Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 122: Maniac Mansion

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

30 years ago, Lucasfilm Games gave us Maniac Mansion: an unassuming little adventure created by people who never dabbled in the genre before. But this lack of conventional wisdom caused Maniac Mansion to be an adventure game unlike anything else in existenceand one that would shape the future of Lucas' game division for years to come. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Mikel Reparaz, and Phil Kollar as the crew ponders the joys of Ron Gilbert's B&E simulator.

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So diversify your gaming budget by signing up today. We'll start playing all your favorite games absolutely free for 30 days. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this week, Bob Mackey. And today's episode is all about Maniac Mansion, one of my favorite games of all time. We did a Maniac Mansion episode in 2012 for One Up, but that was an interview episode with Ron Gilbert. And that was great, but I wanted to do a dedicated, you know, regular retronauts about this game and why it's great and what it influenced.

So before I get started, let's see who's here today in the room. Who's across from me? Samoa, Jeremy Parrish. Jeremy Parrish is here. And this is apparently the one adventure game, Jeremy has played. It's the only one that is interesting. It is one of the most interesting adventure games. I won't say it's the only one that is interesting, but we'll talk more about that later.

Who else is here today? This is Michael Rappara's of Vigam Apocalypse. And Michael, what are your feelings on Maniac Mansion? I enjoyed it. I hadn't actually played it before you tapped me for this. So we're getting some new perspective. This is great. Yeah, yeah.

But, I mean, it kind of is a refreshing thing to go back and play. I think it holds up remarkably well. It really does, yeah. It's like, well, we'll talk more about it later, but yeah, I feel like at its age incredibly well. And who else is here with us today? A new guest, first time. Well, actually not a first time guest, but maybe first time for our independent friend. First time for the independent run.

I'm Phil Kohler from Polygon, and I'm glad we're here to replace the Ron Gilbert episode. What does Ron Gilbert know about Manchin? That guy is always showing up here. He's forgotten everything. He's always showing up saying, ask me about loom. I mean, I think I've, frankly, I've talked too much Ron Gilbert in my life. I think it's time to cool off a little bit, but Ron Gilbert's great. And I have an entire, like, oral history about, not oral history, but like a really

in-depth interview about his career on U.S. Gamer when I was still there. It's one of the things I'm really proud of. But Phil and I have a secret history together in that Phil and I were going for the same job at one up in 2008. Yeah, which I didn't know until like two months ago when you told me. Yeah, I told you that. I guess we were finalists for the same job. So Phil got the job.

It wasn't a very good job, and I didn't keep it for very long if that makes you feel better. Well, Phil was briefly my enemy for about three months, and then I cooled. I was like, who's this Phil Kohler guy? He thinks he's better than me. But then, so my history of not being employed by one-up is like, Phil beat me in 2008. Frank Sefaldi beat me in 2010. But 2011, I don't know who I beat, but apparently I was number one. And then I had a job for all of 18 months.

That's longer than I had mine. That's pretty long for any games journalism job, frankly. We're not here to talk about the state of games journalism. We're here to talk about Maniac Mansion, much more exciting than that. Bob has Ron Gilbert adopted you as his godson yet? No, but I really want to go on a camping trip or something. I feel like he's my adventure game dad. Yeah, like we can talk about design.

We're buddies on Twitter. I mean, me and Ron Gilbert go back at least five years. We're buds. I hope he doesn't hear this and get creeped out, by the way. So before I start, I wanted to talk about the history of adventure games prior to Maniac Mansion. In order to understand why Maniac Mansion is so great, you have to see what came before. It's sort of like if you sit down and watch Citizen Kane without knowing what came before it, you'll be like, why does everybody care about this movie? But if you look at the state of motion pictures before that movie, you can see why Citizen Kane was so ahead of its time.

And I feel like, I'm not going to say this is the Citizen Kane of Adventure game. Yeah. Yeah, we figured it out. I mean, I feel like Games journalists either say it's a Citizen Kane of something or the Dark Souls of something. But we're going to try to avoid that. Is there a Citizen Kane of Dark Souls yet? That's Dark Souls one, I think. is a kid of Dark Souls.

But yeah, I want to talk about just a brief history of adventure games. So I think the first known adventure game on computers, like the first adventure video game was definitely 1976's Colossal Cave. This was one of those adventure games you had to play at a very expensive workstation at a college university. So this was not played by a lot of people. It was like if you were like an engineering student or you had access to one of these workstations, you would play a game like Colossil Cave. and it was a very rudimentary adventure game.

Well, it was just something that, like, the students had built on this system they had access to. It's like, well, we've got some downtime. Let's amuse ourselves. And I feel like that was kind of the state of most games on computers for a long time. It's like, we built this computer for work, but we snuck a game onto it because we're humans. We like to play. Yeah, Colossal Cave Adventure was created by William Crowther, who was a guy who liked spulunking and going into caverns and exploring in real life. And he said, basically, like, let's take the actual layout of.

of Mammoth Cave and turned it into a video game and then people started adding an adventure game elements and like points and puzzles and quest elements and stuff. So it was a collaborative thing then. Yeah, I mean, it was a mainframe game and all of those back then it was like people would do something and then other people would add to it. Like Space War started out as just like a simple shooter and then some people added some gravity and they added like a star background and so on and so forth. So yeah, it was always kind of this collaborative thing.

Zorke was the same way. It was also collaborative. And Zork is next on the list. I mean, first we have, so that is the workstation environment. That's a workstation game. So beginning to home PCs, some important adventure games are a mystery house by online systems, later Sierra Online. It is the first, it's a text adventure, but you get some nice, in quotes, graphics with that. So basically you just get a static screen of really rudimentary graphics.

But in 1980, that was something amazing for what most people would play as a text adventure, just seeing a scene in front of. It had the finest stick figures that 1980 graphics could draw. Those were some pretty great stick figures. Pretty terrifying murder scenes drawn with those. We also have Zork, which Jeremy mentioned by Infocom. That's another text adventure and I think it's probably the first great and first notable text adventure game. I've never played it.

I think – What? I've never played Zork. I don't know. It's hard for me to go back to text adventure games. I try doing it and I just don't know. Maybe I need the right one to do it. I don't know.

Zork is the right one. It is. I think you would appreciate its very dry sense of humor. Interesting. Phil, how do you feel about text adventures? I'm just curious. Like, I have a problem. I need graphics or something to, like, I mean, I read a lot of books, so I don't know what my problem is. Sure.

Yeah, I've never, I've never, like, completed Zork, but I definitely, I've gone back and, like, it's just one of those things that I'm like, I feel like I need to at least experience it. So I've gone back and, like, jumped in. The thing with a lot of, especially the older text adventures like Zork is, is that they're so, I mean, I guess this is true of the adventure game genre. in general and something we'll talk about with Maniac Mansion but like it's so easy to screw up and die that I think I gave up pretty fast. I feel like

Zork is fairly forgiving. There aren't that many ways to die. I found all of them. Congratulations on that. I mean it's no Shadowgate. That's true. That game was all about killing you. To be fair, I played Zork 1 which was I think a retooled version that came free with not Zork Inquisitor but the FMV Zork game. The FMVs

Zork. Yeah, yeah. Oh, God. Man, that thing had a weird. When the Zork franchise really blew up. Yeah, when they tried to reboot it. Look forward to our Zork episode. I think we should do one. But so we have, you know. I just made a note to do one next episode in the next section.

So Colossal Cave Mystery House Zork. The next big one, 84, is Kingsquest by Sierra Online. So this game looked great for the time. And you had direct control over your character with the arrow keys on the keyboard. And the game still acted as a text adventure in a way in that you would have to type in commands and things like that. So this was kind of like the most common form of adventure game, especially for Sierra online. They would not get into point-and-click adventures until the late 80s, early 90s. And the next super amazing and great and influential adventure game is deja vu, originally for the Macintosh.

And it kind of invented the point-and-click interface. I mean, it looks kind of weird now because it's just like Macintosh OS windows that are popping up around a screen. It's built in HyperCard. Exactly. I don't think it is. Oh, really? I don't believe so. Wow.

We just did a Mac episode on the east side of the country, and I'm pretty sure it was not done in HyperCard. But I could see where – actually, HyperCard came later, actually. Oh, okay. Missed with me. Yeah, right. But whatever it was delivered via – I mean, this was great because you have the point-and-click interface. There was no more guesswork in what is this item in front of me? What did the developers name it?

