I have absolutely zero clue about this Manic Mansion since this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it, but I am definitely gonna give it a 4 hour challenge, if I can find a copy online. Probably gonna find one on the wayback machine web archive.
I’m genuinely curious if I can beat an old game I have zero clue about in under 4 hours, which I doubt I can. Gonna be a late night, as usual, for me.
Make sure to use ScummVM to play it! DOSBox is a great way to play a lot of classic PC games but ScummVM is better for any games it supports. This is because ScummVM is a modern engine that runs old adventure games which are written as scripts that run on an interpreter. This beats running an old engine on DOS through DOSBox!
For the game itself I recommend the Internet archive! You can find it as part of the ExoDOS collection or standalone!
I had planned on using ScummVM after seeing a comment about it here but this actually really helps. My search for the game was leading me towards getting it on GoG, but I’m trying my hardest to save money, so this helps a lot.
Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG, but I love the Internet archive and projects like ScummVM and DOSBox (as well as all the console and arcade emulators). These are long-term projects carrying the torch of preservation of all these classic games.
If you want a modernized remaster of Maniac Mansion (the game pictured in OP), you can play MM Deluxe. It is modeled after Day of the Tentacle’s interface.
Oh, for fans of Sierra, there is now a talkie VGA version of KQ4 - Rosella’s Peril. It came out in late 2025, so I figure those who want to experience that game without parser, that is an option.
Lol King’s Quest was a funny journey for me. I started with KQV as a kid and was always curious about the previous games. It wasn’t until I got them all via abandonware sites as an adult that I realized 5 was the perfect one to start on because the previous ones all relied on vague text parsers to handle all the actions, ones where typing “grab stick” instead of “get stick” could be the difference between having a fun or frustrating time.
So you’re saying there’s now a version of KQIV that has an interface similar to KQV and involves no guessing which verb/noun they want specifically?
Though my record with point and click adventure games hasn’t been great since KQVI. I did beat both 5 and 6 on my own as a kid (getting the 100% win on 6 with no help still gave me a pang of pride when I thought of it just now, when all those pieces start fitting together), but find I don’t have the patience to solve similar games these days (even without the “sometimes punishes clicking the wrong pixel with death” that KQ liked to do). I never did finish KQVII, even. Action games were just more engaging.
Most - or now all, of the point & click series received fan-remakes that modernized the series up to KQVI standards, with voices, graphics, and interface.
Also, if you want more action while still doing adventure gaming stuff, give the Quest for Glory II remake a shot. It has RPG mechanics, a battle system, while still having King’s Quest style stuff. The parser is optional there, but helpful when you want to talk with NPCs.
Many had a premium rate phone line, and it was just a tape so if you were stuck near the end you’d have to listen to the end and potentially pay many times the game’s cost.
Because that was the beginning of the adventure game era where there was no concept of game design and ensuring that the games made logical sense, hence the birth of “moon logic”, thanks Roberta. These games were also made to be obtuse because games were very expensive back then and making obscure logic was an incentive to make things more “worth” it, often intending to make the game last months of play time to solve their “logic” puzzles and you had to be in tune with the game designer to get them.
Not to mention that due to intention or lack of game design, these games were notorious for allowing you to put yourself into a unwinnable state with no way to correct it, things like Space Quest with the alien kiss of death that won’t trigger until the very end of the game or that Kings Quest game where you had one shot to throw a boot at a cat or you’d be dead man walking.
Not being able to finish these games wasn’t even unusual back then without the help of friends or BBS. Heck I had games adventure games I bought from that era that I never finished until the got re-released on Steam.
The Legend of Zelda was a game I absolutely loved as a kid. I could never get much past a certain point but never really knew why. I’d look everywhere, do everything I knew I could do, but always got stuck.
Years later I looked up a walkthrough out of curiosity. Turns out you can burn down bushes in the overworld with the candle. I don’t recall this ever being mentioned or even hinted at as a thing you could do. I was unable to progress because one of the dungeons was locked behind one of those bushes.
I remember playing Castlevania 2 back in the days. I never even came close to beating it. I only ever got as far as i did through sheer willpower and spending a shit ton of hours just brute forcing the game.
