 1980. Graphic adventure games were the next natural stage in the evolution of interactive fiction and were pioneered by On-Line Systems with Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess, both in 1980. The company rechristened itself as Sierra On-Line with the release of its first Adventure Game Interpreter engine-based game, King’s Quest: Quest For The Crown, in 1984, kick-starting a decade of such popularity that adventure games quickly became the default genre for the PC.

Enter LucasArts, who in 1987 was going by the name LucasFilm Games. At that time, Sierra and most other producers of adventure games relied on a text parser that referred to a set of specific verbs and nouns (and, very occasionally, adjectives). LucasFilm Games took the adventure game model established by Sierra and upped the ante by introducing, in the form of Maniac Mansion, the world’s first ‘point-and-click’ adventure game: verbs were listed at the bottom of the screen, and a cursor would allow the player to select an object, non-player character, or aspect of the scenery to manipulate.

Maniac Mansion broke new ground stylistically as well. It was highly referential, a kind of bastard offspring of Little Shop of Horrors, Reanimator, Scooby Doo, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and 1980s punk rock; it involved a family of mad scientists, sentient tentacles from outer space, and a handful of distinctly-archetypal teenagers to select from, each one bringing their own abilities to the various puzzles and interactions present in the house of Edison. It was gleefully anarchic, tongue-in-cheek, pointlessly violent and filled with easter eggs and one-off gags. And the whole thing was based on a new interpreter, programmed from the ground up by Gilbert and fellow LucasFilm employee Chip Morningstar, which they called SCUMM - Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion - which would later become the cornerstone for all of LucasArts’ graphic adventure games.

Originally released for the Commodore 64, Maniac Mansion was ported to the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh and IBM PC... And ultimately, to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990. While the NES port was serviceable (and added a few new features, such as individual soundtracks on Discmen for each playable character) it is significant largely because of the amount of pre-Entertainment Software Ratings Board censorship imposed by Nintendo on the conversion project manager, Douglas Crockford, and his team. In a classic tale of missing the forest for the trees, Crockford relates how family-friendly Nintendo demanded the removal or alteration of dozens of objectionable elements, including the words “sucked out” and “kill”, a poster of a sexy mummy, and most of Nurse Edna’s suggestive dialogue, and even took umbrage at the listing of the “NES SCUMM system” in the game’s credits, but completely overlooked the ability for characters to microwave a hamster to death.

The cult of Maniac Mansion has grown steadily since the game was first released. An uncensored Famicom port with redesigned sprites (and, sadly, no translation) was released in 1988. A sequel, Day of the Tentacle, hit shelves in 1993, focusing on Bernard Bernoulli - the nerdy teenager from Maniac Mansion - and his misadventures through time (given the original’s tiny file size, one easter egg present in Day of the Tentacle allows you to access and play through the entirity of Maniac Mansion on an in-game computer). Maniac Mansion Deluxe, a free-to-download remake with updated graphics and audio, was released by LucasFan Games in 2004. German indie developer Vampyre Games is producing a long-in-gestation 3D remake entitled Meteor Mess 3D, while fellow Deutschlanders Edison Interactive are in the process of remaking Maniac Mansion under the name Night of the Meteor, with the goal of adapting the game to a graphical style similar to Day of the Tentacle.

Finally, though it may be daming a classic game with faint praise, Maniac Mansion was one of the first videogames to receive a live-action television adaptation. Lucasfilm and The Family Channel collaborated on the Canadian production, which debuted in 1990 and starred Joe Flaherty, Deborah Theaker, Kathleen Robertson and a disappointingly small number (read: zero) of green or purple tentacles. The show, virtually a spin-off of SCTV with guest spots from Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Martin Short and David Cronenberg (!!!), shared almost no similarities with the game other than the name of Flaherty’s protagonist character Dr. Fred Edison and the fact that there was a meteor in the household basement.

