Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion is a memorable point-and-click graphic adventure game created by LucasArts, initially released for the Commodore 64. Written by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, it's the first adventure to use the SCUMM game engine, conceived by Gilbert as a tool for creating this type of game (the "MM" in SCUMM stands for "Maniac Mansion").

The game's success led to ports on several platforms, including Apple II (1987), DOS, NES (1988), Amiga, and Atari ST (1989). Maniac Mansion revolutionized the adventure game genre, thanks to its humor, non-linear story, and more straightforward gameplay: while traditional adventures relied on command parsing, Gilbert's adventure used predefined verbs and objects encountered during exploration.

As we know, LucasArts went on to create many other great adventure games after that. Maniac Mansion was the title that started it all. It was followed by a sequel, Day of the Tentacle, in 1993. We also host a fan-made remake, Maniac Mansion Deluxe, created with Adventure Game Studio, which is the same game but with 256-color VGA graphics.

Maniac Mansion is #1 in our Top 20 Commodore 64 Games of all time.