The Edisons' mansion transported me into an alien world full of weirdness and wonder.
I wasn't actively trying to defy my unadventurous nature and break free from my bubble, no. Rather, I was moving toward new horizons because certain external forces were persistently nudging me in that direction.
That's the story of my first decade with video games.
The truth is that I owe much of my growth as a video-game enthusiast to my brother, James, who guided me into many a new world. On numerous occasions, he took me out of my safety zone and he sent me headlong into the wilderness of strange and unusual foreign lands to which I would have never traveled voluntarily. And each time, I was thankful that he did so because I found the experience to be exciting, intoxicating and eye-opening.
That's how it was when he introduced me to Shadowgate, which I found to be surprisingly captivating. Before then, I had absolutely no interest in text adventures and never imagined that one of their kind could ever have a profoundly positive impact on my life. But after I played Shadowgate for a while, I came to see that point-and-click adventure games were actually quite amazing. They had the power, I learned, to entertain, inspire and stir the imagination in the most wonderfully unique way. What they offered was something I couldn't get anywhere else.
Shadowgate's title was appropriate because it perfectly described my experience with the game. For me, playing it was akin to bravely traveling into the shadowy unknown and endeavoring to overcome the mental barriers that had long prevented me from seeking to explore new spaces. It was a close analog for what my life had been up to that point.
In fact, when I think about Shadowgate's indelible title screen and its rendering of a castle entrance whose pushed-open doors give view to an endlessly mysterious darkness, I see the symbolism. I realize that Shadowgate, itself, was literally a "gateway" into a whole new world of imagination and wonder. And I'm happy to have traveled through it. I don't even want to think about what my life would be had I not.
And my experiences with Icom Simulations' masterwork helped me to evolve. They helped me to overcome other mental barriers and find the courage to journey further into the world of point-and-click adventures. Then I went on to discover Deja Vu and Uninvited, both of which became favorites.
But in the more immediate period, there was a recently released point-and-click-style game that was managing to garner my attention. It was a peculiar-looking PC conversion that Nintendo Power couldn't stop raving about.
Its name was Maniac Mansion.
What really pushed the game into must-buy territory, though, was Nintendo Power Volume 16's in-depth coverage of it. The multi-page feature spoke of game aspects that sounded mind-blowingly advanced. In particular, it continued to put a huge amount of emphasis on the game's new, groundbreaking storytelling device: "cut-scenes," which were described to be scripted sequences that would regularly play throughout the course of your game. And these cut-scenes, apparently, didn't occur in isolation. There were observable buildups to them. They occurred in real time, and you could actually interfere with them!
"So I can actually interrupt cut-scenes' lead-in events and thus bump into family members as they move about and set up for important storyline events?" I thought to myself as I attempted to visualize the process. "That sounds insane!"
In video games, it was usually the case that a character would promise to meet you somewhere and then just magically appear at the rendezvous point. But it didn't happen like that in Maniac Mansion, no. Rather, a character had to physically travel from one point to another, and you could observe or interfere with this event and consequently cause the story to move in a completely different direction!
"This is an amazingly advanced game!" I continued to think as I read through that portion of the feature.
Also, I was very intrigued by the game's team-based system, which allowed you to choose a pair of teammates from a pool of six helper characters (they'd team up with "Dave," the game's main character). Each helper was said to possess a unique set of abilities and skills, and because there were a large number of possible character combinations, there were an incalculable amount of ways in which you could navigate through the mansion and thwart Dr. Fred's evil ambitions.
Really, it all sounded too good to be true. "How could the ol' NES handle that many advanced calculations?" I wondered. "Is it actually capable of producing real-time events and keeping track of multiple characters at a time?"
I mean, I wasn't very knowledgeable about gaming platforms' specifications and processing power, no, but still I was aware of that reality that the NES wasn't nearly as powerful as a modern PC. "So how in the world will the NES be able to capably reproduce an advanced PC game?" I kept wondering.