A few years ago, i tried again. I read every conversation in the game and pretty much tried everything before reading a walkthrough. I was stuck at the same part that i was as a child. The solution: take a specific orb, go to a specific wall and crouch for a few seconds. Maybe you can find this out while playing the game, but holy shit these “puzzles” were random.
I had the same problem as a kid. My cousins had beaten it and given me some tips, but I could never figure it out. I also tried again a few years ago on an emulator but didn’t have the patience to make it very far! Fun game though.
Roberta liked fairy tales and the first KQ game was just as many of them crammed into one place as possible. Did she not think that the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle was not crazy? There was one hint in the game of ‘sometimes it is best to think backwards’ but who the fuck would get it?
Also Rumpelstiltskin’s name had to be spelled with the alphabet backwards! That made no damn sense!
I read something years ago that those games were designed to have illogical puzzles so that you’d pay to call the help line (yes, there was a phone number you’d call for help) or sell paper game guides
Nintendo had a Hotline… I called them once because I got stuck in donkey kong country. (The guy was like ‘at the first ledge just drop straight, there’s a hidden cannon that lets you skip the level’)
In particular, ‘Maniac Mansion’ has pathways for the characters to die or the player to be stuck without a recourse — which later adventures avoided, allowing successful completion from any point in the game.
I recently tried playing through it for the first time (on an Android tablet with ScummVM), and pretty sure I hit such a dead end.
Going into it cold without knowing the tropes of the genre and the visual design language would be a massive disadvantage. Gamers in the 80s would have a set of expectations and strategies that we wouldn’t lean on today. Giving someone from 1985 Factorio might lead to some similar confusion until they got the hang of it.
True, maybe a bad example. Although there are a few conventionts it might not bother to explain, like WASD for directional input, or scroll wheels, or whatever.
The Devs spent a lot of time making sure you understand the game in the first 30 minutes. 80’s Devs didn’t do that and it shows in how hard the learning curve of the game is.
It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn’t even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do “tell you” is you don’t have any possible solution for a problem.
Like if you don’t get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you’ll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.
But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.
Idiots should have known to use the honey on the skeleton, causing ants to carry away the bones but leave behind the clearly visible key that I was clicking on for 15 fuckingijfiejbfitkbeofniwkwhofh
The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.
Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.
Game companies also sold strategy guides at the time. They’re designed to be obtuse. I’m pretty sure the full walkthrough for Leisure Suit Larry 1 is only 2 paragraphs or something.
The actual steps to the end are short, there’s just always a puzzle where you have to use a rubber chicken with a bar of soap to make a helicopter or some shit. I love adventure games though, I’m just a walkthrough baby.
There were even quite a few games from the 80s and 90s that required you to use the manual in order to play with translations, instructions, sometimes even hidden codes to move forward.
there would almost always be a moment where you’d use the manual to answer a password and that was their copy protection. that kind of copy protection continued into the 90s
Up to the late 90s at least, Metal Gear Solid had a moment where, in order to progress, you had to enter a codec frequency that was in the back of the CD case.
We had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.
We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.
Maniac Mansion was designed to be replayed, which is why the cast of characters you picked could be different each playthrough. It also meant a lot more red herrings.
I vaguely remember that the point of LucasArts’ adventure games was that they were tired of the bullshit moon logic of Sierra games. I guess it’s the equivalent of someone who was so pissed off with Kaizo Mario that they made Dark Souls or something
LucasArts has plenty of moon logic in their games, sometimes even mocking it with humor. DOTT was a lot of this. It just did not stick your save game to a point of no return where you have to restart over.
I’ve never beat Maniac Manson, but I did beat Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Not in four hours, though. It took months playing (when it was new) after school and bouncing ideas off my father and his best friend. All three of us were playing the game separately and sharing tips.
I could probably beat it in around 2 hours if I tried today? I still remember the path but there are also the random mazes where you just try and hope for the best. Peru, the Sphinx, Mars, maybe another one. Oh yeah, Mexico City. Maybe there are guides online but I’ve never used them, and we didn’t have them when the game was new.