(Maniac Mansion was the first game to include cutscenes. The term ‘cutscene’ was coined by Rob Gilbert to describe the interjected timer-based (rather than behaviour-based) cutaway scenes to non-player characters in the house which propelled the game’s narrative.)

Triptych: Games of Ice and Fire

"Game of Thrones" (t-shirt) by Drew Wise

"Super Frodo Bros." (t-shirt) by Pauline Acalin

"At The Mountains of Madness" (iPhone case) by Josh Legendre

Triptych: Priori Incantatem!

"Harry Potter Travel Poster #1" by Caroline Hadilaksono

"Horcrux Collector's Club" (t-shirt) by Matt Dearden

"HP" by Matt Marblo

Triptych: Minimalist Pixar Posters

"Wall-E" by Lópezgrafico

"Monsters Inc." by Justin Van Genderen

"The Incredibles" by Pandreaa

Games To Play Before You Die: #3 - Marble Madness

Marble Madness (1986)
Publisher: Atari Games
Designer: Mark Cerny

(“I designed a game I’d want to play so you’d want to play it.” -- Mark Cerny)

When Marble Madness was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, a generation of 10-year-olds learned exactly what happens to a game controller when thrown against the wall in a fit of rage.

Marble Madness was devilishly difficult to play. In the arcade, the machines came equipped with trackballs, which allowed you 360-degree control over the titular marble, but the NES had no such peripheral and the d-pad made for a singularly poor substitute. Despite the game’s control-scheme concession of offering a choice between 90-degree or 45-degree directionals, the combination of the d-pad’s limitations and some ahead-of-their-time physics resulted in the sensation of trying to steer a fighter jet with a handlebar. Oh, and don’t get me started on that damn Black Marble. That guy was a straight-up bastard.

The fact that it was so hard is precisely the reason why it’s remembered so fondly today. We spent hours - HOURS - trying to maneuvre our marble around obstacles, past Black Marble, down pipes and along ledges, sometimes gaining little more than a few inches at a time between spawns. Marble Madness was not designed to be played with an NES controller, but we still attempted to master it.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Marble Madness featured a catchy and memorable soundtrack ranking amongst the best of the 8-bit era, gorgeous isometric level design, and a truly novel gameplay concept. Besides increasing in difficulty, each level possessed distinct qualities: the Practice stage was shorter and contained fewer enemies, pitfalls and ledges; the Silly stage reversed the established direction of courses to that point and forced the player to roll uphill; the Ariel stage contained ramps, catapults and funnels, ensuring that the titular marble spent much of its time aloft. And though the list of hostile entities was short, they were memorable: tube worms which leapt on and devoured you, sentient puddles of acid which reduced you to molten glass, and the aforementioned Black Marble, who seemed to exist for no other reason but to cause you immeasurable grief.

Marble Madness came about as a direct result of the North American videogame crash of 1983. The causes of and factors related to this industry-wide implosion are too numerous and complex to get into here, but suffice it to say that Atari was one of the hardest-hit companies by the disaster (owing in part to their extemely poor Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man on 1981, and similarly poorly-designed E.T.: The Extraterrestial, released the following year) and consequently set about rethinking videogames from the ground up. Designers were pressed into adopting two specific goals in their games: providing a distinctive experience through the use of a unique control system, and offering a simultaneous two-player mode.

Taking these missives to heart, Mark Cerny conceived of a game with trackball controls, a multiplayer race mode and unique isometric graphics, and spent 10 months developing Marble Madness with lead programmer Bob Flanagan. Since Atari was in difficult financial straits owing to the market collapse, Cerny and Flanagan were placed under strict deadline and hardware restrictions. Released on time and on budget, the resulting game was, at only six levels, relatively short; for six weeks after release, it became the highest-earning arcade game, but by the seventh week, it dropped off the charts due to its short play-through time.