So I was a little skeptical of some of Nintendo Power's claims. "A lot of this might be exaggeratory," I figured.
Also, because it appeared as though Maniac Mansion was an adaptation of the Family Channel's identically named television series (at the time, I didn't know that the game actually predated the show by three years), I was worried that the magazine's coverage of it might have been biased. After all: The magazine did have a penchant for hyping up heavily marketed licensed games even when they weren't any good. "Is this preview an honest and accurate representation of a 'next-level' video game?" I wondered. "Or is Nintendo Power engaging in embellishment for the sake of selling one of its close partner's low-quality licensed products to kids who are completely undiscerning?"
By that point, I'd already made the firm decision to buy Maniac Mansion, so all I could do was hope that it was the former.
So in October of 1990, a few weeks after the game released, I went out and purchased a copy of it with whatever was left of my undeserved birthday money.
Long before I got my hands on Maniac Mansion, I'd decided that I was going to choose the nerdy Bernard as my second in command. I was set on doing this because Nintendo Power's previews mentioned that he was good with electronics and could thus function as a vital contributor in every character permutation in which he was a part. I chose Michael as my team's third member because, well, I took a liking to his funky theme music as I was reading his character-select-screen profile text! Because, as you know, I was always sure to have solid, logical criteria for choosing playable characters! [slaps gum]
And after I put my team together, I clicked the Start button and entered into the point-and-click world for only the second time. Honestly, I was feeling a bit intimidated in that moment. This genre was, after all, still very new to me, and I wasn't yet certain that I had great aptitude for it. "I hope that my success in Shadowgate wasn't a fluke," I thought.
Thankfully, though, Maniac Mansion was an inviting game. In the opening moments, it did a great job of easing me in and assuring me that the experience would be enjoyable. At the same time, it did a great job of showcasing some of the game's more unique elements, like its quirky visual design and its characters' bizarre brand of humor (they had a fondness for calling each other "Tuna Head," which was apparently an all-purpose insult.
But I was more taken with the game's feel. Its opening scene's separate elements--the starkly faded color-scheme, the oppressively large background visuals, and the eerie silence whose influence was so intense that it could manage to power its way through even the most upbeat rock theme--worked together to create an atmosphere that was unlike any other I'd ever immersed myself in. They produced a pervasive air of foreboding that made me feel as though dark forces that were quietly operating within the environment's seemingly tranquil spaces and as though at any point, some horrible creature could jump out from an ordinary-looking bush and attack me.
"Games that come from the PC world are always evocative and disturbing in this way," I thought to myself as I ran about the opening screens. "It must be their nature."
And I wasn't sure that I was emotionally prepared for most of the things that the game was about to throw at me.
I liked, in particular, the opening screen's most dominant background visual: the large, ridiculously disproportionate blue moon that monopolized the starlit sky's entire eastern portion. It was an impressively rendered image that was fun to look at and examine, and it said a lot about the visual designers' ambition. More importantly, though, it told a very interesting story: This rescue attempt was surely occurring somewhere on Earth, it explained to me, yet the space I was currently occupying was still somehow alien in nature. "The Edisons' mansion is closer to the stars than it is to the protagonists' homes," it said.
All I knew was that normalcy had no place in a place like this (I mean, on what planet is it normal to have a posted warning that says, "Trespassers will be horribly mutilated"?).
And, really, I was entranced by all of it. Maniac Mansion, though it was weird in a way I couldn't explain (because I wasn't yet accustomed to LucasArts' patented style of humor), had me firmly in its grasp. And this was before I'd moved past its opening three screens.
The only problem was that I didn't know what, exactly, I was getting myself into.
