One of the best games! Congrats again! For the wonderful game and for SCUMM... the backbone of all of Lucas Classics
11 years of Maniac Mansion!

21 years... sorry for the incoherence
Maniac Mansion sentimentalisms... it's amazing how time passes by...

21 years...cripes, really been that long? Now if that makes me feel old, I can only imagine how Old man Ron feels about it.

It doesn't bother me at all, because I was 6 years old when I designed Maniac Mansion.

Ron Gilbert is the same age as me? And he has achieved so much, and I have achieved so little.

I did listen to Haggis and make my book available on Lulu, though. So far I have had five orders, although sadly all of those books were ordered by me. I have also had 5 hits, but 4 of those are accounted for by me telling people about the page. The other person must have got lost.

Yes, I am a Monkey Island fan and yes, I did write a book about pirates. And yes, I did put one overt Monkey Island reference in my book... but only one. I have my pride.

Oh hey, cool, you took my advice... too bad it hasn't worked out very well yet. :( But hey, what format does the download version come in? If it's compatible with a Palm (preferably with Plucker), I might get that, once I've finished reading Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Well, I only made the book available the day before I wrote that comment, so my statistics didn't have much of a basis...

The format is PDF, I have no idea how compatible with a Palm that makes it...

My next step is to make some kind of attention-grabbing YouTube clip that will spread like wildfire around the internet and make everyone notice the book. I plan to dress as Miss South Carolina and rant about how mean everyone is being to Britney Spears.

Oh, PDF would make it very suitable, since I've got Adobe Reader installed on the device. And that video sounds like a good idea. Just to be original though, you could change the person to be left alone. Like... "Leave Ron Gilbert alone!!! You are so mean, telling him to get back to work! LEAVE HIM ALONE!!" :)

I can't read the sample chapter. Where's the sample chapter?

Well I wasn't even born yet when I played it!

Hey that's cool... at what age are you now Ron?... are you still six years old or you are just some years older.

lol, yeah. 6 years on your home planet maybe ^^

You should write you memories, Ron, so they can be added (or linked) to the article. It would round the article off perfectly!

The Pepsi can thing comes from an interview with Douglas Crockford. If you're convinced he made it up I'll delete it.

I didn't realize that Maniac Mansion was so... unloved... by contemporary audiences. Half the second page is the authors defending how old and antiquated the game is. It's like, well, the game is kinda crappy, but without it we wouldn't have (cue singing angels) Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max (end angels) - not that I dislike those games, far from it, but that era of LucasArts games should not be worshipped to the detriment of other deserving games.

Maniac Mansion old? Bah, says I. Ain't nothing flawed about this masterpiece, says I. Still playable, says I. I am extremely biased (Maniac Mansion was my first) but I still think it is better than Day of the Tentacle.

Anyway, looking forward to future articles in the series. Zak McKracken is next. I wonder if they are going to do Club Caribe... (I still remember wandering around in the woods hoping that the witch Tabitha would turn me into a green tentacle - God, I'm old).

I don't think it is unloved.Not with more than 70 fan adventures.

Maniac Mansion did a lot of things that later games didn't, and it's really groundbreaking stuff. However, it's hard to ignore the evolutions that LucasArts brought to their adventures, all of which made these games a lot more fun to play. Dead-ends especially - I don't like worrying that I'm going to press the wrong button and break the game. It's not fun.

Then again, I didn't play Maniac Mansion first.

I tried in my comment though to make sure that no one ever forgets that Maniac Mansion did it all first and that we should never stop kissing it and fondling it until it puts out, that cheeky minx. Wait, what am I talking about again?

Why does everybody bring up the dead ends? You have to try REALLY hard to screw yourself over. MM isn't a game that is actively trying to kill you (but it will let you kill yourself through stupidity). All the dead ends and deaths I can think of are the direct result of doing something that you know to be dumb (filling the pool back up with someone in it, mating with a giant severed tentacle, developer fluid in the plant, giving a poor broken soul of a man his only loved thing in the world, only inside out, heating up radioactive liquid, playing with the fuse box to a house powered by a nuclear generator, etc).

It's been a while (twenty years?), so maybe I'm missing something, but I think you are exaggerating on the severity of the dead end thing.

You've probably had enough of the gushing, but i'll go ahead and say it: for me, there was no single game more influential than Maniac Mansion.

The only adventure games i had played to date were Dallas Quest and a few of the old Marvel text adventures, which were pretty rough.  The computer wasn't even mine - i had to visit a friend's house to play these games.  His mom babysat me.

i vividly remember the friend coming home one day and saying "i played this cool game at Bihn An's house."  He described being chased down the hall by a crazy old lady, finding broken ketchup bottles in the fridge that looked like blood, and searching everywhere for chainsaw gas to protect himself.

i thought he was full of crap.  The most complex game i'd seen on the C64 was Montezuma's Revenge.  Everything this kid was describing was impossible.