You click on an item in the background. You click verbs. an inventory that's like physically represented on the screen as you know like bullet lists of items like it really was a forward-thinking game and there's also a great NES port so these are all the things leading up to Maniac Mansion all the influences and everything that came before I think worth mentioning maybe not as a direct influence but is the the sort of Japanese adventure game scene that developed I think the most notable release was that the Portopia serial murder case that's right Yujihori who would go on to create Dragon Quest was that 84

That was 84-85 on PCs, and then it made it to Famicom, I want to say, in 1985. But that was kind of important because it took the PC game, adventure game concept and came up with like a streamlined interface that would work with two buttons and a D-pad. And like I feel like the popularity of that game did a lot to kind of sort of make adventure games on consoles very popular. popular in Japan, which, you know, it would result in Maniac Mansion, I think, account for a lot of its success on consoles and the fact that it had, you know, the Famicom port that we'll talk about later. Yeah, I mean, that's not a great example of a good port, but we'll talk more about that later.

It does provide some context, though. Yeah, of course, of course. There must be, there must be like a good fan translation of that game. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because I've always meant to, like, I feel like it's something I should go check out because I've read a lot about it but never actually tried it. if there's a fan translation, I should look that.

There definitely is. Have you seen screenshots of it, Phil? Yes. Okay. It's pretty hideous. Yeah. Let's talk about, so this is a Lucasfilm Games game before the company was called LucasArts, you know, when they were, what do you call that when a company reorganizes or whatever? Yeah, that happened in like 1990.

But when they were born, they were called Lucasfilm Games. And they started as a division of the Lucasfilm Computer Division, which would eventually become Pixar. And what, the George Lucas sell that off to, like, pay alimony. to pay for Howard the duck debts or something. I forget what the story is behind that. But I know, like, they originally owned Pixar or what would become Pixar and they were sold off for some reason. I should have had more research on this, but I know that Lucasville game was a division of the company

that would eventually become Pixar. Yeah, I mean, there's so much stuff that kind of came out of Lucasfilm and ILM, Pixar, and Adobe Photoshop got has its origins. That's right, yeah. In Lucasfilm, LucasArts, or whatever. So it was founded in 1982, and for the most part, When they first started, they originally known for action games that revolved around some sort of graphical gimmicks. So we have like things like Ballblazer, Rescue on Frectalis, Coronis Rift, and the Idleon.

And a lot of these were just like, we're going to kind of fake 3D in a way that looks very convincing. I mean, it moves at about four frames per second, but that's enough for the early 80s to get you on board. Yeah, I think Rescue on Frectalus was a like procedurally generated game before those were things, wasn't it? I don't remember, but I know what people always remember about that is like when you land, you have to land, up to rescue people, and occasionally one of the people you rescue will be an alien. It will just pop up and on your windscreen and just smash it, and your game will end. So a lot of people who grew up in that era now have night terrors because of this game. So their first adventure game was actually 1986, Labyrinth.

It was based in the Jim Henson movie. And I played this game, and it's not super great, but it is inspired in some way. It has a fun, like, Wizard of Oz style opening in that the game opens as a text adventure game, in which you are going to the movies. And once you, you know, buy your ticket and get popcorn and stuff and sit down, David Bowie appears on the movie screen and you are sucked into the labyrinth. And basically the only goal is like escape in 13 hours. And there's no, there's nothing told to you outside of that.

Like in Kingsquest, you have direct control of your character. And you have like drop-down menu of verbs and your inventory and stuff like that. But it is a very confusing game. I mean, it is taking place in the labyrinth. But it's mainly like just try everything, go everywhere. the backgrounds are just like a bunch of brick walls with doors in them. It's sort of a very confusing game.

I couldn't really get into it. I do love the idea of like starting as a text adventure and then turning it to something like that's cool. That's a really cool idea. It's not directly based on the movie. Like you don't play as Sarah, right? Right. No, you choose a boy or a girl

and then your favorite color. And your color actually, I think it's the color of the character's shirt, but it also influences other things that happen in the game. And the game doesn't actually begin until you type the input command, like, please take this child away.

I don't think that happens. Yeah. And there's no Jennifer Connolly, but that's in the Famicom version, which is also not very fun. It is not... Sort of like Purple Rose of Cairo or something. You go to the movies and Gerith starts talking directly to you and brings you inside the labyrinth. And then it's also cool because it has a bunch of joke endings that you can do. Oh, really?

You can turn his spells back on him and fries his hair. And he's like, oh, well, I guess I have to let you go now. He loses that cool, like, 80s soccer mom do. Yeah. Well, he, like, he refuses to let you win at the end. So, like, you can do a bunch of things, and, like, regardless of what you do, you've won the game. But now it's just like, will you turn him into a frog? Will you, uh, yeah?

I think I did play this for U.S. Gamer on a live stream. That's probably still up if you want to see me getting confused and quitting about halfway through. But if you want to see where the sort of early roots of LucasArts adventure games come from, this is a good place to start just to play around with it. You probably won't have a lot of fun. Oh, and so I'm gonna, uh, and I'm gonna, uh, and I'm,

uh, and I'm, and, uh, and, so, uh, and,

I think it's time to get into the actual production of Maniac Mansion. And I have to say a lot of this comes from Ron Gilbert's presentation at GDC 2011. He gave an hour-long talk. It's super in-depth. You can always go back to our 2012 Retronauts episode, too. There's a lot of great information there. But a lot of this comes from both of those sources. But I do want to reiterate a lot of this because it is important as to how this game was created.

So, of course, we have Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are the co-designers. Gary Winnick was mostly doing art for this game. And we also have programmers David Fox and Chip Morningstar who developed the Scum Engine alongside Ron Gilbert. We'll talk more about that later. But this game started as a concept without a story or genre. are attached. Ron Gilbert and Gary Winick were inspired by sort of comedy slash horror movies like The Fly, Reanimator, and Creep Show, and specifically the Stephen King segment with the Meteor, where Stephen King plays a hillbilly and a meteor lands in his backyard, and I think

he just slowly turns into a plant creature over the course of the 20-minute thing. Have you guys seen Creep Show? It's great. Yeah. It has net... You're selling me on it. It has a rare, a rare instance of Leslie Nielsen playing a villain. Pre-naked gun Leslie Nielsen, he tries to kill, well, he does kill spoilers, he kills Ted Danson for sleeping with his wife. He buries him alive underwater.

So, if you want to see Leslie, the most sinister Leslie Nielsen you've ever seen in your life, I recommend watching creep show. So Gilbert basically had this idea for the game. He didn't know what to do with it. Like, what genre is, what are we going to do with Maniac Mansion? And he figured it out when

he went home for the holidays and a young cousin was playing Kings Quest. And Ron Gilbert's like, oh, this looks cool. I'll try it for myself. And he kind of hated it because he, he, as we all agree at this point in our lives, at this point in history, it's not fair that you have to guess the verb the developer wants you to use or you have to guess, you know, the noun. Like, what is this thing on the screen? And he was like, I can see this bush on the screen. Why can't I just click on the bush instead of guessing, is it a bush? Is it a thicket? Is it this? Is it that? Like, I just want to make this simpler. That's sort of where the genesis of Maniac Mansion came from.

But this is an interesting case of design coming out of sort of not in negative terms, but ignorance. Because Gary and Ron had never designed a game before, and they never designed an adventure game before. And they didn't really play adventure games. So a lot of the ambition of Maniac Mansion came from them not knowing what they couldn't do. And that's why the game took a long time to develop. So there's some interesting stuff I read in, or sorry, I watched in Ron's GD's. see chat. This game was originally going to start kids, like the Goonies or

something like that, but they wanted to skew a little older in terms of their audience. And one of the more important things to come out of Maniac Mansion was the Scum engine. And as we all know, of course, that Scum stands for script creation utility for Maniac Mansion. And the main value

of this is that it allowed for improvisational design. Instead of coding in code, you can code in a much easier to implement scripting language. So if you have an idea, you can throw it into the game, almost instantly and then see the results. And that's sort of how really Monkey Island came to be, just them meeting for lunch coming up with jokes

and immediately implementing them in the game because Monkey Island started as a semi-serious game, but just this improvisational atmosphere behind it really helped influence it more to its comedy. But this is where the hamster in the microwave came from. It was sort of a joke that they put in to make Ron Gilbert laugh. Like, hey, look what we did in five minutes. And then it was part of the game forever,

even the NES version. So the mansion itself is based on the main house of the Skywalker Ranch as sort of a joke because there's a main house and there's a stable house and the games team worked on a stable house. And they would always have a lot of inside jokes about what was happening in the main house because it was very secretive. So if you look at an image of the Skywalker Ranch, you will immediately think of the maniac mansion. There are many elements of inside the mansion like the spiral staircase, like the media room that are drawn directly from the Skywalker Ranch. And that is still in operation, right? That's still like the archival place for Star Wars goodies and whatnot. I've been out there, actually.