I wasn't completely in the dark, though, because I had some advanced knowledge (thanks to Nintendo Power). I knew, for instance, that the key to the mansion's front door was hidden underneath the doormat. Also, I was aware that getting caught by Nurse Edna in the kitchen was no big deal because the encounter served as a mandatory introduction to the manner in which Maniac Mansion scripted its events. And I knew that one of the kids could escape the prison (which is where the Edisons would send you if they caught you running around their mansion) if another kid pushed or pulled on the prison wall's "loose brick," which functioned as an "open" switch.
(In retrospect, I wish I hadn't read deeply into Nintendo Power's big feature. My doing so only served to spoil a lot of the game's early surprises. At the least, I robbed myself of the fun of scanning every object and surface for suspicious marks and protrusions!)
It took me a while to get used to the game's interface, which was different from Shadowgate's in that it required you to guide your characters around and across rooms by moving the cursor to desired room locations and pressing the action button. Particularly, I had trouble moving the characters from room to room in a timely fashion. The process was often laggy- and sluggish-feeling because the rooms were so large and the characters moved rather slowly, and most of the time, I'd miss the targeted door and get stuck on a wall.
Because the characters moved slowly, completing tasks wound up taking way longer than it should have. The simple process of (a) moving a character from the mansion's third floor down to its first floor, (b) handing off an item, and then (c) returning back to the third floor could take two-three minutes. This was a problem because, as the plot-advancing cut-scenes seemed to suggest, there was a time-limit, and thus I didn't have minutes to waste. I had to be precise in my actions and movements, I felt. (And I'd feel this same type of pressure even in my successive play-throughs--at times when I knew how to complete the game in optimal fashion. I'd still fear that even one wasted second could cost me dearly.)
Still, the three-person system system lived up to its bulling. I was super-impressed by it. I loved how it allowed me to bounce between characters as they engaged as they engaged in their separate activities in completely different locations. I really felt as though I was witnessing the power of next-generation game design. "It's either that Maniac Mansion is the 'advanced' game Nintendo Power advertised it to be," I thought, "or I've seriously underestimated the NES' technology!"
And I was pleased to discover that you could, in fact, interfere in the events that served as lead-ins to cut-scenes. I thought it was amazing how you could intercept NPCs as they made their scheduled trips (like Weird Ed's moving from his room to the front door whenever the doorbell would ring) and draw out angry and flustered reactions. At the same time, though, I was always fearful of unintended encounters; I was constantly worried that a cut-scene's lead-in might occur within a room in which one of my characters was strategically positioned. Getting caught was scary, and, more distressingly, it wasted a lot of time.
Really, no room felt safe.
And I couldn't help but be astonished by the complexity of it all. There were so many concurrently running systems and so many possible permutations, and all I could think was, "Is the NES punching above its weight and somehow pulling off a new type of advanced programming? Or is there some type of wizardry at work?"
My first session with Maniac Mansion was mostly about taking in the sights, learning the mansion's layout, and getting to know the green-fleshed Edisons and their face-sucking friends.
At first, I didn't know what to make of the Edison family. "Are they supposed to be zombies?" I wondered. It wasn't clear. From what I could gather, they were either under the influence of some outside force or just insane (like the Addams family). The only character I was able to befriend was the green tentacle, who, surprisingly, was the most reasonable of the bunch (normally, I was told, tentacles were in the market for brains, but luckily this green one was willing to settle for plastic fruit). He was the family's only sane member, it seemed. His troubles were more normal in nature (he was depressed about not being able to get his band started), and he didn't have an inclination to throw visitors in a prison. He was even willing to work with me!
I spent the rest of the first session rushing about the mansion and collecting every possible item. By doing this, I thought, some of the puzzle solutions would become immediately obvious. Few actually did. That was because Maniac Mansion, like Shadowgate (and most point-and-click adventure games), had its own internal logic, and thus its puzzle solutions were almost never immediately obvious. Some were completely arcane (like the one that required you to develop a picture by soaking up developer fluid with a sponge and opening up a sealed letter by microwaving it alongside a bottle of water) while others demanded calculated action--maneuvering around and distracting NPC characters in specific ways (like, say, having one team member preoccupy Nurse Edna by calling her on the phone and then having a second team member sneak into her room and safely access the ladder that leads up into the attic).