I mean I beat that game for the first time, in the first way, when I was ten. But it took me a lot more than 4 hours. Now I could probably do it in two. But only for the Bernard involved endings, and where you can make use of the glitches, like the switch character-pause-freeze Edna in her bedroom.
Was on my way to say this - 4 hours for a first time run of Maniac Manison without prior knowledge is brutal. And as you wrote, it’s a badly standardized test to boot with the amount of possible characters to choose from.
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I have absolutely zero clue about this Manic Mansion since this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it, but I am definitely gonna give it a 4 hour challenge, if I can find a copy online. Probably gonna find one on the wayback machine web archive.
I’m genuinely curious if I can beat an old game I have zero clue about in under 4 hours, which I doubt I can. Gonna be a late night, as usual, for me.
Make sure to use ScummVM to play it! DOSBox is a great way to play a lot of classic PC games but ScummVM is better for any games it supports. This is because ScummVM is a modern engine that runs old adventure games which are written as scripts that run on an interpreter. This beats running an old engine on DOS through DOSBox!
For the game itself I recommend the Internet archive! You can find it as part of the ExoDOS collection or standalone!
I had planned on using ScummVM after seeing a comment about it here but this actually really helps. My search for the game was leading me towards getting it on GoG, but I’m trying my hardest to save money, so this helps a lot.
Thank you so much!
Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG, but I love the Internet archive and projects like ScummVM and DOSBox (as well as all the console and arcade emulators). These are long-term projects carrying the torch of preservation of all these classic games.
After countless Golden Age Hollywood films were lost, I don’t want to see the same thing happen to video games.
I’ll save you the bother, there is zero chance you will complete it in 4 hours, there is an approaching zero chance you will complete it at all
I grew up with Maniac Mansion on the NES and never used a guide for it as a kid while managing to beat it. I’d also fail this test, probably. 🤷♂️
If you want a modernized remaster of Maniac Mansion (the game pictured in OP), you can play MM Deluxe. It is modeled after Day of the Tentacle’s interface.
Maniac Mansion Deluxe
Oh, for fans of Sierra, there is now a talkie VGA version of KQ4 - Rosella’s Peril. It came out in late 2025, so I figure those who want to experience that game without parser, that is an option.
Lol King’s Quest was a funny journey for me. I started with KQV as a kid and was always curious about the previous games. It wasn’t until I got them all via abandonware sites as an adult that I realized 5 was the perfect one to start on because the previous ones all relied on vague text parsers to handle all the actions, ones where typing “grab stick” instead of “get stick” could be the difference between having a fun or frustrating time.
So you’re saying there’s now a version of KQIV that has an interface similar to KQV and involves no guessing which verb/noun they want specifically?
Though my record with point and click adventure games hasn’t been great since KQVI. I did beat both 5 and 6 on my own as a kid (getting the 100% win on 6 with no help still gave me a pang of pride when I thought of it just now, when all those pieces start fitting together), but find I don’t have the patience to solve similar games these days (even without the “sometimes punishes clicking the wrong pixel with death” that KQ liked to do). I never did finish KQVII, even. Action games were just more engaging.
Most - or now all, of the point & click series received fan-remakes that modernized the series up to KQVI standards, with voices, graphics, and interface.
Also, if you want more action while still doing adventure gaming stuff, give the Quest for Glory II remake a shot. It has RPG mechanics, a battle system, while still having King’s Quest style stuff. The parser is optional there, but helpful when you want to talk with NPCs.
AGDI: KQ1, KQ2, KQ3, and Quest for Glory II.
These 80s games were made to sell actual walk-throughs. You had to buy a book or magazine for many of them.
They were not difficult, they were stupid.
Many had a premium rate phone line, and it was just a tape so if you were stuck near the end you’d have to listen to the end and potentially pay many times the game’s cost.
Thanks for reminding me of those 1-900 phone lines … I got in trouble for those.
“Moon logic”
Nah! We were just tougher back then!
Also, with no internet, nothing was around to distract you for 24 hours, or days, to try to solve one puzzle.
