a radically new nerd: March 2012

Maniac Mansion, a game for the Commodore 64 and later PC & NES, riffs on B-horror movies with a schlocky plot about students breaking into the mad scientist Dr. Fred's mansion to rescue the protagonist's cheerleader girlfriend. Under the goofy premise, players were treated to a fun and very clever adventure game. It was filled with dark humor (as well as outright silliness), featured multiple endings, awesome music, and the advent of SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion"), which streamlined play by eliminating text commands, and would be used in future LucasFilm games. As popular as the game was and continues to be, there are a few major things about Maniac Mansion that even as a fan of the game and the genre, I had no idea about:

Innovation in . . . Breakclips?

The damsel in distress making her "Oh Dear, I'm About to be Lobotomized" face.

One of the mechanics in the game is avoiding capture by the residents of the house (Dr. Fred, Ed, and Edna) as you go around rooting through their stuff. In order to warn the player when one of them was on the move, or sometimes just to provide plot points or hints, the game would be interrupted to show these characters talking and going about their evil business. Doesn't sound too crazy; it's common in modern games to leave the actual gameplay to show an expository bit of video. What was significant about it, as described by Maniac Mansion co-creator Ron Gilbert, was that before Maniac Mansion, games had shown non-interactive portions between levels or after big events, but this was different. The game cut away from the action to show a scene. Indeed, Maniac Mansion is credited with having the first true "cutscene", a term that Ron Gilbert actually coined during the game's development. So every time you sit back and watch a game's better-rendered story bits, you now know it has a tiny bit of MM's DNA.

Makes you wish for the good old days when a cutscene was just "Gee, I'm hungry!"

Serious Nightmare Fuel

Maniac Mansion scared me as a kid (even the tamed-down NES version), which I've been pretty embarrassed about in retrospect. However, while researching the game, I've seen enough mentions of similar experiences to realize I wasn't alone. It seems odd to have been afraid of what is fundamentally a really goofy game - that is, until I actually went back and took a good look. Let me hit the high spots for you:

Ledger of Terror

- The constant anxiety about being caught (if you don't know what you're doing, anyway)
- The multiple ways to accidentally nuke yourself and everything in a 5-mile radius (I once declared this winning since it effectively stopped Dr. Fred and the evil meteor).
- One of the first rooms is a blood-spattered kitchen, complete with a bloody chainsaw . . .
- Walk a little past the blood and Nurse Edna suddenly appears, captures you, and locks you in a dungeon . . .
- And if you have a male character, she says "I should have tied you to the bed, cutie."

Okay, maybe that all sounds relatively tame, but you can also get into a situation where a resident of the house does more than merely consider sexing you up. Hint: It's not any of the humans.

If you go to Green Tentacle's room, you find a record entitled "Tentacle Mating Calls". If you use the equipment in the music room, you can record that music onto a cassette tape. Give the tape to the Green Tentacle and he pops it into his stereo system and plays it, thinking it's your demo tape. Then this happens -

And in front of his mother! The cad!

He says 'THE TENTACLE MATING CALL!", approaches your character, and then the screen cuts to an image of your gravestone beside the mansion. Allow me to clarify:

In Maniac Mansion, you can be

RAPED TO DEATH BY A TENTACLE MONSTER

Just one tentacle? Meh.

And lastly, in contrast to that -

Wholesome Family Programming

Later on in life, when I was a little less tentacle-phobic, I played Day of the Tentacle, the hilarious, time-traveling sequel to Maniac Mansion. Up until recently I had vague memories from that game's plot, something about the Edisons getting money from the use of their image; I guess I kind of assumed it was from the first game or some-referential joke like that. It turns out that it was supposed to a TV show they were getting paid for, but either way I just laughed it off because that’d be ridic-

Holy crap. This was actually a show? How come I never heard of it?

Who has time to read things!?! There's video games!

Also, I didn't have cable.

It was aired on YTV in Canada and was available on The Family Channel in the United States. Still, I'm guessing I probably never heard of it because things like this usually start as mediocre ideas and get canned midway through the pilot, right?

Maniac Mansion, the TV show, was not only critically acclaimed, named one of Time Magazine's top ten shows of 1990, but ran for three seasons – 66 episodes. The writers managed this feat by having increasingly little in common with the game over time. (Read: Disappointing lack of sentient tentacles.) The main similarities were that the family lives in a mansion and there is a meteor that Dr. Fred experiments on. In this universe, where trespassing and the name Edna didn't hold up well in focus groups, his experiments backfire and cause trouble with the family, a family that now includes siblings with moody teenager problems, etc. For instance there’s this segment, which includes the Uncle that was turned into a fly with a human head, the toddler that was turned into an exceptionally creepy man in his early forties, and FEELINGS.

It’s weird alright, but keep in mind that “family” sitcoms at the time didn’t rule out crazy stunts like this. Family Matters, which was long-running and popular in the US, hung its hat on Steve Urkel, who also was a mad scientist. This is evidenced by his artificially intelligent Urkelbot, the love interest, Laura, falling for a clone of Urkel who was run through some kind of coolness enhancing machine, and the episode where Urkel builds a nuclear bomb and destroys Chicago.

Contemporaries

Another interesting tidbit - the show was created by and occasionally guest-starred Eugene Levy.

They nixed his idea about Nurse Edna making a pie and the tentacles finding it.

So there you have it folks, retro video game nostalgia lovingly wrapped in retro TV nostalgia. It all goes to show that the more you look at your past, the more horrifying and bizarre it becomes until you're not even sure the world makes sense anymore.