Despite respectable earnings, Marble Madness couldn’t rescue Atari from the mire they had gotten bogged down in, but it remains one of the last great games from the golden age of arcades and managed to make a respectable transition to the home console market. It was ported to a wide range of consoles and home computers, including the Commodore 64, Amiga, Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive and of course, the Nintendo Entertainment System. A mobile phone version of Marble Madness was announced by Electronic Arts in 2010.

(Mark Cerny, who has executive produced or contributed to dozens of games, including Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Resistance: Fall of Man, designed Marble Madness when he was only 18 years old.)

Showcase: NinjaInk's Spiderman\Calvin & Hobbes Mashups

There's tons of great little details in these: the Pumpkin Bomb lamp, the Spidey face logo rug, both toy and life-sized Spider Cars... Kudos to NinjaInk for doing a great job with these.

[NinjaInk's DeviantArt]

Triptych: Sidekicks and Power-Ups

"Power Up For A Bit" by Josh Mirman

"Yoshi's Quality Fruit" by MistyNoelle

"Akira Bros." (t-shirt) by BazNet

Triptych: Damn Fine Coffee!

"Black Lodge" by Ashley Anderson

"Black Lodge Coffee Co." (t-shirt) by Mephias

"Black Lodge 2600" (download the full game here!) by Jak Locke

Games To Play Before You Die: #2 - TradeWars 2002

TradeWars 2002 (1984)
Publisher: EIS
Designers: Gary Martin & John Pritchett

(“This has to be the single, largest man-made object you’ve ever seen. It continues
on for miles and contains the factories for all of the major brands of Space-going craft.
Since the material wars of 1998 on Earth, all ship builders relocated here.”)

They don’t get much credit these days, but for about two decades before the rise of the Internet, dial-up bulletin board systems, or BBSes, offered the only means to getting online. The conceit that one might connect to, and communicate with, other people via their computers was heady fare in 1984 - the stuff of “Neuromancer” and “Terminator" rather than the cultural zeitgeist that we take for granted today.

Inevitably, new kinds of shared social spaces lead to new kinds of play, and by the mid-’80s BBSes began to implement door games into their interfaces, allowing users to load external, multiplayer game modules. These door games, or doors, were typically text-based with ANSI or ASCII graphics thrown in for flavour, and while they did not offer simultaneous multiplayer, they are notable for the fact that they were our first taste of interactive online gaming.

Nowhere was this more engaging than in TradeWars 2002. It was far from intuitive and had a steep learning curve, compounded by the fact that, like most doors of the time, a set number of daily turns were distributed to each player in order to discourage them from staying connected to the BBS and tying up the incoming phone line for other users. Planets, ships, starports and corporations were all defined by so many stats, rankings and variables that the casual or new player might find themselves intimidated right off the bat. And yet, once you got the hang of it, TradeWars 2002 was a genuinely addictive game.

Nominally a trading sim, TradeWars 2002 possesses so many traditional and open-world roleplaying game elements that it may be considered a proto-MMORPG. There are no missions, no narrative and no canonical characters... Just a vast, open galaxy of sectors to explore, planets to mine, colonies to establish, and space pirates to fight. Interestingly, it was also one of the first games to include morality alignment, with benefits from and detriments to being either good or evil, and guilds, here called corporations, within which players may trade or share resources, ships and colonies.

TradeWars 2002 boasts a faithful collective of fans to this day, and Telnet-based tournaments are still held. In 2007, EIS in partnership with Sylien Games announced that they were remaking the game under the title TradeWars Rising, updating the graphical user interface and introducing true massively multiplayer elements but retaining the essential mechanics of gameplay. As of this writing, TradeWars Rising is in Beta and is free to play at http://www.tradewarsrising.com/.

(Supported systems: DOS and Windows-based systems, required dial-up connectivity.)

Triptych: King Of The Cosmos Am Disappoint

"The Little Prince" by Fort Awesome Studios

"We Love Katamari" by PronouncedYou

"Katamari Damacy Jelly Beans", Artist Unknown (possibly official game art?)