I was able to figure out a lot of the puzzles on my own, but some of them were so utterly perplexing that I had no choice but to turn to Nintendo Power for help. I did so for those like the aforementioned picture-developing puzzle, solving which required the application of scientific techniques (using steam to melt glue) that a kid like me just didn't know about.
That was the thing about so many of Maniac Mansion's puzzles: They weren't about simple tasks like picking up a key and using it to unlock a nearby door, no. Rather, they entailed multiple complex operations, and in many instances, they were more mentally and physically demanding than any of the puzzles I had to deal with in Shadowgate.
Obtaining, say, a simple could key would usually entail (a) using one of your team members to lure away the character that was occupying a certain room, (b) having a second character enter said room and systematically sift through its possessions in search of a four-digit password that could be used to open a safe in another room, and then (c) heading over to that room and using the password to open the key-containing safe. And that entire process would represent just one part of a much larger puzzle.
Solving complex puzzles was tough enough, but doing it while controlling and keeping track of three separate characters was one of the most difficult things I'd ever been asked to do in a game. Consequently, I had to learn how to be a semi-competent multitasker.
In Maniac Mansion, you had to be quick and precise. Dawdling for too long or failing to efficiently obtain items could get you captured or even killed. You were always under pressure to perform proficiently, and for a nervous little fellow like me, that was a tough thing to do with any consistency.
I mean, I was able to beat Maniac Mansion and do so far quicker than I did Shadowgate (which, in a couple of instances, stumped me for months), yeah, but still I found it to be the more intimidating of the two. For that reason, I almost always played it in a safe way and stuck with known quantities. I rarely strayed from the Bernard-Michael pairing. Their collective challenges were tough enough, I thought, and I really wasn't interested in subjecting myself to the stressful process of having to play through the game with ten-plus character combinations and thus grapple with seemingly infinite puzzle-permutations.
There was so much content, a great deal of which was weird and inexplicable, and there were so many possibilities that my brain would shut down whenever I thought about trying to exhaust it all. Attempting to do so, I felt, would have a detrimental effect on my mental stability.
So in the future, I played Maniac Mansion mostly the same way: I put Michael's expertise in photography to use and thus helped Weird Ed develop his plans, and I did this in pursuit of recruiting him to our side and providing him the means to eliminate the obstructive purple tentacle; and I had the technology-minded Bernard hack his way into Dr. Fed's lab and modify a radio so that it could be used to contact the space-traveling Meteor Police.
Eventually I realized that this was a redundant method--that you didn't need to acquire Weird Ed's services if you picked the Meteor Policeman's dropped badge, which could likewise scare off the purple tentacle--but because I was a creature of habit, I stuck with it anyway. My justification was that befriending Weird Ed and turning him into my ally was an essential part of the story. It helped him to carry out his heroic plan and play a big role in saving his family.
Really, what brought me back to Maniac Mansion again and again was its wonderfully unique, amazingly alluring atmosphere. I was entranced by it. I desired to understand and form a connection to it. And that's what I did most of the time. More than playing to achieve victory, I loved to explore every inch of the mansion and examine all of its antique furnishings and wonder about what they'd look like from a first-person perspective. I loved to look at all of the rooms' weird and curious visual details and trying to get a sense of what their message was--what they were trying to tell me about the mental state of the people who occupied this mansion.
Also, I loved feeling of being a silent trespasser in a hostile environment. I loved being able to stealthily sneak my way around the mansion's ill-intentioned inhabitants and find safe haven in places that, I imagined, they either forgot about or just never visited (like the long den that was furnished with an old-fashioned radio and candlelight chandeliers).
