1990 · NES
| Region | Date | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| North America | Sep 1990 | Jaleco |
| Europe and Australia | 22 Oct 1992 | Jaleco |
Maniac Mansion began in 1987 as a Lucasfilm Games computer adventure, a comedy built from B-movie horror clichés. This page covers the NES version, published by Jaleco in North America in September 1990. The story is unchanged. Dr. Fred Edison, a mad scientist whose mind belongs to a sentient meteor that crashed near his house twenty years ago, has kidnapped Sandy Pantz. Her boyfriend, Dave Miller, picks two companions from six friends, Bernard, Jeff, Michael, Razor, Syd and Wendy, and the three go in after her.
You play by choosing verbs such as Walk To or Unlock from a menu and pointing at things in the room. Each friend has different skills: Syd and Razor play instruments, and Bernard can fix appliances. Many puzzles only work for certain characters, so the team you pick decides your route through the house. Nearly everyone in the mansion is hostile, the Edisons and the purple tentacle included, and getting caught means the dungeon or, sometimes, death. There are five possible endings.
Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick created the game, and Gilbert built the SCUMM engine to make it, an engine Lucasfilm reused in many later adventures. The NES version was the second try at a Nintendo port. Jaleco had already released a Famicom version in Japan in June 1988, with cute redrawn characters, flip-screen rooms and a 104-character password. The American cartridge was Lucasfilm Games' first NES game, made with Realtime Associates and directed by Douglas Crockford on a modified engine, NES SCUMM. It is generally seen as closer to the original. Tim Schafer, later a designer of the sequel Day of the Tentacle, got his first professional credit on it as a playtester.
It also gained what no earlier version had: background music. Realtime Associates brought in George 'The Fat Man' Sanger and David Hayes, who wrote a theme for each character, including punk for Razor and a version of Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back in Town' for Dave.
Then it met Nintendo of America's content rules. Crockford's team cut profanity and suggestive lines, shortened a graffiti hint, and removed a swimsuit calendar, a classical statue and a mummy poster in a Playmate pose. Nintendo manufactured 250,000 cartridges, each with a battery save. Microwaving the hamster survived the cuts until Nintendo spotted it after the first batch sold, and Jaleco had to remove it from later shipments.
The design is still clever. Choosing a team at the start changes which puzzles you can solve, which makes second and third runs worthwhile, and the writing's affection for bad horror films comes through even trimmed. The music gives each character a personality the computer versions never had.
The interface shows its age. Steering a cursor across a verb menu with a control pad is slower than a mouse, and some puzzles can leave you in a position where you can no longer win, a mistake Ron Gilbert has owned and designed out of his later games. Save often. Even so, it remains one of the NES's most distinctive games.
Nintendo's reviewers had a classical statue taken out of Maniac Mansion and left in a hamster you could cook. Then they noticed the hamster. Douglas Crockford, who directed the port, pointed to it as proof of how contradictory the rules were.
The sociologist Howard Becker wrote that 'deviant behavior is behavior that people so label'. Nothing is offensive in itself; it becomes so when a group writes a rule and applies it. This port is a clean case study. Lines and images that shipped on home computers needed cutting for a Nintendo, because a different gatekeeper drew the line. Johan Huizinga saw play as a bounded circle with its own order. Here the order inside the circle was Lucasfilm's, and the order around it was Nintendo's, and the cartridge is the record of the two negotiating. Players only ever saw the result. Knowing the history, it is hard not to smile at what went and what stayed, and to remember that what counts as unacceptable in play is always decided by people.
Read: The magic circle: the world that rules make →
Verdict · 8/10
A sharp, funny adventure that survived Nintendo's scissors with most of its wit intact and gained a great soundtrack on the way. Slow to control today, but still unlike anything else on the NES.
