NES

Maniac Mansion

Trivia

If you read one of the speakers in the green tentacle's room, you will find out that they are "THX" sound speakers. THX is a high-quality sound technology developed by Lucasfilm.

Was one of the very, very few NES games to be translated into Spanish.

The computer games featured an ingenious, innovative and humorous copy protection scheme. In a new game a player entered the house, walked upstairs and are confronted by a giant iron bolted door which opens after entering four correct symbols on the keypad as shown in "Nuke'm Alarms - Nukes Burglars in their tracks: Owner's Disarmament Quick Reference Guide" included with the game. The wrong answer proved fatal!

The game was ported not once, but twice, to the NES. One version was made in America, while another one was made by Jaleco in Japan. The two versions look very different.

In the NES version ONLY. Many things had to be censored/changed to comply with Nintendo's policies.

The "bad words" we removed, for example: "The meteor is going to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad."

The "KILL THRILL" arcade game was changed to "TUNA"

"For a good time EDNA 3444" was changed to "Call Edna 3444"

For a complete list of changes and more info visit Douglas Crockford's website titled "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System" at http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html

There is an X-Wing model in Ed's room.

The German LucasFan Games developed a freeware 256-colour remake called Maniac Mansion Deluxe.

Contributed by Der.Archivar (602) on May 26, 2004.

Connections between Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken (based on Amiga version):

In the game room there's a Zak McKracken poster.

In Maniac Mansion there's a chainsaw that has no gas. In the game Zak McKracken there is a can of gas on Mars. The can reads, "For use with chainsaws only". When you try to pick it up the character says, "I don't need it. It's for a different game."

"Tuna head" is said in both Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. One of the aliens in Zak is always saying, "Tum de dum." In Maniac Mansion when Weird Ed is walking through the kitchen to get his cheese he says, "Tum te dum."

It appears that Zak happens to be going out with Sandy from Maniac Mansion. In Zak McKracken, if you go away and come back home enough times and keep checking the answering machine you will soon get a message from Weird Ed from Maniac Mansion. He calls up about going to a monster truck show, and that he'll come by with Sandy at 6:00 in the Edsel.

Zak McKracken, at the police station in Nepal: there is a wanted poster for the purple meteor.

The name of Razor's punk band is "Razor and the Scummettes", a reference to the SCUMM graphical interface used by LucasArts adventures.

And actually, you can microwave the hamster in any of the computer releases (but not the NES version), but you have to use a sick-minded character (such as Syd or Razor) when doing it. Showing the exploded hamster to Weird Ed will make him kill that character.

In the mansion's library, there is an un-useable plant called "Chuck the Plant" The plant also appears in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" in Henry's room, and "Day of the Tentacle" in the lobby.

In a pre-release version you could put the hamster in the microwave but this was removed by LucasArts for the final release.

The game was created via a scripting language created by Ron Gilbert. The langage was called SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion).

Every adventure game LucasArts has created has used a modified version of SCUMM.

SCUMM also powers the Putt-Putt kid game series.

Maniac Mansion is included as a bonus game inside Maniac Mansion 2 (you find it on a computer in the game!)

The game spawned a comedy series on the Family Channel in the early 90's.