Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trivia / Maniac Mansion

Go To

  • Breakthrough Hit: For LucasArts.
  • Dummied Out:
    • The man-eating-plant was apparently supposed to be another possible cause of death and in fact the trigger to make it happen still exists in-game: if a kid is in the observatory room above the room with the plant and tries to descend before the plant has been given the can of PepsiĀ®, the plant will eat the kid. As the only way to get into the observatory in the first place is to give the can of PepsiĀ® to the plant in the first place, this can only be activated by cheating or using a debug code to move the kid directly to the room.
    • A few objects censored from the NES version of the game (see below) still exist in the ROM. Also present, but rendered invisible, is the security door keypad which was part of the computer version's Copy Protection but has no function (apart from triggering the house's self-destruct mechanism) in the NES port.
  • Executive Meddling: The NES version went through a number of changes at the request of Nintendo of America. To mention a few: A statue of a classical reclining nude was removed, because hey, no nudity allowed in Nintendo games. A scrawling on a wall says "For a good time" followed by a name and a phone number. Nintendo of America felt that was offensive due to the possible sexual undertones. Their objection was specifically that it was offensive, not that it had sexual connotations. The end credits of the game originally mentioned "NES SCUMM system", which stands for the NES version of Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, the game engine that LucasArts used for their adventures. They were initially confused by this, thinking they were calling the NES "scum", so that was also removed. As for what got into the finished product... they miraculously managed to get away with nuking the hamster in the microwave, at least until Nintendo found out when it came time to ship the game to PAL regions. If you want more details, the person who headed the porting on LucasArts side has written an article about it titled The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion.
    • On a much lesser scale, the infamous "tuna head" line was originally going to be "shit head". The boss at LucasArts refused to release the game with that word in it. When Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick protested, the executive gave them one day to come up with a reason why the word needed to be used. When they couldn't, Gilbert changed it to the more ridiculous "tuna head" as a protest. After "tuna head" would become a beloved joke in the Maniac Mansion fandom, Gilbert admitted this was actually a lot funnier.
  • Genre-Killer: This game's success and being the Trope Codifier for the Point-and-Click Game would ultimately be the death knell for Text Parser adventure games. Sierra, who at the time was the biggest player in the Adventure Game market, would continue to rely on text parsers for only one more year before migrating to point and click themselves.
  • Referenced by...:
    • Conway's Game of Life has a methuselah named "Fred", in reference to a previously-discovered methuselah named "Edna".
    • Chuck the Plant became a go-to gag in several later games, along with similarly named plants such as Ace Attorney's office fern Charley, or Charles the plant from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind... which gives up "Meteor Slime" as an ingredient.
    • In the beginning of Secret of Evermore, the hero boy is exploring an old abandoned mansion, and he finds a chainsaw and a mummy inside... as well as a balloon animal.
  • Technology Marches On: The use of Cassette tapes and cassette players. The use of records and record players, as well as the typewriter, is a deliberate use of this trope since in The '80s record players and typewriters were associated with older people - very much like the Edison family. Ironically, with the resurgence of vinyl in the late 2010s/early 2020s, the records and record player have become somewhat un-dated.
  • Urban Legend of Zelda:
    • Being able to kill the kids with the chandelier.
    • There was also a rumour that allegedly, you could see some kind of Easter Egg with the telescope.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The original draft for the game featured a cast of young children going into the mansion. This was changed when it was pointed out that featuring children as the playable characters would skew the game much younger than desired, so the characters were changed to older teens, and Ron Gilbert still refers to the cast as "the kids" as a holdover from the original design.
    • Weird Ed started out as a more helpful, friendly character in the early drafts.
    • The complexity of the game led to a point in the development where a frustrated Gilbert wanted to cut most of the endings and reduced the playable characters to three just to get the game finished. Ironically, plans to include a similar system in the sequel, Day of the Tentacle, were abandoned early on due to the staff correctly predicting that they would run into the same problem.
  • Word of God: Based on early plans for Day of the Tentacle, the official party is Dave, Bernard, and Razor.

Top