And the thing that I remember most about it is that we went to see a screening of a movie for press. And this other couple, like, parked next to us, got out of their car. And, like, they had their dog with them. And they let the dog out, let have a drink of water. And security guard came up and it's like, I'm sorry, there's no dogs allowed here. You're going to have to leave. Trust passers will be mutilated. No, no, no.

He'll just stay in the car. No, I'm sorry. No exceptions. You're going to have to leave right. Wow. So tight security there. What movie were you seeing? It was the square about the protests at Tahrir Square in Egypt.

Oh, wow. Interesting. So you had not played Maniac Mansion before that? I had not. Okay, so you would not have made a connection. So it didn't strike that court of recognition. So like a lot of games of this era, it was kind of designed on paper. They had like a kind of like a map the size of this table and layers of acetate that they would pull down over the rooms that had various item descriptions.

and, you know, puzzle pathways and various, like, character pathways and things like that that they would pull down. So a lot of the game was actually developed on paper, which is really interesting. I don't think that happens a lot anymore these days, although I could be surprised. I know when talking to the project, code name of the game, Intelligent Systems was saying they prototype a lot of things on paper, which is pretty cool. So the original version... It makes for better art books, you know, 20 years later. It does. Like, here's my drawing of this sexy firearm character.

Everybody loves those. Please look at my sheet of Wivus. So the original version came out in 1987 for the Commodore 64. This game saw a lot of other versions like Apple 2, Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, but the most popular version has to be the NES version. A, the NES had a gigantic install base, but B, this game also had a Nintendo Power cover, which was like, money in the bank. I think you probably sold like $250K just by having a Nintendo Power cover.

Yeah, at what point did Nintendo Power covers stop selling games? Because Metal Storm was on NES Nintendo Power, and that game didn't get produced in large quantities, and now was extremely expensive. So there was a drop-off at some point. But I think Maniac Mansion was still, like, just at the cusp. Maybe those first 20 issues were the ones that really sold the games, I think. I think in Maniac Mansion's case, it also helped that that was published with, like, a walk-through in Nintendo Power, like, telling you everything that you could do. And so, like, now I kind of feel like I did play the game at the time just from reading that, but... I think I did, too.

I didn't tell you everything. I think I told you about, like, half of the puzzles, like, or gave you hints for half of them. But I bring this up a lot on PC episodes we do. I feel like it's hard to remember, but computers were not, like, these ever-present thing in the household until probably the mid-90s. I mean, I knew people that had computers, but it was basically like, this is my dad's computer for his work, and we were allowed to put some games on it. It's not like, this is the family computer, unless you were rich. and I didn't really know any rich people. But so, like, for the most part, kids in this NES demographic did not play adventure games, did not know what they were.

So this was sort of their first and really my first experience with adventure games. So it's time to move on to talking about the actual game. I've been monologing too much about all these facts. I thought it was important to get all these out. So let's talk about our history with the game. Phil, how about you? Sure. So I definitely, I had the NES version.

I don't think I owned it, but I rented it from the local video store fairly regularly. And it was one of those games that I rented a lot because I could never quite get it. I didn't understand it. So every time I rented, I was like, this time I'm going to figure it out. Did you understand, like, the basic pointing and clicking? Yeah, I guess it was because it was so different from every other NES game that I was playing. That's true, it really is. You know, like it wasn't a platformer, it wasn't an action game.

And I was still young enough at that point. Like, I was probably six years old or something, and I just didn't, I didn't get it. Like, I didn't understand what I was supposed to be, what my goal was. There was a lot of reading involved in that game, too. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Maybe not all words six-year-olds can understand, like, radioactive and things like that. But so I don't think I ever, like, really made, I don't think I ever beat the NES version. I don't think I ever finished it.

I also didn't have the Nintendo Power walkthrough or anything like that or access to walkthroughs. But I did, I remember, I distinctly remember. I remember many years later when I was probably like 13 or 14 or 15, and I had a computer finally, finding a PC version and finding a walkthrough online and playing through it with a walkthrough, just that I could finally be like, okay, no, I've completed this game now. I know what this is. You conquer the demons of your past. Yeah, exactly. What did you think about it after sort of approaching it as a teenager, getting a better sense of the design? I assume you might have played more adventure games after that or before that.

Yeah, I definitely gotten more into adventure games. also just had a broader knowledge of games in general and of like the different things that games can do beyond just like action games and platformers. So I appreciated it a lot more.

I think I played it back to back with Dave the Tenicle. Oh, okay. And so like in my mind I'm always like, well, Dave the Tenicle was a lot better. I like it more, but we'll talk more about that. Yeah, we'll talk more about that later. I have so much to say.

I wrote like 40,000 words for day. I think I've written more than any other human about Day of the Tenticold. But Michael, how about you? What's your experience with Maniac Mansion? Well, again, I did read the Nintendo Power feature, and I think I thought a lot about Maniac Mansion when I was a kid. Like, I'd see it in computer stores.

I could never get it. I think I had like a minor childhood crush on Razor. Oh, I did too. Yeah, I think a lot of people did. She was awesome. But, yeah, never actually got to play it by the time that I was able to get into adventure games when my parents upgraded us from an Apple 2

to a Mac in the early 90s. I was kind of more into Sierra's games like SpaceQuest because they looked better than Maniac Mansion. They did, yeah. And it's, at least for me, I started with LucasArts

and then later when I was a teenager I would buy like the Sierra collections and I was like, I just can't get into these games because they play by very different rules. They were also better about porting them to Mac than LucasArts was. Yeah. Anything else about the game?

You know, I somehow missed it when I did play Day of the Tenticle. So, yeah, like for the longest time, I was just kind of like, oh, yeah, I should play that someday. And this finally gave me the impetus to do that. Awesome. Cool. We'll talk about what you thought about it soon. Jeremy, this is your favorite adventure game. Yes, by far. That's not quite true. But it's not the only adventure game I've played. In fact, I felt really comfortable playing Maniac Mansion because I had already played.

played through Shadowgate on NES. So I wasn't like, you know, unlike with Chris, or Phil, sorry. I wasn't like, oh, this is, this is strange. Like, this is, you know, a new form of video games for me. So I did feel kind of comfortable jumping into it. But, yeah, I remember getting it like on a Black Friday when it first came out because my father went off to the store to buy, like do some gift shopping or whatever. early in the morning. I was like, well, if you see Ninja Turtles 2 or Maniac Mansion for

an ES, can you pick one of those up for me? And he came home with both because it was like buy one, get one free. So that was a happy holiday. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, I played through Maniac Mansion quite a few times on NES and, um, with, with or without walkthroughs. I don't know. I probably used a walkthrough. I don't remember like sitting there with Nintendo Power, but I probably did use it to some degree, like when I got stuck. But I liked the combinations of different characters, and there were some characters I liked more than others. Like, Jeff, I don't care. He's like the Fred from Scooby-Doo. He's almost as useless as Dave.

He's just like some vanilla there. Yeah. Oh, is that his name? Dave. Dave is the main character. Oh, Dave, okay. Who has no skills. Which one is Jeff? Jeff is a surfer.

Okay. Yeah, I don't care about either. He's got the best music, though. But Bernard, I was like, yes, that's me. And then what's the name of the girl who's the journalist? Wendy. Wendy. Okay, like, those two characters were me.

It was like the nerd and the writer. And then Razor I liked because she reminded me of a classmate of mine who was like punk rock and really cool. And everyone was like, wow, she's awesome. We're still friends with her on Facebook and she makes jewelry now out of like bones and skeletons and stuff. Yeah. I think we all of them used. She's still rad. She's still awesome.

