Maniac Mansion - Impact and Legacy

Impact and Legacy

Referring to Maniac Mansion as a "seminal" title, GamesTM staff credited it with reinventing the graphical adventures' gameplay. The writer stated that removing the need to guess input verbs allowed players to focus more on the story and puzzles, resulting in less frustration and more enjoyment. Eurogamer's Kristan Reed made similar comments, saying that the design freed players from the "guessing-game frustration" and made the process "infinitely more elegant and intuitive". However, Connie Veugen and Felipe Quérette noted that determining the game's vocabulary was an enjoyable aspect of the genre. GamesTM magazine further commented that the game had solidified Lucasfilm Games as a leader in the graphic adventure genre. Authors Mike and Sandie Morrison commented that the studio had brought "serious competition" to the genre in the form of Maniac Mansion. Authors Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Wilson echoed the sentiment, calling it a "landmark title" for the company. They also stated that the game, along with Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, had inaugurated a "new era of humor-based adventure games". Reed seconded the statement, noting that the game "set in motion a captivating chapter in the history of gaming" that encompassed wit, invention, and style. GameSpy's Christopher Buecheler credited the game's success with making its genre commercially and critically viable. It was also one of the first video games to feature product placement (Pepsi brands); other games, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, Zool, and Tapper followed suit. Retro Gamer's Stuart Hunt wrote in a September 2011 issue that "Maniac Mansion proved that videogames could capture the essence of an entirely different medium and opened our eyes to the wonderful things that happened when they placed their interactive stamp on them". The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle developer Dave Grossman said that Maniac Mansion revolutionized the adventure game genre, also noting the fact that the game was only 64 KB large and that the music was good, especially for PCs. In a Joystiq interview on his development of The Cave, Gilbert said that some people originally did not classify Maniac Mansion as an adventure game because it was not a text-based adventure with stationary graphics and a text parser, just as people did not classify The Cave as an adventure game because it is not point-and-click. He concluded by citing Maniac Mansion as an example of the evolution of the adventure game genre, saying: "I think adventure games just evolve and they change, and I think you just need to do what's right for them."

The game engine, SCUMM, has been described as "revolutionary", which Lucasfilm Games used the engine to develop eleven other games in the following decade, improving the engine with each subsequent game. GamesTM attributed this change to a desire to streamline production and produce fun games. Competitors eventually adopted similar systems for their adventure games. Following his departure from LucasArts (Lucasfilm Games had been combined under this name with ILM and Skywalker Sound in 1990) in 1992, Gilbert used the SCUMM technology to create adventure games and Backyard Sports games at Humongous Entertainment. The designers built on their experience from Maniac Mansion and expanded the process and their ambition in subsequent titles. In retrospect, Gilbert commented that he made a number of mistakes designing the game (for instance, the dead-end situations that arise if certain items are used incorrectly) and applied the lessons to future games. In cutscenes, Gilbert had used a timer rather than a specific event to trigger them, which occasionally resulted in awkward scene changes. The designer aimed to avoid these flaws in the Monkey Island series of games. However, Gilbert commented that Maniac Mansion is his favorite because of its imperfections.