1987 жылғы «Мәніакальді үй» ойыны

1987 video game
the video game

Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It follows teenage protagonist Dave Miller as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sandy Pantz from a mad scientist, whose mind has been enslaved by a sentient meteor. The player uses a point and click interface to guide Dave and two of his six playable friends through the scientist's mansion while solving puzzles and avoiding dangers. Gameplay is non linear, and the game must be completed in different ways based on the player's choice of characters. Initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, Maniac Mansion was Lucasfilm Games' first self published product. The game was conceived in 1985 by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who sought to tell a comedic story based on horror film and B movie clichés. They mapped out the project as a paper and pencil game before coding commenced. While earlier adventure titles had relied on command lines, Gilbert disliked such systems, and he developed Maniac Mansions simpler point and click interface as a replacement. To speed up production, he created a game engine called SCUMM, which was used in many later LucasArts titles. After its release, Maniac Mansion was ported to several platforms. A port for the Nintendo Entertainment System had to be reworked heavily, in response to Nintendo of America’s concerns that the game was inappropriate for children. Maniac Mansion was critically acclaimed: reviewers lauded its graphics, cutscenes, animation, and humor. Writer Orson Scott Card praised it as a step toward "computer games [becoming] a valid storytelling art". It influenced numerous graphic adventure titles, and its point and click interface became a standard feature in the genre. The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as a serious rival to adventure game studios such as Sierra On Line. In 1990, Maniac Mansion was adapted into a three season television series of the same name, written by Eugene Levy and starring Joe Flaherty. A sequel to the game, Day of the Tentacle, was released in 1993.

Maniac Mansion is a graphic adventure game in which the player uses a point and click interface to guide characters through a two dimensional game world and to solve puzzles. Fifteen action commands, such as "Walk To" and "Unlock", may be selected by the player from a menu on the screen's lower half. The game may be completed with any combination of characters; but, since many puzzles are solvable only by certain characters, different paths must be taken based on the group's composition. Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Ron Gilbert, that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events. With the exception of the green tentacle, the mansion's inhabitants are hostile, and will throw the player characters into the dungeon—or, in some situations, kill them—if they see them. When a character dies, the player must continue with the remaining of the three selected characters; the game ends if all characters are killed. Maniac Mansion has five possible endings, based on which characters are chosen, which survive, and what the characters accomplish.

[[File:Ron Gilbert PAX 2009. jpg|thumb|upright|alt=A brown haired man with a light brown plaid shirt stands behind a podium against a black background.|Ron Gilbert (pictured) co wrote and co designed Maniac Mansion with Gary Winnick; they were both puzzle and graphic adventure game fans. Gilbert had been hired the previous year as a programmer for the game Koronis Rift. Gilbert and Winnick co wrote and co designed the project, and also worked separately with Gilbert on programming and Winnick on visuals. As both of them enjoyed B horror films, they decided to make a comedy horror game set in a haunted house. Story and characters were a primary concern for Gilbert and Winnick. The pair based the game's cast on friends, family members, acquaintances, and stereotypes. For example, Winnick's girlfriend Ray was the inspiration for Razor, while Dave and Wendy were based, respectively, on Gilbert and a fellow Lucasfilm employee named Wendy. Maniac Mansions story and structure were designed before coding commenced. The project's earliest incarnation was a paper and pencil board game, in which the mansion's floor plan was used as a game board, and cards represented events and characters. The game's dialogue, written by David Fox, was not created until after programming had begun. He decided that a new game engine would have to be created. Lucasfilm employee Chip Morningstar contributed the base code for the engine, which Gilbert then built on. Gilbert hoped to create a "system that could be used on many adventure games, cutting down the time it took to make them". Because of the project's nonlinear puzzle design, the team struggled to prevent no win scenarios, in which the player unexpectedly became unable to complete the game. As a result of this problem, Gilbert later explained: "We were constantly fighting against the desire just to rip out all the endings and just go with three characters, or even sometimes just one character". Lucasfilm Games had only one playtester, and many dead ends went undetected as a result. quote box | width = 30% | salign=center | quote=All adventure games of the time required typing, and this is understandable given that most of them were text based. A few games, most notably the Sierra ones, had graphics but they still required typing. I never understood this and felt that it was only taking it halfway.|source=Ron Gilbert on the then common input method in adventure games Fox had made a similar attempt to streamline Lucasfilm's earlier Labyrinth: The Computer Game and he conceived the entirety of Maniac Mansions interface, according to Gilbert. Forty input commands were planned at first, but the number was gradually reduced to 12. The game was released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II in October 1987. While previous Lucasfilm Games products had been published by outside companies, Maniac Mansion was self published. The company hired Ken Macklin, an acquaintance of Winnick's, to design the game's packaging artwork. Gilbert and Winnick collaborated with the marketing department to design the back cover. The two also created an insert that includes hints, a backstory, and jokes. In September 1990 Jaleco released an American version of Maniac Mansion as the first NES title developed by Lucasfilm Games in cooperation with Realtime Associates. Generally, this port is regarded as being far closer to the original game than the Japanese effort. Company management was occupied with other projects, and so the port received little attention until employee Douglas Crockford volunteered to direct it. The team used a modified version of the SCUMM engine called "NES SCUMM" for the port. The graphics had to be entirely redrawn to match the NES's display resolution. During Maniac Mansions development for the Commodore 64, Lucasfilm had censored profanity in the script: for instance, the early line of dialogue "Don't be a shit head" became "Don't be a tuna head". Each cartridge was fitted with a battery powered back up to save data. Nintendo announced the port through its official magazine in early 1990, and it provided further coverage later that year. The ability to microwave a hamster remained in the game, which Crockford cited as an example of the censors' contradictory criteria.

