Did you ever play Maniac Mansion? Of course you did. Because if you hadn’t, the geek police (a real thing) would have already taken away your geek card (also real.)
Like pretty much anything Lucasfilm Games (RIP) released throughout the 80s and 90s, Maniac Mansion is just one of those games you have to play. Seriously, go bootleg it if you have to.
Maniac Mansion creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are back with a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and the many such LucasArts games of yesteryear: Thimbleweed Park. The wonderfully clunky interface? The oh-so-pixely pixel art? It’s all there.
As they put it:
It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.
That’s literally all they would’ve had to say before I started throwing money at my screen, but they’ve shared some more details about the project:
- It’s a modern engine, but it looks oh-so-very SCUMM like.
- You’ll play one of five characters, switching between them on the fly at any time.
- It’ll cost just $20 bucks. You can give them more money than that, of course (it is a Kickstarter, after all) — but $20 gets you the game on Mac, Linux, or Windows.
- Once it’s funded, the guys estimate that it should take them about 18 months to wrap things up. Alas, that means it’s not scheduled to ship until June of 2016
They’ve set out to raise $375,000, and are at $265,000 just 3 days into their Kickstarter campaign.