We're all going to talk about our mutual razor crushes in this room eventually. But yeah, for me, it was sort of what I described earlier. I was an, you know, avid Nintendo Power Reader. And I saw this cover. And I was like, this is like nothing I've seen before. You're just in a house and you're like trying to rescue somebody, but you're not doing it by jumping on enemies. You're actually like interacting with in the environment in these detailed rooms. So it really, that's when the bug bit me and I eventually got it and I was obsessed with it ever since.

And I would like design my own adventure games on paper with friends. So like this game really got me into adventure games. We would not get a computer for like six more years. So like every day, every time I would go to like software, et cetera, I would see all these adventure games on the shelf and just like start crying. Like, I will never play these. I just want to play more adventure games. But eventually when we got a computer, I caught up with everything, and I was much happier. But, yeah, this game really planted that seed in my mind, and I've been an adventure game fan ever since.

And let's talk about the goal of this game, the overall design of this game. So the goal of this game is very simple. The premise is very simple. Dr. Fred, Dr. Fred Edison, has kidnapped Dave's girlfriend, Sandy, four reasons. I guess his plot for her doesn't really. make any sense in the grand context of the game. He's going to suck her brains out with the zombiematic. It's important to note that 25 years earlier, a meteor landed in the Edison's property, and it's been mind-controlling Dr. Fright ever since. And I guess cheerleader

brains are part of his grand design. I don't know why. I don't know how that connects to anything. It's just a generic mad scientist plot, I think. Obviously, this game is inspired by B-movies and horror comedies and stuff like that. But looking at this game from, like, I guess, a macro perspective or like just a pure design perspective, your goal is to rescue Sandy, but there are actually four goals you need to meet. Open both outer doors to Dr. Fred's lab, get past the purple tentacle,

and then find a way to dispose of the evil meteor. And in order to do this, you have a team of three kids to pull off this goal, or these goals. So you always have to have Dave. Dave is Sandy's boyfriend, and Dave has no skills, no abilities. And in fact...

He's the quintessential. obligatory white guy. I think so. He's like, well, he's based on Ron Gilbert in 1987. So I made the joke last time. It's like, was that a comment on you, Ron, that he doesn't have any skills? I think Ron just frowned at me.

My first play-through, I just parked him in the dungeon and used him to free the other ones. That's all I do with him. And I think that's sort of, I think the game is designed for him to get captured first because when you go into the house, you go into the kitchen first, probably. It's the first door you see. And you're immediately captured by Edna. And once he's in the dungeon, there's no way to get out. So you have to send a.

another kid. And so I think he's designed just to get captured. I was like, hey, Dave, why don't you go for a swim? Oh, God. I do like his boys are back in town style music from the NES game, but that's basically it. So I'll talk about the rest of the characters and all of their skills. We can comment more on them if you

want to. Bernard is Jeremy, obviously. He's a token nerd of the group. He has the most utility. He can fix anything. That means the radio and the phone. His one downside is that he cannot get past Green Tenticle. You have to have another kid get past green tentacle.

He's the one that cannot even feed green tentacle. Once you get to the third floor, you have to give him food. Bernard doesn't even want to go there. He will just run away. So you need someone else to do that first. But that's not a big problem. That's really easy to do. So Bernard is kind of O.P., I think, in this game.

Just like me. It's just like Jeremy. He's Ope for humanity. Michael, oh, no, sorry. Jeff is the surfer and the stoner. He can fix the phone, but that's it. I mean, he's okay. Using the phone is helpful, but it's not necessary.

and Jeff has cool music, but that's basically it. And he's on the cover. Some of the characters aren't on the cover. Razor, as we talked about, is the punk rock girl. She can play the piano and also microwave the hamster if you want to, which has no effect, but you can't actually get one of the rare deaths if you microwave the hamster and give it to Weird Ed. He will kill you and bury you in the front yard,

which is what happens to any kid who dies in the house. It's very, very morbid. So Sid is just the male copy of Razor. He does all the same stuff as her, and he can also microwave the hamster. I'm pretty sure. Wendy, she is the journalist. Her skill is being able to write anything, and that's used in this game by rewriting the Meteor's manuscript.

She has the best ending by far. She can, oh, really, she does. I actually got it when I replayed the game. Apparently, she can rewrite like a 300-page manuscript in less than a night, which is great, less than a few seconds in terms of the game's time. But the game operates on a really weird time flow in which you can send away for something. It will come on that same night. The mailman shows up.

I have to assume this game takes place on one night. And I think the last character is Michael, who can develop film, and that's really just used to get past Purple Tentical. If you develop the film for Weird Ed, he will help you get Purple Tenticle out of the way to access Sandy and Dr. Fred. So all of these character skills work to get you past the four, like, mini goals under the main goal of rescuing Sandy.

I'm gonnae, ...andahe, ...and... ...and... ...a... ...it... ...and... ...the...

...and... ...and... And it's important to note that this has the point-and-click interface we all have grown to know and love in adventure games. Adventure games would eventually get rid of the verb bar. They would eventually move towards more like graphical icons. Thimbleweed Park, which is Ron Gilbert's newest game, uses the verb bar. He said, like, no, I like verbs. further versions of this game

would remove like four verbs so verbs like fix turn on turn off what is would be gone from the NES version and I think future versions what is was kind of like a redundant it's not even a verb it's not really passive verb come on but it's it's not it's kind of useless in that

like in the original PC versions and C64 versions when you hover the cursor over something it won't show you what it is in the little verb bar but if you click what is and then hover it does in the NES version you automatically get the what is, you know, what is is built into the game itself. So they got rid of that being redundant. But over time, they pruned away a lot of the verbs and now all the essential

ones are there in that final NES version. This game is also notable for sort of having an in-game clock. I'm not sure. I think it's just events or things you're doing that help things move along in time. I don't think it's like a real time clock or anything sophisticated like that. But it does give the game a great sense of tension in that NPCs are moving around the house. You know, you cut to Dr. Fred as he's, you know, preparing to kill Sandy and things like that. It gives it a real sense of, like, momentum. Like, you have to hurry up. I don't think you can run out of time at any point in the game. You can sort of bumble around, but things are happening while you're doing things regardless of what your characters are doing. It's like

things are happening and you're just in this world and trying to work around them. The idea of NPCs having their own schedules independent of the player, had that been done before in video games? I mean, that was something that you would see in, like, Shenmu, and it was considered revolutionary there. Yeah, I mean, once you strip away the artifice of Maniac Mansion, you realize it's like, well, Weird Ed only moves three times.

Edna never moves, and Dr. Fred never moves, so it's all sort of an illusion. Sure, but still. The tension is still there, but yeah, I mean... I think this is part of why the game kind of alluded me so much as a kid, is I, like, this illusion, as you say,

it totally worked for me as a kid. I was 100% like that tension was there and I was like, this is a game where I can like run out of time or where like the people are moving around and it's not based off of, it like, it really freaked me out as a kid. And I think that was appealing to kids actually because weirdly enough, this game has a strange sense of like voyeurism. Like especially for a kid whose life is controlled by all these forces outside of themselves to be able to like sneak into a house and like creep around adults and know that they can catch you at any time. There's sort of a weird thrill that you would get at. in major trouble for if you tried in real life as a kid. But there was sort of like a mischief simulator for children. It does have that kind of Goonies element now that you sort of mention the kind of spiritual

connection there of like creeping in and intruding into someone else's house where you're not supposed to be. And as I talked about earlier, you know, when you're playing the game, it will cut away to different scenes like what Dr. Fred is doing, weird at talking to his mom about Dr. Fred's plans, you know, where characters are going and what they're doing. This game, I don't know if it invented cutscenes, but it invented the word cutscene. And in the scripting language of Maniac Mansion, it is C-U-T-H-C-E-E-N-E. Phil, what is the Polygon, like, what is the Polygon rules for the word cutscene?

Yeah, is it one word, two words, hyphenated? I'm really bad with our style guide as editors, other editors at Polygown will tell you, but I think it is one word. Okay, whenever I write it, I'm never sure. I always just use it as one word. Seeing it is hyphenated, feels oddly old-timey, like photograph. Yeah. Yeah, or like tomorrow. I see that a lot of old books.