According to Stuart Hunt of Retro Gamer, Maniac Mansion received highly positive reviews from critics. Nevertheless, Ron Gilbert noted that "it wasn't a huge hit" commercially. In 2011, Hunt wrote that "as so often tends to be the way with cult classics, the popularity it saw was slow in coming". Commodore Users Bill Scolding and three reviewers from Zzap!64 compared the game to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Further comparisons were drawn to Psycho, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Addams Family and Scooby Doo. In Compute!, Orson Scott Card praised the game's humor, cinematic storytelling and lack of violence. He called it "compellingly good" and evidence of Lucasfilm's push "to make computer games a valid storytelling art". In describing Maniac Mansion as Lucasfilms' "breakthrough game", Matthew Castillo of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine praised the "B movie" horror elements, the use of cutscenes and the visuals. German magazine Happy Computer commended the point and click interface and likened it to that of Uninvited by ICOM Simulations. The publication highlighted Maniac Mansions graphics, originality, and overall enjoyability: one of the writers called it the best adventure title yet released. Happy Computer later reported that Maniac Mansion was the highest selling video game in West Germany for three consecutive months. The game's humor received praise from Zzap!64, whose reviewers called the point and click controls "tremendous" and the total package "innovative and polished". Shay Addams of Questbusters: The Adventurer's Newsletter preferred Maniac Mansions interface to that of Labyrinth: The Computer Game. He considered the game to be Lucasfilm's best, and he recommended it to Commodore 64 and Apple II users unable to run titles with better visuals, such as those from Sierra On Line. A writer for ACE enjoyed the game's animation and depth, but he noted that fans of text based adventures would dislike the game's simplicity.

