Text Adventures - Game Typography & Maniac Mansion Censorship

 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.

Comments

[Shamous]

Datum needs more half life 2. You gotta finish that.

More applicable, do you know if there's a name for the text that is the text in most adventure games? Like pixel text with black outline?

Anyway, my contribution: http://tinyurl.com/r2ja55

[.tiff]

I know, dude. I'm almost finished!

One of our goals is to isolate the specific font faces that were used in the games themselves, but that part is a little bit trickier than finding fonts we like. Once we identify fonts though, it'd be neat if we could link folks to where they can get them and use them.

We thank you for your contribution, and will credit you for your link!

[Aquma]

how awesomely geeky, with the adventure game typography and all. My favorite game font is Apple Kid.

I downloaded the LucasArts Adventure game megapack on torrent a couple of years back. I want to play through a lot of those games, but so far all I've completed is The Secret of Monkey Island.

Sam and Max is next on the list.

[.tiff]

I'll have to check out "Apple Kid", what was it used in?

Happy to hear you're giving the old LucasArts Adventure games a pass. I owe a lot to those games, and they had a huge impact on me as I was growing up. I hope you enjoy them, and Sam & Max + Day of the Tentacle are must plays!

[Aquma]

Apple Kid is the updated version of Orange Kid which are typefaces from the cult favorite SNES game Earthbound. A must play if you're a fan of quirky LucasArts adventure game humor, imo.

http://forum.starmen.net/forum/Fan/Forum/Apple-Kid-font

I actually was impacted by Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle growing up too. I played through them when I was younger but I decided I wanted to play through more of those games now that I'm older and arguably smarter.

I remember playing DotT and starting up Maniac Mansion in-game, and then getting frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to exit and get back to the DotT!

[.tiff]

Wow, thanks for the font! I'll probably be injecting this into Text Adventure somehow... will certainly credit you :)

And yeah! I had the same trouble with DOTT. I remember finding Maniac Mansion and then getting really upset and *scared* that I couldn't return to the main game!

[Aquma]

I think I ended up just closing the game and reloading my last save. I tend to get upset when I have to redo things in a game that I just did for dumb reasons. My version also didn't have voices which was nice since I could make up my own in my head.

[Hagarack]

Thanks for the link, it's a really cool site. Any other suggestions for stuff to do with graphic design in games? It's an area that's difficult to google :) Seems to me that graphics have been given all the attention and UIs and other design elements have been a bit neglected. What do you think?

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