Video hyphen game is, that's like the biggest brain on the... I just say Huegos, it's much as a year. Yeah, what is it? Hoagos. Hoagos is eggs. Oh, yeah. That's a different thing. Wait, wait a minute.

Huegos Rancheros. Yes. I want beans poured all over my manic mansion cartridge. Non-interactive story scenes existed prior to this, but I believe this was the first game in which scenes would cut away from the gameplay without the players notice, without any sort of like, oh, you're not going to move to the story scene. It's just like you're in the middle of doing something. All of a sudden, you're cutting away to another scene.

So this game sort of established this. And I think it was because it was created by people who didn't know the rules, really. It was just like, well, why can't we do this? I mean, like, prior to this, non-interactive story scenes would happen before the game or after the game or both. Is that how we justify Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance, turning that into a mechanic where suddenly, like, you're in the middle of a boss battle and you have to play the other character instead. Oh, God, I forgot about that. Is that because No Moran doesn't know how video games work?

He should buy, he has no excuse. He's not Ron Gilbert in 1987. So, uh, and get ready for Final Fantasy 7 remake in 20, 25, everybody. So, so excited. Yeah. So we talked about the, the heroes of this game. Let's talk about the antagonist before you start getting into the actual design of the game. So, uh, the, the blue-skinned Edison family consists of a bunch of wacky characters.

We have Dr. Fred. He's being controlled by the Meteor, but some part of him is still self-aware because he leaves clues behind as to how to help him. So he puts the code for the second door in the Meteor mess arcade game. I think he's crying for help on the inside, but he's being controlled by the meteor, and you can't help it. Nurse Edna was the one character that really got a makeover for the NES game. She is always horny in a very sexually aggressive way. Kind of getting you ready for Overwatch. Yes. But it's not as great if an old lady is talking about tying you to her bed. So, yeah, that's what she says when she captures a male character. I should have tied you to my bed. And of course...

Everybody is someone's fetish. Yes. But, I mean, Dr. Fred hasn't slept in 25 years, so he hasn't thrown her a bone in a long time. And there's a reason behind this. And I'm sorry. What's the Nersedna fan art scene on Tumblr? Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I don't want to see that cosplay. I really don't. So purple tentacles. is Dr. Fred's right-hand man and his first line of defense. I don't know why purple tentacle allied with Dr. Fred but Green Tenticle didn't. Green Tenticle, as we would see in these characters both move on today, the Tentacle. Green Tenticle is a wimp. His life is going nowhere.

He wants to be a musician. And you have to feed him to get past the third floor and to the fourth floor. That's a really easy thing to do. And he will eventually help you if you get him a recording contract. Or he will kill you in two different ways. These are the two secret deaths in the game.

Green Tenticle will kill you if you get a record contract for yourself. That's if you record yourself playing the music and then send away for a contract and show it to him. And disgustingly enough, he will also kill you if you record the tentacle mating call to a cassette tape and played in his bedroom. It will just cut away from the room and then cut to your grave. So there's some things going on in Maniac Mansion that are not safe for anyone. This is a, I'm going to say this could be the one NES game with implied rape. So that made it into the NES It's in the NES version

It must have slipped past something Someone It's probably just too subtle for the sensors to catch Yeah, it's like, oh, he just killed you Because he was mad, you ruined his record or something It's, you know, it's death by sex But it's not a cross So it's okay

I guess, I guess But that somehow made it into the NES game But Edna was less horny Even though she still had a heart shape ed With a mirror over it And the purple meteor is constantly Tripping purple slime We don't know where he came from

but he has ambitions, too, just like Green Tentacle. He wants to be a writer, but he sucks at writing, probably because he has no arms. I really want to read. I feel that. I mean, he's Dr. Fred's right-hand man, but he has neither hands nor is he a man. That's true, yeah. It's just a sad existence. And you can find his memoirs in the mansion.

That's how you get one of the endings. But it's just like, I want to read those. Like, where did this guy come from? Why is he controlling this doctor's mind? There's so many questions I have, and there's no timeline or lore. First play-through, I tried to rewrite them as Razor. And it's just like, oh, I think I made it worse. I didn't know you could do that.

That's great. Adventure games up to this point were notorious for killing the player, especially Sierra games. And in a way that feels a bit unfair in that the deaths were funny, but I feel like they punish you for experimenting. And in LucasArts games, while they still had deaths, which they wouldn't last for very long, the deaths are sort of like Easter eggs that are obvious. Like, hey, don't fill the radioactive pool up with water if there's a kid in it. Don't give Weird Ed his exploded hamster remains. Like, don't push the self-destruct button on the mansion.

These are all fun Easter-Ake things instead of, like, I walked to the right and a bear killed me or something like that, like in King's Quest. Don't microwave the water that you get from the radioactive pool. That's true. Although it gives you a really cool scene of your character spinning around, apparently dying of radiation. Did we talk about Weird Ed? Weird Ed? Oh, you're right. Weird Ed is the military enthusiast who would now be posting our Reddit a lot, and he is really attached to his hamster.

And his hamster is, you must take his hamster to get the card key to the Meteor's room. Dr. Fred and Edna's kid, right? He is, and he is not happy about his father, but he's also a weird shut-in. He also looks like the sort of kid you'd keep in the basement in, like, the original concept art. Like, he's just wearing, like, a blood spattered smock and has this, like, weird long vulture neck. He's much less ugly in the NES version. He's got, like, this weird bulbous chin and, like, these jagged teeth in the computer versions. A brown shirt Nazi uniform, though, doesn't he?

He does. It's like in like a little beret. Like, he's like a... He's a survivalist. Yeah. Again, again, he would be posting our Reddit a lot. But yeah, again, with the desk, these are all like, I mean, I would stumble in some of these on the NAS game, but they taught you something. But they were also funny.

And you can save in this too, so it's not like you're being thrown back to the beginning of the game. And another thing about adventure games is that Sierra and other games, text adventures, basically everybody, they're all about these unfair dead ends. It's like, you would do something. to shut yourself off from finishing the game, but the game would not inform you in any way, so you'd just be bashing your head against things for a long time. And like with the deaths and Maniac Mansion,

these dead ends are very obvious in some ways. I think there's maybe like one unfair dead end and if you try to open the envelope, it will ruin it and you need that envelope to do certain things in the game. You have to steam the envelope open to get a quarter out of it. There's one quarter in this entire mansion, and there are three times in this

entire mansion you need, just like any good adventure game. But I want to move want to talk about the NES version. And I think this is the version that we all played first, right? I mean, I think Michael was it for you, too, or was a Macintosh? Well, actually, the version I played first was the one that's part of

Day of the Tenicle Remastered. Okay. Which is the 1989 deluxe version, I think. That's the MS. DOS version, yeah. Yeah, but the NES version, as I said before, it has to be the most played version of the game based on just everyone on NES, it decided on Intent Power cover.

It was like nothing anyone I played before outside of like Shadowgate. The graphics are a bit nicer. The characters maintain their very stiff animations. I mean, in no version of this game just walking up and downstairs look convincing. It's just like characters are oddly shuffling and moving sideways as they like, I don't know. I don't know even how to describe that. It would take 3D games until like 2015 and create convincing stair animations.

I'm surprised they didn't just warp them to the next room when you clicked on the stairs instead of watching that weird like shuffle. Yeah, they're shuffling their feet. Yeah. So strange. They need some Simon Belmont animation. It's like watching... I was going to say, it's like watching Donald Trump walk downstairs.

It's also... That's right, I said it. It's also really striking, like, comparing the NES version of the computer versions, or of any game, really, that NES games always had background music. PC games at the time almost never did. Yeah, and my... So when I played the PC version much later, I was like, okay, this is the PC version of Maniac Mansion. going to be even better than the NES version. And then I was stunned to find out, like, no, there's one song and it comes out of your PC

speaker, as do all the other sound effects. And PC speaker is basically like the earliest cell phone trying to compose music. Yeah. And it's mostly silent. It is mostly silent. There's very few sound effects. Yeah. And I will say, like, looking, you know, looking up some videos of the NES version in preparation

for this podcast, one thing I had completely forgot is was the music and how, like, it's actually pretty good. It's good, yeah. It's produced by a group called Team Fat, who would produce a lot of very, like, European-sounding music for the N.S. As in, like, The Fat Man? The Fat Man. The Seventh Guest. Has in Jake in The Fat Man?

