At least once every few months or so I slip into the world of ye olde forgotten adventure games (at this point, even Google's wonder wheel can see this coming). This last week the adventure bug's bite has gone pretty deep. If you check my "Games Recently Played" Daytum you'll notice a significant increase in the Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate pie piece, which altogether lead me to getting knee deep in ATMachine's House of LucasArts and Sierra Oddities once again.
This step back into nostalgia-land hasn't been an entirely fruitless adventure mind you. Between old Loom and Monkey Island screenshots, I was inspired to collaborate with my good buddy Brilliam on Text Adventure, a blog that archives some neat videogame typography from over the decades. It's on its first legs, but we've assembled a pretty decent collection so far. Suggestions for improvement and submissions for the site are happily taken!
Meanwhile, I got a real kick out of reading Douglas Crockford's article "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System" (also found via ATMachine). Crockford, who managed Maniac Mansion's port for the NES, outlines the various changes that were required to make the game appropriate for a younger NES audience. Suggestive dialogue, mummy playmate posters, and other content was removed from the original version, but I thought this tidbit was the most interesting:
Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish
the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad
word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games
is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the
word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or
the act.