Then i saw the game. And i believed.

Today, i've created and published over fifty kids' games.  Some of them borrow more heavily from Maniac Mansion than others. But for every last one, i am indebted to Maniac Mansion.  That game is the reason i became a game developer.

Ron - if you're at GDC this year, i'd love to buy you a drink and kiss your ring.  (It can't taste any worse than your ass right now.)

What a brilliant write-up!

MM is my favourite game all time, I played it for the first time when I was 9, now I'm 26 years old and I still play it again and again...

I remember when I had like 8 years old and I rented this game for the NES. It was so absorbing that I rented it several times even when I had finished it and I even started learning english (I'm not from US) by my own just to understand everything in the mansion.

By the way does anyone know what's the story with lucasfan games?
http://www.lucasfangames.de/
I read somewhere that lucasarts sent them a cease and desist letter or something like that.
Is that false or do they deserve to be kicked in the nuts?

In related news, Steve Purcell starts a blog, it has some pretty cool drawings.

http://spudvisionblog.blogspot.com/

Off topic.. Mr. Gilbert I was reading some interviews about deathspank and you mentioned "there's not much out there between Bejeweled and Halo." ... have you played Half Life? its a great game with a great story line and great puzzles, and the guys who made it are making the rest of the plot episodic now. I think you should add it asap to your list of current played games. From the creators of Teamfortress and CounterStrike.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree - and very strongly at that.
I read rave reviews of Half Life. Even if FPS are not my thing, I always thought I should give it a go, because everyone said the story was great. Looking at this enigmatic guy on the cover (turned out to be Gordon Freeman) made me wonder who he was and what his story was.
Well, I have played all episodes now, and I must say it loud: there is no story in Half Life. You get no background, no insight, nothing. You only get fractions of the events happening, and they are limited to the "actual" time. Most of the things that happen remain unexplained. I thought Gordon had a family, imagined "Half Life" to be some obscure thing happening in that universe, I thought maybe he was infected by some strange alien disease/weapon, and was living in some kind of half life; I expected to discover maybe this - but maybe, hopefully, much more than this.
Instead, I am still wondering who Gordon Freeman is; in all 4 episodes, I've not discovered a single, damn thing about him. I did discover "Half Life" to be a scientific reference to something completely unrelated.
Later on in the game, Combines are introduced. You don't have a single clue who they are and what they want, why they do what they do. I had to look it up in Wikipedia to understand anything.
Not that the game is bad; it's a very good FPS, well acted and with beautiful graphics. But if we're talking about story, well, it's got nothing.

Plus, I'm going to be blasphemous here and add that Dreamfall is the most  overrated, ugly and story-lacking "game" of all. It's not even a game; it's just a bloated, meaningless kind of "interactive" (that means infuriating) movie.
It is the ultimate demonstration, if any was ever needed, that graphics mean nothing in a good adventure game; it makes you sad, and longing for real, story-filled adventure games; like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, The Dig, Indy 4.
It makes you want Ron back on track, desperately, badly, and now.

Probably you like games with linear plots.. Half Life its not for you then, This game compares more like a mystery movie or book where as you go you get clues of whats going on and youve to arrange them like a puzzle on your head to understand.
I find very interesting how game designers tell the same plot from different angles from different characters on half life, blue shift, oppossion force and Half Life Decay, they all give you clues on whats going on and all he parts of the mystery puzzle fit perfectly.
Probably you had so many overspectations on the game that you where psicologically closed to the storyline, missing important details and dialogs on your crazy run through the games for finding what was going on. And what do you mean you dont know about "combines", what you expected, a formal introduction? suppossely your character was stuck in a no aging chamber since the first episode.. youre not supposed to know whats going on as fast as you start playing, dont be silly.
Probably if you checked the game manuals you wouldnt have any need for consulting wikipedia... yet the game is not finished yet with one more, and final chapter is about to unfold, there, you should finish to understand completely the story.

Anyways, for those like you who didnt payed attention for the story details, or just to lazy to play it, there are some plot summaries in internet, theres a pretty fair one at http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Image:Windows_logo.png



I was reading some coments from the creators who agree with fans that trama would make up a good movie, but they are afraid that holliwood screws it up badly the same way they do with every other thing it touches.

by the way, there are no movie scenes in Halflife, the storyline is everywhere as you play.

What I can conclude is that, again, you dont like too complicated plots and you enjoy linear trama more. If youre not the "detective" type, then this game was not ment your you. Im not a hardcore gamer, but I can say I enjoyed half life's story, and yes I would recomend it to Mr Gilbert.