No, no, no. I can't remember the guy's name. It's a game composer who calls himself the Fat Man. It probably isn't. Yeah. Who's actually not fat, but, like, poses in nudie suits a lot. The Cowboy Tuxitos. But, yeah, this music is really good, and you'll hear it all throughout this episode.

In an interesting touch, Each character has a portable CD player, which is really fancy for 1990. I mean, that's a pricey item. And that CD player has a single looping song. And the song that plays, oh, George Sanger? Yeah, that's the Fat Man. So each song the character has sort of defines them as a character. Like, Jeff has, like, the surf rock sound.

Bernard has this, like, crazy Devo. What would you call that? I mean, have you heard the Bernard song recently? Not recently. Okay, it's sort of like... You're probably right, like New Wave-ish. Like Devo, New Wave, Razors theme is really grating. It's like a punk theme.

Michael is a jazzy theme. I think Wendy's theme is classical music, like sort of like a Bach rip-off. I mean, it's really great. It was a really nice touch. And you can turn this music off, too, if you want. So you can play the game as it was intended to be played originally. But it's a really, really nice touch. And I mean, you have to have a video game with music.

And for the NES in 1990. You can't not do that. And there's also a lot of censorship in this game. We covered a lot of this in episode 77, but there is a great article on the internet that's been up since I've had internet access it's called the expurgation of

Maniac Mansion so if you read that you will hear about all the things that Nintendo said this is we will not we will not allow this including the word scum in the game like NES scum system like why we don't want the word scum next to NES and they had to explain what that meant and everything so go back to that

episode we'll talk more about that but I did mention Edna is significantly less horny which I think is good for all of us and the NES very Not for me. Not for Phil. He's pro-thirsty Edna. Now we know the fetishist.

Wait, that's more of a waypoint attitude, Phil. Yeah. They're up to no good over there. So the NES version, one more thing is it has some pretty significant bugs in it, one of which really helps you get past some challenges. So one of the best bugs in this game is that if you send one kid into, you know, Edna's room or Weird Ed's room, and before they get captured, you send another kid in, all the action in that room is frozen.

So the other kid can just go around and loot the room and do whatever they want while the action is frozen. You'll still have that kid get captured, but you have all the time you want. So that is one cheat I always use in the NES version. So it's kind of like the quick silver scene and days of future past. Yes, exactly. It's like you have awesome like Zach Morris stop powers. You can just freeze time and it plays rush and do whatever you want. And it was great to play the PC version because it's like, I don't have this cheat anymore.

Now I have to lure characters out of their rooms or call them on the phone or, you know, send a kid in to be the the sacrifice and then go into the room and try to make it out before they come back. It's all very tense, and that's what I love about this game. And there are some refinements. As I said, all the useless commands are gotten rid of. The what-is thing is automatic. And in general, it is like just the best sort of, in terms of ease of use, the best version of this game. I mean, unfortunately, you do have to play with a controller.

But if you play it on Scum VM, there's a hack in which you can play it with a mouse. So you can actually play the NES version of this game with a mouse. which is amazing. I've never done it before, but I do want to try it. But if you want to play it now, this has never been re-released. I'm surprised there's never been a virtual console version of this game or anything like that with how popular it seemed to be. I don't think LucasArts ever did anything with virtual console.

Really? I don't think so. I don't think so. You're right. The Super Star Wars games came out for the Super NES, but those were published originally by JVC, so I'm not sure what the rights are on those. Well, this was published by Jalico. Right.

And did they publish anything on virtual console, like basis loaded? Jalico does publish on virtual console, but, you know, this is someone else's property. So you start getting into these weird rights collisions and things like that never show up. Yeah. And the NES version was developed by one of the worst title developers, real-time associates, which I don't even know what that means. We associate with you in real-time. Not in pastime or, I don't know, active time battle. I never made any turn-based game.

I see, yes. real time. This would be their only good game. I mean, I look at their history and just like, well, I mean, you're making a good game even better, but this is a great version of this game. What else did they make? So, we have, let's see, for the... They were around

a while. Yeah, they were around, they're still around. Founded in 1986, they're in El Segundo. NES games such as Caesar's Palace. Dick Tracy, the Rocketeer. Wow. And Team Fat did music for the Rocketeer, and I believe Dick Tracy, They did the loom port for TurboGraphics 16, and...

I played a lot of that Dick Tracy game. It wasn't good. I did, too. It was confusing. It reminded me a lot of Who Frame Roger Rabbit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't good, but I have very fond memories for some reason. I do, too.

They did the beefs and butted Super Nintendo game. I mean, do you need me to keep talking? No, that's good. That's good. I just want to know, Pocahontas for the Pico. Oh, wow. They were the... They were the creators of Bug and Bug, too.

I mean, these guys wanted Bug to be their, you know, meal ticket, but it never worked out, but they're still around. I did play a lot of bug also. Wow. I've never played bug. I played, there was like a PC version of it that I had because I never had a Saturday. Oh, there was a PC version of it. Bug RIP. Poor enough for Bug at home,

everybody. We'll be back after this. What's the bug episode? Oh man, bug episode is coming after you hit the next Patreon tier. One million dollars. We will do an episode about bug, but I'll leave you time to think about that. We'll be right back after our break. You know, when you're a lot of things that you're a lot of things that you think exist. Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, you name it. When you're a kid, it's real. But when you find out

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is pretty remarkable, if unbelievable. Over the course of a single, spooky night, multiple people can send and receive packages and without the use of any wormhole technology. That works great for solving adventure game puzzles, but, unfortunately, the postal system in the real world is much more

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slash Retronauts and start your free premium 30-day trial today. This premium trial allows you to check out two games and or movies at a time, and you can only get this offer by visiting Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. Now go sign up and start playing all your favorite games absolutely free for 30 days. The Serial Killer Podcast, hosted by me, Thomas Weiberg Thune, is the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were? What they and how. Join me as I sit down bi-weekly to bring you, dear listener, into the dark land of serial murder and psychopathy. The show goes into graphic detail on the most infamous and lesser-known serial killers from around the world, with each episode covering one unique

serial killer. So far, the show has covered serial killer superstars such as BTK, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Yorkshire Ripper, and less than known killers, such as Elias Abuelazam and Anatoly Onoprienko. Be advised, this show is not for children as it takes you deep into the twisted world

of ultimate evil. You can find me exclusively at podcast1.com or on the new podcast 1 app. Also, don't forget to rate and review on Apple podcasts. And now, an important message from Maniac Mansion.

I'm here to talk to you about a serious problem. that's developed. And that is, we found out that people are attempting to imitate Turner, my oversized four-year-old son, and Harry, my brother-in-law, who's a fly, by trying to mutate themselves. Now, people, please, do not mutate yourselves at home. It's very dangerous. What's he talking about? Maniac Mansion. A daringly witty look at the far side of family life. You've met Fred, the oblivious head of household. Then there's Casey, his wife. Is there a law that says a mother can't be snippy with her own kids? Speaking of the kids, Ike's got a James Dean fixation.

Tina's a true teenage genius. And turn his the baby of the family mutated into a baby, Huey. Plus, there's Uncle Harry, the hapless house fly. Oh, that's been good for a few lapses. Time magazine calls Maniac Mansion the loniest, sweetest family comedy of the year, the best of 90. See it here on Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays, only on the family channel. And caller number nine for $1 million.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10.

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I'm only saying this because I had to point this out to people on our Twitter account, and they were very happy after I told them. If you go to our Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts for $3 a month, you get all of our podcast a week ahead of time at a higher bit rate in with no ads. I'm only saying this because I've seen people online upset about the ads, and I just was like, hey, this is how you get no ads, and they're very happy after I tell them that. And it really doesn't count as listening to my voice unless you're listening at the highest possible bid rate. That's true. You need to hear all of the true fill of it, not with all, you know, we have to, we have to down to things a bit.

