Maniac Mansion began as a board game on paper. Ron Gilbert and the artist Gary Winnick drew the floorplan of a haunted house, laid acetate overlays on it for each floor, and moved cards around it to see whether their story of teenagers breaking into a mad scientist’s home was any fun. It was, and turning it into a Commodore 64 game took Gilbert so long that he built a programming language along the way. That language, SCUMM, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, ran every Lucasfilm adventure for the next decade. The game itself was a comedy about bad horror films, with a hamster that could be put in a microwave, and when Nintendo came to publish it on the NES, the company’s rules on content cut it about.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts. In Gilbert’s words, “the first game that LucasArts published themselves”.
- Design: Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, with the programmers David Fox and Aric Wilmunder.
- Released: 1987, for the Commodore 64 and Apple II at $34.95 in the US. PC, Amiga and Atari ST versions followed, and Jaleco published an NES version in 1990.
- Engine: SCUMM, in its first game.
- Sequel: Day of the Tentacle (1993).
Teenagers in a haunted house
“Gary and I tried to pull every cliché we could think of into the game and really make fun of the genre,” Gilbert told Edge. “Everyone in it was a stereotype.” Both men liked campy horror films; Winnick narrowed it to “teenage horror movies where the kids always split up and go off into the dark recesses of a scary location on their own”. His first drawing for the game was the outside of the house with a sign, “WARNING: TRESPASSERS WILL BE HORRIBLY MUTILATED”, put out front as a joke. It stayed in the finished game.
The story, as ZZAP! 64 told it in December 1987: a meteor has crashed in the back yard of the Edison family, and since then Dr Fred has “developed megalomaniac tendencies and vowed to take over the world”. He has kidnapped Sandy, the girlfriend of a teenager called Dave, and plans to suck her brains out. Dave goes to rescue her and takes two friends. The rest of the household are no help: Nurse Edna, Weird Ed with his pet hamster, and Dead Cousin Ted, a mummified corpse. Most of them, Gilbert said, were based on real people he and Winnick knew, “but I’m not saying who for fear of reprisals”.
Compute!’s Gazette listed the six friends Dave can choose from:
| Character | As Compute!’s Gazette described them in 1987 |
|---|---|
| Razor | “a female punker” |
| Bernard | “a physics whiz with a cowardly streak” |
| Jeff | “a surfer” |
| Syd | “a rock musician” |
| Michael | “a photographer” |
| Wendy | “a would-be novelist” |
The choice changes the game. Each kid had “two or three puzzles that only they could solve”, Gilbert told Retro Gamer, and the team drew up “huge puzzle charts with all the possibilities” to keep track of them. “Having multiple kids, and multiple combinations of kids,” Fox said, “made the game exponentially more complex to program, test, and debug.” Gilbert said he was not sure he would do it again.
Playing it
The screen showed a side-on, scrolling view of the house, with a list of verbs and the current kid’s inventory beneath it. ZZAP!’s reviewers explained how a command was built: move the joystick cursor to a verb such as “unlock”, then to the door in the picture, then to the key in the inventory, until the message line read “unlock door with key”, and press fire. The function keys switched between the three kids, who could split up to explore, and every so often the game cut away to “a cameo scene happening elsewhere around the house”, Dr Fred muttering his plans or another member of the family wandering about. Computer Gaming World’s listing called these “Cut-scenes”. The game ended when all three kids and Sandy were safe and the machinery in the basement was disabled.
ZZAP! 64 gave it 93%. “The control method is a doddle to use,” one reviewer wrote, “and makes the action incredibly easy to get into.” Another compared it with “an interactive Scooby-Doo type cartoon”.
The verbs replaced the typed commands of earlier adventures. “I decided that I was sick and tired of text parsers,” Gilbert said. Fox recalled him gathering the designers round a computer to demonstrate Sierra’s games and pick apart how they punished players, as when picking up a piece of broken mirror killed the hero. Maniac Mansion did not fully live up to that itself. The kids could die, and the game could reach a state where it could no longer be won. Compared with Monkey Island, Gilbert admitted, “there are a lot more places where you die and the game can end in a no-win state. Those were lessons learned.”
The house was full of jokes that went nowhere. Edge listed a broken spiral staircase that looks like the key to a puzzle and serves no purpose, a medicine cabinet in Dr Fred’s office that never opens, a poster of Gilbert, an X-Wing model in Weird Ed’s bedroom, a THX-1138 number plate, and a chainsaw with no fuel. The fuel could be found, but only in Zak McKracken, a different game. Fox’s contribution was the hamster: “I didn’t tell Ron about it ahead of time — just programmed it in and showed it to him. He loved it.” Take Weird Ed’s hamster from its cage and put it in the kitchen microwave, and it explodes.
Building SCUMM
“SCUMM was a bit of an afterthought,” Gilbert told Edge. “I started to program the gameplay in 6502 assembly language, but soon realised that it was just too complex and I needed a scripting language. I spent a good year just working on that, before the game started to come together.” Fox joined to help for what Gilbert expected to be about a month; he stayed for about six. The design was complete before programming started, but after that, Gilbert said, “it was a big free-for-all”, with Winnick drawing, Gilbert and Fox programming, and the dialogue written as they went. Because he had built the whole system, the game was “about a year late, and I was not a very popular person with management for several months”.