Maniac Mansion was one of those games that was finite in scope but so imagination-stirring that it had the power to convince me that there was way more to its world than what I was seeing. I was made to feel as though there were many rich secrets hiding beyond its rooms' surfaces.
The best example is how I felt about the library: It was likely that its "out of order" staircase existed simply for the purpose of providing the room some character, yeah, yet I couldn't help but think that it actually led to an accessible room. That's why I was always trying to find ways to climb it. "Maybe I can get Bernard to 'fix' its damaged portions!" I'd think. "Or if there's a gap, then maybe I can use one of my items to plug it up!"
I likened that staircase to the sealed door in Shadowgate's well room. It was, I was convinced, a gateway to a secret space. I was certain that it led to an entire secret wing of the mansion--to sacred ground upon which few had ever stepped. And surely that sacred ground was filled with mind-blowing treasures.
I was desperate to get up that staircase. I spent a countless amount of hours trying to "fix" the staircase and searching the mansion for a button or a lever that served to open up an alternate staircase or some other climbable object. "Maybe one of the bookshelves spins around and reveals a pole or something," I thought. Otherwise, I kept hoping that an upcoming issue of Nintendo Power would hold the answer.
Eventually I had to accept the fact that the stairway was merely decoration. It didn't actually lead anywhere. The Mansion didn't have any "secret wing." Of course, though, that didn't stop from imagining what might have been waiting for me atop those steps. It was still fun to think about.
Whenever I'd ruminate on the matter, I'd be reminded of a dream I'd constantly have--the one in which I'd find a secret passage somewhere in my house. Said passage would always lead to room that I never knew was there--usually to an inexplicably pristine living room or an underground arcade. And the more I played Maniac Mansion, the more I came to feel as though its design was largely informed by that particular type of dream. "This game's creators must have had many of those 'secret-passage' dreams when they were kids," I thought.
In time, that's how I came to regard Maniac Mansion's atmosphere. It was an essence whose purpose was to take me on a journey into the minds of the game's childlike creators and allow me to partake in their most wondrous unconscious fantasies.
Oh, and the mansion, probably not coincidentally, had its own arcade! You couldn't actually play any of its games (in a unscripted way, at least), no, but still it was one of my favorite rooms to visit. I liked to look at it and think about what it would have been like to have an arcade in my house. That was, after all, every kid's dream (in both a conscious and unconscious way).
And because of how I viewed the medium's disparate sectors (I considered arcades, consoles and computers to exist within separate, largely incompatible universes), I found the very idea of this room to be kinda crazy. I mean, here you had an arcade machine within an NES game that was a conversion of PC game. Talk about worlds colliding!
Also, I thought it was a nice touch how Super Mario Bros.-sounding fanfare would play whenever Meteor Mess' high score screen displayed. I saw this as a respectful nod to Maniac Mansion's new host platform.
Whether I was racing my way toward victory or leisurely exploring the mansion in search of a hidden trigger, I'd always feel compelled to stop and listen to the green tentacle's sob story. Not because it was interesting, no, but because I knew that I'd feel bad if I left the room before the tentacle had the chance to finish telling it. I felt that my rudely bolting on him would break his heart (or his most equivalent organ). I'd imagine a scene in which the ditched tentacle would stand there silently, in an anguished state, and then a tear would roll down his face as he realized that his words were ineffective and that his plight had gone unacknowledged. And I couldn't let that happen to the slimy little fellow. I had to stay and listen and let him know that I cared.
And, well, I just thought you'd like to know that.
By always sticking with the pair of Bernard and Michael, I cut out a lot of the game's replay value, yeah, but still I was able to find plenty of other ways to derive enjoyment from it. I had fun, for instance, developing techniques for evading Nurse Edna in the first kitchen scene and skipping said scene entirely; in time, I became pretty good at rushing back to and exiting the kitchen's door before she could capture me. Also, I'd interact with every possible object in every possible manner and do so with the hope of discovering new and interesting ways to blow up the mansion. And once I discovered that the playable characters could die (after, say, microwaving radioactive water), I'd attempt to kill off all three of them in pursuit of achieving the hard-to-accomplish goal of lining the mansion's lawn with three tombstones (this was how I spent my time, yes).