I love you. I'm saying it to the audience. If you're on Patreon, that was a special gift to everybody. So just letting you know, patreon.com slash retronuts, I think I'm going to let everyone know after the break because, I mean, ads are how we're trying to make this thing grown to a real business. And unfortunately, some people don't like hearing them, but we do offer an option if you don't. but let's stop talking about the world of capitalism and more about MAPManiac Mansion. I did want to talk about the overall design of this game. I think I've sort of given it in broad strokes, but for being a first-time adventure game designer, there's a lot of sophistication in what Ron Gilbert did with this game in that, well, number one,

the entire mansion is not available to you at once. It gradually opens up, which is a very interesting design choice, and it is put in there to not intimidate players. Some of the things you would see get improved in his games are in Maniac Mansion. There's a lot of, I would call it chaff. There's a lot of items that have no use. It's just like, I'm going to pick up the rotting turkey. I'm going to pick up the old batteries.

A lot of them are just like, you can pick this up. It's fine. Like, there's a lot of things like that in the game. But I really want to know from you guys, if you can remember, can you remember any specific puzzles that you got stuck on in the game? Maybe from childhood or anything you couldn't figure out like, how do I do this? Or when do I do this? Let anything stick out in your mind. I still haven't figured out what the small key in Edna's room is for.

Ooh, I can tell you the small key opens up the coin boxes on the arcade games. In case you play the wrong one, you can get your quarterback because only one quarter exists in the world of Maniac Mansion. Jeremy or Phil, can you remember any, like, puzzles or anything, like any times you got stumped in the game? Yeah, the one involving timing, like getting a kid into Edna's room and having him captured. Like, that was pretty tough. Yeah. How about you, Phil? Do you know any...

Yeah, nothing's popping into my mind. It's been long enough. but I'm not sure I remember any specific puzzles. Yeah, I'm trying to think of anything. I feel like they were just like a bunch of random scattershot ones, nothing in particular, but just like I don't know how to open this door. But this game, I feel more than adventure games. I mean, every adventure game was meant to be replayed,

but Maniac Mansion is such a short game that I feel like it's sort of a groundhogs day sort of effect where it's just like I have to be outside to get the package because if you don't get the package, you can't be friend weird at. I have to be at this location at this time or this thing won't happen. A lot of this game involves mailing things. So you have to, if you want to get the ending with Razor or Sid, you have to, you know, record the Green Tentacles demo track, send it away, then wait outside, get the contract and everything like that. There's a lot of things involving time in this game where you have to know where to be. Is this why you love Majora's Mask so much?

You were conditioned from childhood to love Majora's Mask. I think this game introduced me into the idea of games where the illusion of the game will move on without you. Like, you were just in this world and things are happening and you need to react to them. Like, I'm a big fan of any game that's like that. I don't know about you guys. I just, I like feeling that I'm not like the all-knowing God. I'm just this person in this world that's going to do whatever it wants to without me. Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about it now from the Majores Mass perspective.

And I think we had the kind of like opposite reaction where, like I said, it worked for me. in terms of being incredibly tense, but I hated it. And then similarly, with Majora's mask, I was just like, no, no. I think it, like, conditioned to me to hate that kind of thing in video games or, like, to be really, like, put off by it. Thankfully, in Maniac Mansion, there's no, there's no end time limit, I think. Something really weird happened to me as a kid, and I did not dream this, and I can't find anything about it online. It might have been just, like, the game locking up because of a bug and not letting me do anything, but I was just experimenting with the game as a kid.

and all of a sudden none of the characters could move and when I tried to do something the only text I got was the meteor is in control now and that was a terrifying thing to me as a kid and searching for that online I could not find anything about it I have no idea where that error message came from or if it's something that happens if you take too long in the game but I don't think this game has a hard time limit

or I mean it acts as if it does at some point in the game Dr. Fred turns off the power and that sort of is like one of the final events that happens without your intervention, like something that happens, a cutscene. And if you're fast enough, you can repair the wires and the attic to fix the arcade game in order to get that working. Otherwise, you can turn them off yourself. But I don't think that this game has a time limit.

I just think it's all an illusion. But as Phil was saying, and certainly I had that feeling, too, as a kid, like, it worked. It's still like you have to keep moving. Things are happening in this mansion, even though they really aren't. It's all an illusion. I did read something about that. The meteor is in control now thing seems familiar to me, but I can't remember exactly what it is it triggers it. What if the secret twist at the end of this episode of Retronauts is that the meteor has been in control ever since that point in your life and you just didn't know it.

I'm like, oh no, it's like the plot of Get Apple with a Meteor. Someone put a meteoror in my brain. Spoilers for Get Out, by the way. Please see it. Let's move on to talk about, strangely enough, the various different version of this game. This game was unavailable for about, I'm going to say, 20 years, unavailable in any format as it was not republished. I think LucasArts republished it up until the, probably the early 90s or mid-90s. It was always available on Day of the Tentacle, but I think Day of the Tentacle went out of print in like 1996.

But there's, as I said, there are many versions we talked about before. But because it was unavailable, people did try to remake it. So we have The version that I played a lot in the OTS was Maniac Mansion Deluxe. It was an unofficial remake that updates Maniac Mansion and it looks more like a LucasArts game from the Monkey Island era. It's a very nice looking game.

I don't know where you can get it now. It was free, obviously, but it was a very nice upgrade of the PC version. There's no music, of course, because that's what it was trying to emulate the PC version. We also have Meteor MESS 3D, which has been in development for, like six years. I saw a Kotaku story about it. I don't know, a long time ago, maybe

2011, but it's, it doesn't look good. It's like all of the characters are very Sims-looking. They look like Sims models. So you lose a lot of the character. I don't know if you guys have seen Meteor or Mess 3D or anything like this. I have. It's not the most attractive looking game. I don't think it will ever be finished. I feel like people eventually forgot about it. But the best one, which I think will also not be finished, but it looks the best, is Night of the Meteor, uh, which is a remake done in the style of day the tentacles. So they're redoing the characters and backgrounds and things as if they were very Chuck Jones, uh, looking, uh,

day the tentacle characters. And they do a very good job, what I've seen of it. But, um, it's been in works for six years. In the last update to the webpage, I think was in 2016. So with a lot of these ambitious projects, you see, you see people, uh, just give up, which is understandable, like making a full remake of a game, even as small as maniac mansion. is a pretty big undertaking. But thankfully, you can play this game today, as Michael was saying, on 2016's Day, the Tenticle Remastered, which is the way I played it. I played it on PS4.

Oh, on PS4. Wow. Wow, I can't imagine. Yeah, it's like, can you imagine what, yeah. But if you go to Weird Ed's Room and use the computer, you can play Maniac Mansion. And it's a great version of the game, no music, but it is the, since it's like the Deluxe version, like the IBM PC version. Yeah, the 1989 version. Yeah, yeah.

It looks really good, much better than the Commodore 64 version, which, looked pretty good for a Commodore 64 game in 1987, but it's not very great today. And I think that IBMPC version might have the first true version of the Maniac Mansion theme. The C-64 version has just sort of just the baseline, really, in the drums. But this version would have, like, the melody on top of it. And the NES version is the best. You'll hear probably at some point in this, but it's Team Fat with their crazy, like, European-style chip tunes. is doing the Maniac Mansion theme, and it's great.

And one thing I have to bring up is the inexplicable. That's the best way to describe this TV show. Canadian American co-production, everyone's shaking their head or maybe nodding in solidarity for we all experienced us and suffered through this. 1990 to 1993, 63, 66 episodes of Maniac Mansion. And I'll tell you what. So many more that I had assumed they ever did. I thought it was like 13 and they were out, Phil.

But young Bob was never disappointed more. This is coming from someone who doesn't have a father, by the way. Young Bob was never disappointed more than watching the show Maniac Mansion for the first time and realizing this was not what was promised to me. This is not a Maniac Mansion TV show. So what do you guys remember of the show before I talk more about it? I just remember it's like, they're making a Maniac Mansion TV show. They interviewed Joe Flaherty in Nintendo Power.

Of course, all the kids know about SCTV. This is going to be great. And then I watch it, I'm like, what the hell is this? Anybody jump in with Mediac Mansion TV show memories? Dr. Fred wasn't blue. That's true. He was not blue, number one. And much younger than his video game counterpart.

But I watched this, rewatched it recently for an episode of VGA that we were doing on. Oh, where did you find it? Like, well, just on YouTube or something? Yeah, just on YouTube. This was never released on, like, TV. Like, who is going to buy the Blu-ray of Maniac Mansion? Like, first off, while research. Phil's pre-ordered it.

