Maniac Mansion IBM PC MS-DOS 1988 LucasFilm Games

Maniac Mansion IBM PC 1988-89

LucasFilm Games released Maniac Mansion for IBM PC MS-DOS 2.0 in March of 1988. The graphically enhanced version of Maniac Mansion was released in December of 1989 for IBM PC only.

The original version of Maniac Mansion (1987-88) was programmed by Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gilbery, designed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, scripted and written by Ron Gilbert and Gary Fox, drawn and animated by Gary Winnick and composed by Chris Grigg and David Lawrence. IBM sounds were generated by Dave Warhol and David Hayes.

In Maniac Mansion players assume the role of David Miller, who, along with his friends, explores the mansion of the mad scientist, Dr. Fred, in search of his girlfriend, Sandy Pantz, who has been kidnapped.

Maniac Mansion commonly displays in 4-color CGA or 16-color MCGA, Tandy and EGA 320x200. In-game, the display mode is toggleable with shift + various keys. Maniac Mansion also supports "snap scrolling" for systems that cannot handle its screen-scrolling.

Maniac Mansion of 1987 on the Commodore 64 was technically the first SCUMM-engine game as they came to be designed though LucasFilm Games' Labyrinth of 1986 stands as the origin of the SCUMM-engine and Maniac Mansion's predecessor.

Maniac Mansion was the first graphics adventure game to employ plot-furnishing cutscene cinematization (a Ron Gilbert "innovation").

Maniac Mansion's successor is Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders of 1988.

Maniac Mansion employs 15 verbs, three characters to switch between and a scrollable, list-based inventory. The original versions of Maniac Mansion are not mouse-controlled, but rather keyboard driven via cursor-keys and hotkeys. The on-screen cursor is driven by the cursor-keys, not mouse.

Maniac Mansion was distributed on 1x 5.25" 360kB floppy disk or 1x 3.5" 720kB DS DD diskette. The hard disk drive install size is 400 kbytes (55 files).

The Enhanced version of Maniac Mansion was distributed on 1x 3.5" 720kB DS DD diskette. The hard disk drive install size is 740 kbytes (55 files).

Both versions of Maniac Mansion are installed to hard disk drive via copy *.*.

• Maniac Mansion Manual: 5 pages
• Maniac Mansion Hint Book: 47 pages
• Maniac Mansion copy protection: Nuke'm Alarms: 7 sections
• Maniac Mansion Poster

cf.

• Chronological List of Graphics Adventure Games IBM PC MS-DOS
• Early 1990s IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners jealous
• 1980s IBM PC Games that made Atari ST and Amiga owners jealous
• History of Computer Games 1976-2024
• History of 1990s Computer Games
• History of Shoot 'em Ups 1976-2000
• Western Computer-game Machines