Kids these days don’t understand the struggle!
😃
Grab ye flask
But ye can’t get ye flaske!
There were also the “feelies”, which were a secondary line defense of copy protecion method. They sometimes were a clue to those puzzles.
The puzzle were often moon logic or ‘oh shit! You mean THAT is what I must do?’
Sierra online had great games with great stories and characters but their puzzles were… Yeah…
I had to look up a solution in Myst because it was something I didn’t know I could do.
Because that was the beginning of the adventure game era where there was no concept of game design and ensuring that the games made logical sense, hence the birth of “moon logic”, thanks Roberta. These games were also made to be obtuse because games were very expensive back then and making obscure logic was an incentive to make things more “worth” it, often intending to make the game last months of play time to solve their “logic” puzzles and you had to be in tune with the game designer to get them.
Not to mention that due to intention or lack of game design, these games were notorious for allowing you to put yourself into a unwinnable state with no way to correct it, things like Space Quest with the alien kiss of death that won’t trigger until the very end of the game or that Kings Quest game where you had one shot to throw a boot at a cat or you’d be dead man walking.
Not being able to finish these games wasn’t even unusual back then without the help of friends or BBS. Heck I had games adventure games I bought from that era that I never finished until the got re-released on Steam.
The Legend of Zelda was a game I absolutely loved as a kid. I could never get much past a certain point but never really knew why. I’d look everywhere, do everything I knew I could do, but always got stuck.
Years later I looked up a walkthrough out of curiosity. Turns out you can burn down bushes in the overworld with the candle. I don’t recall this ever being mentioned or even hinted at as a thing you could do. I was unable to progress because one of the dungeons was locked behind one of those bushes.
I remember playing Castlevania 2 back in the days. I never even came close to beating it. I only ever got as far as i did through sheer willpower and spending a shit ton of hours just brute forcing the game. A few years ago, i tried again. I read every conversation in the game and pretty much tried everything before reading a walkthrough. I was stuck at the same part that i was as a child. The solution: take a specific orb, go to a specific wall and crouch for a few seconds. Maybe you can find this out while playing the game, but holy shit these “puzzles” were random.
I had the same problem as a kid. My cousins had beaten it and given me some tips, but I could never figure it out. I also tried again a few years ago on an emulator but didn’t have the patience to make it very far! Fun game though.
Ah, the classic AVGN problem with Castlevania 2
Roberta liked fairy tales and the first KQ game was just as many of them crammed into one place as possible. Did she not think that the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle was not crazy? There was one hint in the game of ‘sometimes it is best to think backwards’ but who the fuck would get it?
Also Rumpelstiltskin’s name had to be spelled with the alphabet backwards! That made no damn sense!
excuse me his name was nikstlitslepmur and heaven help you if you mispeel it
IFNKOVHGROGHPRM! It was IFNKOVHGROGHPRM in the original AGI version!
i spent too much time trying to figure that out. I thought it was ROT13 or something but that was meaner.
A very common thing even back then. Finishing a game was not a given. It was an achievement.
I read something years ago that those games were designed to have illogical puzzles so that you’d pay to call the help line (yes, there was a phone number you’d call for help) or sell paper game guides
The Secret of Monkey Island 2 famously mocked this where you could simulate literally call the helpline in-game as the PC while lost in a jungle.
I need to play this again!
Nintendo had a Hotline… I called them once because I got stuck in donkey kong country. (The guy was like ‘at the first ledge just drop straight, there’s a hidden cannon that lets you skip the level’)
That’s frustrating. How were you meant to find that?
Accidentally fall down?
Sure, but it sounds like every player would need to fall in the same hole or they couldn’t progress.
I’m sure they managed, but that’s not a great design.
I think that was a shortcut. Not the only way to beat the level.
In particular, ‘Maniac Mansion’ has pathways for the characters to die or the player to be stuck without a recourse — which later adventures avoided, allowing successful completion from any point in the game.
I recently tried playing through it for the first time (on an Android tablet with ScummVM), and pretty sure I hit such a dead end.
