In 1989 Ron Gilbert, who had just made Maniac Mansion and the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure for Lucasfilm Games, published an essay called “Why Adventure Games Suck”. Its complaint was that adventure games kept breaking their own spell. Every time a player had to restore a saved game, or “ends up pounding his or her head on the desk in frustration”, the illusion was lost. Gilbert set out twelve rules to stop that happening, and the adventures his company made over the next decade, from The Secret of Monkey Island to Grim Fandango, are the best-known attempt to follow them: games in which the player could almost never die or get stuck, and which were meant to make people laugh.
Fast facts
- Studio: Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts, in San Rafael, California.
- Engine: SCUMM, the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion”, from 1987 to The Curse of Monkey Island (1997); then GrimE, a 3D engine, for Grim Fandango (1998) and Escape from Monkey Island (2000).
- Interface: verbs and objects clicked on screen, not typed.
- Rules: set out by Gilbert in 1989; no deaths and no dead ends from Loom and Monkey Island (1990) onwards.
- People: Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, David Fox, Brian Moriarty, Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood, among others.
Pointing instead of typing
Maniac Mansion (1987) replaced the text parser with a list of verbs at the bottom of the screen. Gilbert disliked typing commands and guessing the word the programmer had used; it made more sense to him “to just point at an object”. ZZAP! 64 gave the Commodore 64 game 93% in December 1987 and found that “the control method is a doddle to use, and makes the action incredibly easy to get into”. It also liked the way the game “cuts” away to show the mad Dr Fred plotting elsewhere in the house, an idea the SCUMM language turned into a command and, Gilbert believed, gave games the word “cut-scene”.
The scripting system built for that one game became the house engine. David Fox used it for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), and the company went on to make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Brian Moriarty’s Loom (1990), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Full Throttle and The Dig (1995) and The Curse of Monkey Island (1997). The LucasArts entry lists their designers.
Gilbert’s Rules of Thumb
The early games did not yet follow the rules. Maniac Mansion had, Gilbert later admitted, “a lot more places where you die and the game can end in a no-win state. Those were lessons learned.” He wrote the lessons down for The Journal of Computer Game Design, and Computer Gaming World printed an abstract in April 1990:
- The final objective needs to be clear
- Even sub-goals need to be obvious
- Live and learn
- Watch out for “backwards puzzles”
- Avoid the “I forgot to pick it up” syndrome
- Make the puzzles advance the story
- Real time gaming offers poor quality drama
- There must be incremental rewards
- Avoid arbitrary puzzles
- Reward the player’s intent
- Make the events/puzzles consistent
- Give the player lots of options
Rule 3 did not ban danger. “It is a morale problem when players can only learn by ‘dying’ and having to reboot,” the abstract explained. “Although danger is inherent in drama, note that danger should be survivable if the player is clever enough.” Rule 6 was the test for a puzzle: “Unless solving a puzzle brings the player closer to understanding both the story and the game, it is simply ‘busy work’.” Rule 7 objected to time-based puzzles, “especially if the player must fail on several occasions before getting his timing down”. And rule 12 offered a picture. Gilbert saw a linear game as “a cage with the player locked into the cage until he or she finds a certain key to get out”, and suggested that designers “think of the player as being outside the cage and the puzzles being locked within”.
Computer Gaming World closed with the essay’s own last line: “The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.”
No deaths, no dead ends
The games of 1990 put the rules into practice. CU Amiga said of Loom that “you can never get stuck in a situation. Also you can’t die, and that’s an achievement for which Lucasfilm should feel proud”, though it warned that “experienced adventurers may find it too simple”. Computer Gaming World’s Scorpia wrote that The Secret of Monkey Island had “no dead ends”. Guybrush Threepwood could die in only one place, underwater, and the Adventure Game Deaths entry tells how Gilbert argued the point against Sierra’s designers in 1991.
Later reviewers checked for it as a matter of course. Of Day of the Tentacle, Charles Ardai wrote in 1993 that “one cannot die”; PC Player noted that Full Throttle (1995) had neither deaths nor dead ends. Without death as a penalty, the puzzles had to be fair instead: Gilbert’s rule against arbitrary puzzles asked that a player’s first thought on solving one should be “Of course, why didn’t I think of that sooner!”
Jokes and voices
The other thing the games shared was comedy. Monkey Island had pirates who won sword fights with insults; Day of the Tentacle sent three friends through time in portable toilets; Sam & Max toured America’s roadside attractions with a dog detective and a manic rabbit. Gilbert made Monkey Island with two young writers, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, and Schafer and Grossman then led Day of the Tentacle. As CD-ROM arrived the games began to talk: Day of the Tentacle’s CD version held more than 268MB of sound, and The Curse of Monkey Island was the first in its series with voices.
The end of the run
The engine changed before the games stopped. The Curse of Monkey Island was the last LucasArts adventure on SCUMM. Schafer’s Grim Fandango (1998) moved to a new 3D engine, GrimE, partly because, he explained, “Ron and Aric had left and we really needed someone keeping up the engine side of SCUMM”. Escape from Monkey Island (2000), the first of its series in 3D, was the second and last game on GrimE. After it, Star Wars games became the company’s main work, and Gilbert’s series moved to Telltale, whose Tales of Monkey Island (2009) was directed by Grossman.
The designers carried the approach elsewhere. Gilbert had left in 1992 to found Humongous Entertainment, which licensed SCUMM for children’s adventures. Schafer founded Double Fine Productions in 2000, and former LucasArts staff who had worked on a cancelled Sam & Max sequel founded Telltale in 2004. LucasArts itself remastered The Secret of Monkey Island in 2009, and Double Fine remastered Grim Fandango in 2015 and Day of the Tentacle in 2016. Gilbert and Gary Winnick, Maniac Mansion’s co-designers, made Thimbleweed Park (2017) in the style of their 1987 game, and Gilbert and Grossman returned to the series with Return to Monkey Island in 2022.
Sources
- ZZAP! 64 issue 32, December 1987, p. 12: Maniac Mansion review (93%; the control method; the cut-away scenes).
- Computer Gaming World issue 70, April 1990, p. 42: abstract of Ron Gilbert’s “Why Adventure Games Suck” from The Journal of Computer Game Design (the twelve rules, the cage, and the closing line).
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, pp. 94–98, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Gilbert on deaths and no-win states in Maniac Mansion.
- CU Amiga, October 1990: Tony Dillon’s review of Loom.
- Computer Gaming World issue 73, July 1990: Scorpia’s review of The Secret of Monkey Island (“no dead ends”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993, pp. 46–47 and 80: Charles Ardai’s review of Day of the Tentacle. Compute! issue 159, December 1993, p. 118: its 268MB of sound on CD-ROM.
- PC Player (Germany), July 1995: Full Throttle review (no deaths or dead ends).
- Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, and Gilbert’s, Schafer’s and Wilmunder’s accounts of SCUMM, as set out in the SCUMM entry: the parser, the cut-scene command, SCUMM’s later games, Grim Fandango’s new engine, Humongous Entertainment.
- Retro Gamer issue 27, 2006, p. 39, and Wireframe issue 43, September 2020: Escape from Monkey Island on the GrimE engine, as cited in the Grim Fandango entry.
- For the designers, Double Fine, Telltale, the remasters and Return to Monkey Island, see the LucasArts, The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango entries and their sources.