In memory of LucasArts which, essentially, finally came to an end today, we dug into the GDC vaults to bring back designer Ron Gilbert's postmortem of his groundbreaking 1987 graphical adventure game Maniac Mansion. Gilbert was employee number nine of what was then called LucasFilm Games. After a couple of supporting roles on other projects, Maniac Mansion was his first game as creative lead. The game was an innovator in a lot of ways: while it wasn't the first graphical adventure to use mouse controls, many would say it was the first to do it right, thanks to Gilbert's simple sentence construction interface for what he called his SCUMM engine. Most of us associate Gilbert with later work, such as The Secret of Monkey Island, but he says that Maniac Mansion is still his favorite work. And in what he calls his "odd collection of memories" about the making of the game, his nostalgia for that long-gone era is obvious. The video of Gilbert's presentation is available above for free, courtesy of the GDC Vault.

About the GDC Vault

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