PC Computing in 1988 wrote that Maniac Mansion for the PC had a clever story but "grade B animation", concluding that "the result falls short of the magic we expect from George Lucas". Reviewing the MS DOS and Atari ST ports, a critic from The Games Machine called Maniac Mansion "an enjoyable romp" that was structurally superior to later LucasArts adventure games. The writer noticed poor pathfinding and disliked the limited audio. Computer Gaming Worlds Charles Ardai praised the game for attaining "the necessary and precarious balance between laughs and suspense that so many comic horror films and novels lack". Although he faulted the control system's limited options, he hailed it as "one of the most comfortable ever devised". Reviewing Maniac Mansions Amiga version four years after its release, Simon Byron of The One Amiga praised the game for retaining "charm and humour", but suggested that its art direction had become "tacky" compared to more recent titles. Stephen Bradly of Amiga Format found the game derivative, but encountered "loads of visual humour" in it, adding: "Strangely, it's quite compelling after a while". Michael Labiner of Germany's Amiga Joker considered Maniac Mansion to be one of the best adventure games for the system. He noted minor graphical flaws, such as a limited color palette, but he argued that the gameplay made up for such shortcomings. Writing for Datormagazin in Sweden, Ingela Palmér commented that the Amiga and Commodore 64 versions of Maniac Mansion were nearly identical. She criticized the graphics and gameplay of both releases but felt the game to be highly enjoyable regardless. Reviewing the NES release, Entertainment Weekly named it the #20 greatest game released that season: "The graphics are merely okay and the music is Nintendo at its tinniest, but Maniac Mansion's plot is enough to overcome these faults. In this command driven game — adapted from the computer hit — three buddies venture into a sinister haunted mansion and wind up juggling a bunch of wacky story lines". British magazine Mean Machines commended the game's presentation, playability, and replay value. The publication also noted undetailed graphics and "ear bashing tunes". The magazine's Julian Rignall compared Maniac Mansion to the title Shadowgate, but he preferred the former's controls and lack of "death without warning situations". In retrospective features, Edge magazine called the NES version "somewhat neutered" and GamesTM referred to it as "infamous" and "heavily censored". The two companies collaborated with Atlantis Films to produce a sitcom named after the game, which debuted in September of that year. Based in part on the video game, the series focuses on the Edison family's life and stars Joe Flaherty as Dr. Fred. Its writing staff was led by Eugene Levy. Gilbert later said that the premise of the series changed during production until it differed heavily from the game's original plot. Time named it one of the year's best new series. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly questioned the decision to air the series on The Family Channel, given Flaherty's subversive humor. The sequel Day of the Tentacle was released in 1993,

In 2010, the staff of GamesTM dubbed Maniac Mansion a "seminal" title that overhauled the gameplay of the graphic adventure genre. Removing the need to guess syntax allowed players to concentrate on the story and puzzles, which created a smoother and more enjoyable experience, according to the magazine. Similarly, Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy called the game a contributor to its genre's subsequent critical adoration and commercial success. Conversely, writer Mark Dery argued that the goal of rescuing a kidnapped cheerleader reinforced negative gender roles. The Lucasfilm team built on their experiences from Maniac Mansion and became increasingly ambitious in subsequent titles. The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as one of the leading producers of adventure games: This belief was shared by Reed, who wrote that Maniac Mansion "set in motion a captivating chapter in the history of gaming" that encompassed wit, invention, and style. In 2011, Richard Cobbett summarized Maniac Mansion as "one of the most intricate and important adventure games ever made". Retro Gamer ranked it as one of the ten best Commodore 64 games in 2006, and IGN later named it one of the ten best LucasArts adventure games. Seven years after the NES version's debut, Nintendo Power named it the 61st best game ever. The publication dubbed it the 16th best NES title in 2008. The game's uniqueness and clever writing were praised by Nintendo Power: in 2010, the magazine's Chris Hoffman stated that the game is "unlike anything else out there — a point and click adventure with an awesome sense of humor and multiple solutions to almost every puzzle". In its retrospective coverage, Nintendo Power several times noted the ability to microwave a hamster,

Maniac Mansion enthusiasts have drawn fan art of its characters, participated in tentacle themed cosplay and produced a trailer for a fictitious film adaptation of the game. By the end of 2004, the remake had over 200,000 downloads. A remake with three dimensional graphics called Meteor Mess was created by the German developer Vampyr Games, and, as of 2011, another group in Germany produced one with art direction similar to that of Day of the Tentacle. Fans have created an episodic series of games based on Maniac Mansion. Gilbert has said that he would like to see an official remake, similar in its graphics and gameplay to The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge. He also expressed doubts about its potential quality, in light of George Lucas's enhanced remakes of the original Star Wars trilogy. In December 2017, Disney, which gained rights to the LucasArts games following its acquisition of Lucasfilm, published Maniac Mansion running atop the ScummVM virtual machine to various digital storefronts. Physical re releases of the NES and PC versions are scheduled for release by Limited Run Games. A musical that parodied the main arc of the video game, Mansión Maniática, Pablo Flores Torres was released in Argentina in 2023.