Ron Gilbert was at the center of the golden age of adventure games at LucasArts Entertainment, but after creating some of the genre’s most iconic games (Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island), Gilbert suddenly left the company. Now, over 20 years later, Gilbert is once again working on an old school adventure game, and in a recent interview with US Gamer, he reminisced on early days of the genre.

“Maniac Mansion (1987) did not start out as an adventure game, like we said ‘Hey, let’s make an adventure game.’ We just said ‘Hey, let’s make a game,’ ” Gilbert recalled.

“We started playing around with these characters and the world, and I personally was very frustrated because I kind of felt like there was something wrong with the game. We had a lot of ideas and we had a lot of these great characters and this great setting, but I just could not picture the gameplay in my head in a cohesive way.”

It wasn’t until after watching his cousin play Sierra Entertainment’s King’s Quest (1984) that Gilbert realized what Maniac Mansion was missing.

“My understanding of adventure games before that were all text, and I just watched him play, and it was like this epiphany moment,” Gilbert said. “Like ‘Oh, this is what Maniac Mansion needs to be. It needs to be an adventure game with these pictures on it.’ And that was the point that Maniac Mansion just instantly turned into an actual adventure game.”

“It makes me wonder whether those games seemed hard to people because they were ten years old”

King’s Quest, like many adventure games of the 1980s, used a text-based command system. Players would type in actions like “Look around,” “Go West,” or “Get ye flask,” and while this system could be immersive for its time, it was also not very user friendly. It could be frustrating for players to figure out exactly the right way to word a simple action so that the game would understand, and you could only read phrases like “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that command” so many times.

Maniac Mansion dropped the text input but kept the commands, allowing users to click an action like “Pick up” or “Use” and then click the object on which to perform that action. And so the point-and-click adventure game was born.

Despite being more user friendly, however, point-and-click games have often been criticized over the years for sometimes being overly difficult, especially in regards to their puzzles, which are often a little nonsensical.

For example, one of the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle (a sequel of sorts to Maniac Mansion) involves an elaborate plan to steal a golden quill from Thomas Jefferson. The plan involves using an exploding cigar and wind-up chattering teeth with George Washington, all so you can get a blanket from John Hancock that you eventually use to smoke the room out so you can get the quill.

You need the quill, of course, to make a battery for your port-a-potty time machine. Yeah.

But Gilbert said that after watching a friend complete Maniac Mansion in just six hours on her first play through, he wondered if the games were really that difficult.

“People talk about those games back then—Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and whatnot—and just how complicated and hard they were,” he said. “They say how adventure games today are much too small, and why can’t we make games that take us 40 hours to complete? So I found it very interesting that she was through the whole thing in six hours. It makes me wonder whether those games seemed hard to people because they were ten years old.”

You can read the full in-depth interview with Gilbert here.

Image courtesy of Terrible Toybox Inc