Half Life doesn't really have a plot. I love the game to death (the first one, second one kinda sucks) but it uses obtuseness as a replacement for plot, much like the tv show Lost does. What it does is take something really simple and obvious and then obfuscates it. This can greatly help affect the emotional feel of a work - Silent Hill and Lost both benefit from it greatly - but we mustn't confuse it for actual plot development. Ever see A Christmas Story? "Be sure to drink your ovaltine".

But videogames aren't about plot - even adventure games - so, it's kind of a moot point anyway.

CoughPhoenixWrightCough
Well, okay, yeah.
I have to disagree with you there.
True, not all games are about plot, I will more than agree with you there.
But you can't say that about all of them.
Let us go back to Phoenix Wright.  The game is all about exploring and advancing the plot and then piecing it all together.  I don't think you could argue that it's not about the plot.
Or, let's take Grim Fandango as another example.  It's an adventure game, well and sure, and I'd say it's about the plot.  Everything you do is to advance the plot.
Or even in, say, a Zelda game.  Despite the action-oriented gameplay, you're usually motivated by either obtaining abilities or some crazy crap like that or advancing the plot.
Does anyone else see a pattern here?

Well, sorry, but your reply is filled with assumptions that don't match my opinions, nor do they match reality.

I like games that have a good plot; but I also like games that have no plot, if it is not necessary. Half Life is a good game, but has no story whatsoever. What I don't feel comfortable with is touting a game for its plot, when it has none.

You assumed I had a "crazy run", but it is not so; I took my time, months in fact, to finish the games. I think no detail has escaped me. I played HL1, HL2, Ep.1 and Ep.2. Maybe the other ones you cited do contain "clues", but I don't think a game should span seven episodes to just to give you some "clues" about what's going on.
And, if one has got to "check the manuals", then there's is something very wrong about the way the story is told.

I wasn't expecting a formal introduction of Combines, although I have to say that this "suspension chamber" thing only adds to the lameness of the plot. Problems is, you never get to know anything about Combines. Compare them to, say, LeChuck. Have wondered why the dialogues in Monkey Island? The cut-scenes? You get to know your enemy. In Half Life, you're constantly told what to do, without ever understanding why. Gordon, do this. Gordon, do that. We have to do this. You never have a choice, or feel compelled to do something. You do what you do because you're told to.
That is why saying that Half Life has a complicated plot is laughable. It is as linear as it can be; you never, ever have multiple paths. You just follow the instructions.

As for the meaning of "Half Life"... you weren't paying attention, were you? I said 'I did discover "Half Life" to be a scientific reference to something completely unrelated'. Actually, I already knew the meaning, except in my language it's got a different name ("emivita"), and who could have imagined it was a reference to that. Still, it remains unrelated to the game; it's like calling Monkey Island "Callous feet" because Guybrush has corns.
I imagined some things from the title. I assumed Gordon had a life, which more often than not involves a family. I imagined a half life to be something in between a full life and no life. Is this so far-fetched?
Now tell me, what is, exactly, that makes you think of "Egyptian emperors" (maybe you meant Pharahos) and tsunami when you hear the name "Guybrush Threepwood"?

All in all, your conclusions are very wrong. I do enjoy complicated plots; but there is nothing to "investigate" in Half Life, as there is nothing to discover.

My God, I can't believe I've been reading the blog of someone who's at least partially responsible for one of my all-time favorite games as a kid. And I was playing Day of the Tentacle just three days ago!

exactly, and some people just keep talking about FPS games. Blasphemy I'd say...

I wonder if Ron played any Phoenix Wright games and what he thought of them. I have a feeling he probably wouldn't like them. They're a lot different than the stuff he makes.

You know, Ron, to be honest, I used to look up to you. You've been in the industry for ages. Yeah, you got your franchise taken over by Lucas' asshole of a company. And you came out an ugly bitter fuck on the other end, just like half of my professors. (Actually, all the people I know who came out bitter have all worked at Lucas....hmm)
I just wanted to tell you this. Just cause things suck right now, doesn't mean they won't be good again. I had this teacher who worked his whole life at Lucas , then got fired or something, after like...20 years or something.
And he's a total asshole and ruins students, manipulates them and tries to turn them bitter. Fuck that.

What I'm trying to say, is do something constructive, man. I know this website's called Grumpy Gamer, but it's not called Asshole Gamer, is it?

Nice article, by the way. Had a good time reading it.

Funny how many people commenting on MM in that article actually never finished the game. I was 10 years old back then and we solved it with every combo of characters.
I think I still remember all the different ways to finish the game. But I am still wondering what Jeff could do, and as I was skipping through the transcript of the walkthrough I saw this: "Jeff...well, he may have hidden talents."

What talents did he have? Anyone able to fill me in? Ron?

Why don't you do a game combinating Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. It could be "Maniac Monkey" or "Maniac Island"