Going into it cold without knowing the tropes of the genre and the visual design language would be a massive disadvantage. Gamers in the 80s would have a set of expectations and strategies that we wouldn’t lean on today. Giving someone from 1985 Factorio might lead to some similar confusion until they got the hang of it.
Similar to giving an English reader some Chaucer.
Factorio spends a lot of time optimizing the first 30 minutes of game play for this exact reason. Check out these blogs on it:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-327
True, maybe a bad example. Although there are a few conventionts it might not bother to explain, like WASD for directional input, or scroll wheels, or whatever.
I think Factorio perfectly proves your point.
The Devs spent a lot of time making sure you understand the game in the first 30 minutes. 80’s Devs didn’t do that and it shows in how hard the learning curve of the game is.
It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn’t even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do “tell you” is you don’t have any possible solution for a problem.
Like if you don’t get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you’ll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.
But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.
Idiots should have known to use the honey on the skeleton, causing ants to carry away the bones but leave behind the clearly visible key that I was clicking on for 15 fuckingijfiejbfitkbeofniwkwhofh
Oh seriously???
yes 80s adventure puzzle games were shit
The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.
Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.
Hey! Spoilers!
Well, yeah.
Game companies also sold strategy guides at the time. They’re designed to be obtuse. I’m pretty sure the full walkthrough for Leisure Suit Larry 1 is only 2 paragraphs or something.
The actual steps to the end are short, there’s just always a puzzle where you have to use a rubber chicken with a bar of soap to make a helicopter or some shit. I love adventure games though, I’m just a walkthrough baby.
There were even quite a few games from the 80s and 90s that required you to use the manual in order to play with translations, instructions, sometimes even hidden codes to move forward.
there would almost always be a moment where you’d use the manual to answer a password and that was their copy protection. that kind of copy protection continued into the 90s
Up to the late 90s at least, Metal Gear Solid had a moment where, in order to progress, you had to enter a codec frequency that was in the back of the CD case.
We had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.
We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.
Maniac Mansion was designed to be replayed, which is why the cast of characters you picked could be different each playthrough. It also meant a lot more red herrings.
Lucasarts was much cleaner. We finished DOTT as kids without hints.
Maniac Mansion 2 (DOTT) was way easier (and even came with Maniac Mansion 1 as an in-game easter egg)
Yep. That’s how I played Maniac Mansion!
I vaguely remember that the point of LucasArts’ adventure games was that they were tired of the bullshit moon logic of Sierra games. I guess it’s the equivalent of someone who was so pissed off with Kaizo Mario that they made Dark Souls or something
LucasArts has plenty of moon logic in their games, sometimes even mocking it with humor. DOTT was a lot of this. It just did not stick your save game to a point of no return where you have to restart over.
Yeah Curse of Monkey Island does have a few “Oh come the fuck on!” Moments.
I’ve never beat Maniac Manson, but I did beat Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Not in four hours, though. It took months playing (when it was new) after school and bouncing ideas off my father and his best friend. All three of us were playing the game separately and sharing tips.
I could probably beat it in around 2 hours if I tried today? I still remember the path but there are also the random mazes where you just try and hope for the best. Peru, the Sphinx, Mars, maybe another one. Oh yeah, Mexico City. Maybe there are guides online but I’ve never used them, and we didn’t have them when the game was new.
The squirrel …
4 hours is pretty cruel.
I mean I beat that game for the first time, in the first way, when I was ten. But it took me a lot more than 4 hours. Now I could probably do it in two. But only for the Bernard involved endings, and where you can make use of the glitches, like the switch character-pause-freeze Edna in her bedroom.
Lol only 4 hours given? Sounds like the study runners also didn’t have enough patience to really study this. Or designed the study for the conclusion.
Was on my way to say this - 4 hours for a first time run of Maniac Manison without prior knowledge is brutal. And as you wrote, it’s a badly standardized test to boot with the amount of possible characters to choose from.
In those people defense, that number of success was the same in the early 90’s too.
Edit: Moon logic was a bitch back in the day. LucasArts and Sierra were the prime offenders.
Idk what kind of forklift certifications they’ve been going through, those things are impossible to fail
Challenge accepted