The scripting system made the game easy to move. “Because we were working in a high-level language,” Fox said, “it was much easier to port to other platforms.” Only the interpreter had to be rewritten for each computer. The SCUMM entry tells the rest: how Gilbert made the system general for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), and how LucasArts used it up to The Curse of Monkey Island (1997).
The NES version
The Nintendo cartridge was Lucasfilm’s first. Jaleco published it under licence, and Nintendo Power reported in March 1990 that it was “under translation for the NES”. Douglas Crockford, a technologist at the company, volunteered to manage its completion, and his account of what followed, “The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion”, is the main record of it.
Nintendo’s standards department read every line of text. Jaleco’s Howie Rubin warned the team in advance that “the baddest bad word is Kill”. “The central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things,” Crockford wrote. “The image and the act are good, but the word is bad.” Among the changes he describes:
- a bathroom graffito, “For a good time EDNA 3444”, became “Call Edna 3444”;
- Nurse Edna’s suggestive speeches and an obscene phone call were rewritten;
- Weird Ed telling his mother that Dr Fred “hasn’t eaten in 5 years” became “hasn’t slept”, because Nintendo read the line, with its talk of bodies, as cannibalism;
- two posters in Ted’s room and a classical nude statue were taken out, though Crockford tried arguing that the statue was a Michelangelo;
- the arcade game in the house, Kill Thrill, became Tuna Diver;
- the credits lost two mentions of “NES SCUMM”, after Nintendo asked what SCUMM meant.
Nintendo did not object at the time to the hamster. “They didn’t object to the nasty stuff that happens to the hamster,” Crockford wrote. It did not last. David Sheff’s history of Nintendo, Game Over, says Nintendo’s reviewer passed the game and thousands of cartridges were sold before someone at Nintendo noticed the exploding hamster, and Jaleco was told to delete it from future cartridges. Jaleco’s press release defended the scene: “Although Jaleco USA does not condone the placing of rodents into a cooking apparatus, the feature added a degree of fun to the already wacky and wild game.” Crockford ended his account: “Nintendo is a jealous god.”
Day of the Tentacle, and after
“The sequel for Maniac Mansion didn’t happen for years after the original was released,” Gilbert said. David Fox’s Zak McKracken came next, and Gilbert moved on to Monkey Island. “I had always had this story idea for Maniac Mansion II that involved going back in time.” Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman wrote it: Day of the Tentacle (1993) brought back Bernard, set the Purple Tentacle loose on the world, and split the three heroes across past, present and future. Compute! found that “the complete Maniac Mansion — CGA graphics and PC speaker sounds intact — is cleverly hidden within Day of the Tentacle”; Retro Gamer later explained that it was reached by using a computer in the house.
The game also became a television sitcom, which Edge mentioned in passing. Co-produced by Lucasfilm, it ran for three seasons from 1990 to 1993 on YTV in Canada and the Family Channel in the US, with Joe Flaherty as Dr Fred. Gilbert and Winnick worked together again on Thimbleweed Park (2017), an adventure funded on Kickstarter and made to look and play like their game of 1987.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 41, November 1987, p. 4: new-release listing, Apple II and C64, $34.95, and “Cut-scenes”.
- Compute!’s Gazette issue 53, November 1987, p. 37: review; Dave, Sandy and Dr Fred, and the six kids described.
- ZZAP! 64 issue 32, December 1987, pp. 12–13: review, 93%; story, controls, cut-away scenes and reviewers’ comments.
- Nintendo Power issue 11, March 1990, p. 95, “Gossip Galore”: Maniac Mansion “under translation for the NES from Jaleco”; issue 16, September 1990, pp. 14–19: feature on the NES version.
- Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993, pp. 47 and 80: Day of the Tentacle review; Bernard’s return.
- Compute! issue 159, December 1993, p. 118: Day of the Tentacle review; the complete Maniac Mansion hidden inside it.
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, pp. 94–98, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Gilbert, Winnick and Fox on the design, the paper prototype, the characters, SCUMM, the delay and self-publishing, the hamster, Sierra’s games and deaths, the in-jokes, the sequel, the TV sitcom, and Douglas Crockford and the NES version.
- Retro Gamer issue 12, 2005, p. 47: the hamster removed from the NES version.
- Retro Gamer issue 27, 2006, pp. 35–38: Gilbert on the kids’ puzzles and puzzle charts; the NES changes; Maniac Mansion hidden inside Day of the Tentacle; the platforms the game appeared on.
- Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, p. 66: Weird Ed’s hamster exploded in the kitchen microwave.
- David Sheff, Game Over: Press Start to Continue (1999 edition, with Andy Eddy), on Nintendo’s licensees: the hamster found after release and Jaleco’s press release.
- Douglas Crockford, “The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System” (web; Crockford’s own account, primary). https://www.crockford.com/maniac.html
- Wikipedia, “Maniac Mansion (TV series)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): YTV and the Family Channel, 1990–1993, three seasons, Joe Flaherty, Lucasfilm as co-producer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_Mansion_(TV_series)
- Wikipedia, “Thimbleweed Park” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Gilbert and Winnick’s Kickstarter-funded adventure, released 30 March 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed_Park