I knew, from reading other gaming magazines, that you could microwave and thus kill Weird Ed's hamster, but I didn't have any desire to engage in such activity (because I'm an animal-lover). It was a horrible act, and I was appalled even by the idea of it. I did do it once--mostly for curiosity's sake (and since it was, after all, a unique way to kill off a playable character)--but I felt so bad about it in following that I swore never to do it again.
Seriously--what kind of psychos would even give you the option to microwave a hamster (I mean, besides the crazies who made Shadowgate and the other MacVenture games)? It had to have been the case that 90s-era PC developers were a little sick in the head.
There were so many ways to have fun in Maniac Mansion. There were so many possibilities. I felt that way even ten years later, when I decided to return to it and derive enjoyment from it in new ways. I continued to be blown away by the game's sheer depth. During my play-throughs, I discovered that there were many amusing ending scenes and victory permutations and that I'd missed out on a ton of cool content by choosing to stay in my safety zone; I'd foolishly passed up on the opportunity to earn interesting, entertaining endings like those in which (a) the green tentacle gets his album published and becomes a rock star, (b) one of the protagonists uses a modified rocket engine to turn the Edisons' car into a spaceship and then returns the meteor to space, and (c) the protagonists reform the meteor and help to get it booked on a talk show.
I still wonder how the game's developers were able to plan out all of these complex storyline variations and code them in and somehow avoid creating game-killing conflicts. Just thinking about the process is exhausting.
But one thing I've never been keen on is 90s-era Nintendo of America's ridiculous censorship policies and how they affected the game's development. The company's tampering with a well-known property--its demanding that LucasArts alter its established masterpiece for the sake of protecting a minority of hypersensitive kids from mildly offensive ideas--was an insult not only to Ron Gilbert and friends but to every player who was looking to experience the game as it was originally envisioned.
I won't go as far to say that NOA's meddling "ruined" the port, though. It wasn't that damaging; it didn't stop Maniac Mansion from being a top-tier NES game. What it did, rather, was serve to make NES Maniac Mansion a little less than it should have been. And when we're talking about a game of this caliber, even a tiny degree of change is way too much.
Looking at it from NOA's perspective, I guess the company felt as though it had no choice to but to protect its younger userbase from the original version's gratuitous violence, allusions to cannibalism, and gross depictions of human anatomy. But horribly drowning playable characters and poisoning them to death, cruelly microwaving hamsters, and blowing up mansions? That was all fine, I guess.
Because it's always important to have priorities.
Maniac Mansion, much like the NES' other point-and-click conversions, was always inviting me to use my imagination and daring me to wonder about what was lurking beyond its walls, and that was one of the big reasons why I was so fond of it. It presented its weird and bizarre world in a curiously unique way and thus inspired me to think about its visuals, environments and characters in completely new terms, and that was one of the most important things that any game had ever done for me. Truly, Maniac Mansion helped me to expand my world.
And its curiosity-inducing influence extended even further than that. It also stirred me to wonder about what was going on in the world of modern PCs and how that world had changed since the early days of the Commodore 64 and IBM machines (on which my classmates and I would play very simple games like Oregon Trail). And Maniac Mansion, like Shadowgate, provided me some valuable insight--an eye-opening glimpse into an interesting world that I was unfortunately unable to visit at the time. It gave me just enough of a taste of the modern PC's wonderfully unique game-design qualities and uncompromised creative spirit to make me envious of those who were lucky enough to own a computer.
Above all, Maniac Mansion and its ilk helped to remove some barriers and make my eventual entry into the PC space a much smoother process. It was thanks to them that I could confidently enter into the world of DOS and feel as though I belonged there.
That was its greatest contribution to my life.
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