![]() ![]() And it was just obvious this was going to be a very difficult task without some kind of a language to be able to abstract the gameplay, in a way. IGN: Why was it necessary to create a new engine for Maniac Mansion? Gilbert: I started kind of hand-coding it all in assembly language, which was really about the only thing you could use to program the Commodore 64. Aric and Brad's contribution came in when we did the PC ports of the engine. I did most of the Commodore 64 programming for the engine. It was kind of my concept because I really needed it to build Maniac Mansion. What was your contribution to the engine? Ron Gilbert: I created it. IGN: You worked on the SCUMM engine with fellow Lucasfilm Games employees Aric Wilmunder and Brad Taylor. So that was the first job I had in the industry. I sent that off to some companies to see if anyone wanted to publish it and there was a company that offered me a job. It allowed people using Basic to get access to the Commodore 64's graphics, which were really, really powerful but there was no way to access them through Basic. I wrote an extension to the Basic language that came with the Commodore called Graphics Basic. IGN: What originally brought you to work in the games industry? Gilbert: I had bought a Commodore 64 when I was in college and I was just programming it because it was fun to do. We recently got the chance to reminisce about the glory days of graphic adventures with Gilbert, and discuss how totally awesome 300 was. These days Gilbert is shopping around a new adventure/RPG game to publishers and runs the Grumpy Gamer blog. The legacy continues today, as Sam & Max, while it no longer uses the engine, is still going strong as a franchise. SCUMM would go on to power almost all of LucasArts' adventure games, including Zak McKracken and the Alien Mind Benders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. SCUMM was his solution to simplify the coding process - it allowed him to create the game's story, dialogue, items, and environments with built-in tools and saved him having to write scripts for each action. The Grumpy Gamer himself: Ron Gilbert Ambitious as the idea was, Gilbert realized it would take ages to program the actual source code. ![]() His big idea: Maniac Mansion, a hilarious romp with multiple playable characters (each with specific abilities), multiple endings, and cut scenes that revealed hints at solving the game's mind-bending puzzles. ![]() He wanted to make an adventure game that was more interactive and graphically exciting than what had been done up to that point. A fan of adventure games, when the time came to make his own title he had grand plans of improving the genre. Gilbert started out programming on the Commodore 64 while in college, and was eventually employed by LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) doing C64 ports of their Atari 800 games. IGN recently caught up with the man behind SCUMM, the Grumpy Gamer himself, Ron Gilbert. SCUMM streamlined the process for coding these intensive, epic games and greatly decreased their development times. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the SCUMM engine, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which powered most of the classic LucasArts graphic adventures. ![]()
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