While researching for this, I kept having that stupid theme song running through my head, which is kind of pretty but totally inappropriate to something called Maniac Mansion. And then, like, the actual show, I could only get through about five minutes before shutting it off because, like, oh, this is, like, every dumb sitcom where it's, like, focused. They have, like, two and a half kids that are always, like, taking pot shots at each other and laugh track with every joke a kid tells. I mean, I vaguely recall, and, like, I don't know. if I'm making this up because I don't remember the show very well. Was it supposed to be like a take on

like Adams families? Yeah, I kind of feel like you had the Munsters, which was the, it was the bad version of the Adams family. Then this was the bad version of the Munsters. Yeah, I mean, it was the, I mean, so they only keep Dr. Fred. And there's

also an uncle who's a fly. He's like the human head on a flybott. Yeah, so there's some special effects. And it's also just like, it's, I don't think it's very funny. Just like a giant baby Huey style adult. It's just like sort of like a developmentally disabled person. It's just like this giant child, this giant man has the brain of a child. I was like, well, that's actually like not that outlandish. This is not very sci-fi. So it doesn't even go that far. Since you bring up the monsters, it just thought like it felt

less like that and it felt more like what they really wanted to do was a honey I shrunk the kids TV series. Yeah. And they got this license. I mean, they eventually made one. But I want to, I want to compare two things here because we have some time to kill. And that's, the most important thing on Retronauts is The Kill Time is let's compare Mediatic Manchin's theme to the TV show theme. So I friggin' love Maniac Manchin's theme, especially the NES version. Let's play a bit of it.

So we get this kicking ass drum. Oh, it's so good. I mean, we're on board with this, right? Yeah, no. That's good. Yes. It's exciting. Things are happening. I love it. Man, this is the most rock and NES song I think ever produced. So you've heard the Maniac Mansion

And ES Team Let's hear the heartwarming Season 1 intro of Maniac Mansion Yeah, I'm really thinking about, you know, Purple Meteor and Razor and Tentacles I beat a PlayStation game in 1998 that had this as the ending theme I want to, hold on, they actually say Manich Mansion at some point here in the chorus.

Let's skip ahead. I mean, I'm getting goosebumps, but for different reasons. So, yeah, that's Maniac Mansion, Stevie. You destroy Metal Gear and you ride off with Howl into the sunset on a snowmobile, and that's the music line. That's it. It's beautiful. But, yeah, I mean, again. Sympathy of the night, the castle's crumbling.

I am the wind. I am the mansion. Yes, so that, I mean, that was one of the most devastating moments of my life is watching. I've lived a very charm life, by the way. But watching Manic Mansion for the first time was just like, why did they do this? Did you stick with it? Did you keep watching? No, I mean, I would watch any garbage on TV at that time.

I would watch that wretched Mario cartoon, all three of them. I would watch anything involving a video game, but I was like, this has gone too far, sir. And I will not, I will not even tolerate this for a second. And it's funny because it involved a lot of talented people. I mean, it involved people from SCTV, a lot of Joe Flaherty is great. He's the, if you don't know who he is, he's the guy at the end of Back to the Future, too. Are you Marty McFly? He's that guy.

I mean, he's done a lot more than that. He played Count Floyd on SCTV. He's great. I mean, he's okay in this, too. He was also the dad on freaks and geeks, the dad of the main geek. I wonder if anybody's ever done, like, a deep dive on how this show happened and, like, what the story is behind it. It's funny. You mentioned that because, like, I brought this up to Ron Gilbert and Tim Schaefer, and they're very polite about it,

but they kind of had like a WTF reaction to it as well where they were like, yeah, they were just producing this thing and they told us about it and we watched it and we were like, did they play the game? I feel like Madiac Mansion fever was hot in 1990 because the NES game was out and Maniac Mansion is a very compelling name. I think that's really what sold the game, the title Maniac Mansion.

But I just think they just wanted the premise and not even the premise, just like the title and the mansion and the doctor and that's it. I don't think they cared about. out the actual guts of the game. But as a kid, I was like, oh, every week they're going to break into the mansion and solve puzzles, and it's going to be great,

but it's no, it's like heartwarming family, and there's a fly guy, and, yeah, that's basically it. So we must, before we go, we must, before we go, let's talk about the Famacom version. It's unfortunate. I think we're talking about it earlier. Were you talking about a Phil? mentioned it. Yeah, it's, so this version was by Jalico, and luckily they did not port this over to America. Jalico got real-time associates to make their own version. I think they sort of acknowledged their mistakes. It's very bad.

Ugly graphics, everybody in this game looks like a little play school action figure that's just like they're all, they're all smiling, and they're just all like very squat and super deformed. That aspect somehow feels more appropriate to Japan at the time. It really does, but I think it removes the sort of creepy. vibe of the, like, the creepy, spooky, fun vibe, the spoopy vibe, if you will. Yeah, I mean, that sort of aesthetic makeover worked a lot on NES FAMICOM. Like, you kind of make it sort of cute Japanese cartoon style. And generally, Japanese developed NES games were better than, you know, Western developed NES games. But I think there was such strength in the original material that that did not work out in one of those

kind of rare exceptions to the rule. Yeah, and I can tell you more about the limitation. So, like, one of the more technologically advanced things in Maniac Mansion for the Commodore 64 is they had scrolling rooms, which is like, oh, my God, we can scroll a room, and you can walk to the end of the room, and there could be something waiting for you on the other end. It was, like, something to build suspense in the game. And the Famicom version, almost every room is contented to one screen, and they get rid of a lot of the items in the screen. If you look at this game screenshots up at a night, I suggest you do if you want to know what we're talking about. everything looks very plain every room is just very stark stark primary colors all the objects you can interact with are just there it just i mean the um it doesn't feel like you're in a real house like a real spooky house it just feels like very artificial and very gamey in a way in a bad way um there's no music and unfortunately there's no safe system you have 104 character passwords so that's almost like a tweet these days so like not an ideal version of maniac mansion um Again, real-time associates did a great job for one of their only good games, and that is the one I had Ron Gobert sign, even though he's like, I didn't work on this.

They had to call up the bug people. It's like, hi. The future bug people. Are you associates? Question number two. Do you work in real time? You're hired. So I want to move on before we go to talk about Day of the Tenicle.

Now, who here is familiar with this game in this room? I am, Michael, have you played Day of Tenticle? Phil and Jeremy. How about you guys? Afraid not. God damn it, Jeremy. Well, we can talk without. You told me to play Maniac, man.

You didn't say anything about Day of the Tenticle. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. That was not discussed at a time. But Day of the Tenticle was a game made by Ron Gilbert's, you know, protégés, Dave Grossman and Tim Schaefer, of course. And it is a fantastic game. I like it more than Maniac Mansion. I'm probably the biggest fan of Day of the Tenticle that ever lived.

If you look at, I really suggest you go to my U.S. Gamer oral history of Dave the Tenticle. It is probably the hardest I've ever worked on something. And I don't know how many people read it, but it is about 40,000 words of the development of data tentacle. I talked to everyone who worked on the game, both directors, the musician, the art people. It is a really great look, I think, into the development of this game. And I think I have the most Wikipedia citations on this game now, which is my goal in life. I will have no children, but I will have Wikipedia citations. And that's more important.

But this game really, it tries to stay canonical to. Maniac Mansion in some ways, in that what happened in the first game was made into a game, which is the game we played. But this is the reality of Maniac Mansion. The Day of the Tenicle is the reality of the Maniac Mansion world. The game we played was based on the events of the real world. And a lot of this game is based around how screwed Dr. Fred gets on the TV series and the video game. Like, he signed a bad contract, and a lot of this game is about getting him out of that contract. Was the contract with three guys who publish anything, or is it somebody else?

I forget who. I don't think they were represented in the game. But this game would only carry over Bernard, but a lot of the other residents of the mansion are there. Purple Tentical is the antagonist. Dr. Fred, Nurse Edna, is in there briefly. A Weird Ed is in the game. And the funny way they characterize him is that it's canonical that his hamster was killed by one of the kids. So he now is a very tortured man.

who works on his stamp collection. It's a voice kind of based on Boris Karloff. Yes. He's like, oh, has Borisov talk? Something happened to him. I was working in the lab. That's really it, right? Just say, Antiposto.

Okay, that's right. That's your Boris Karloff's impression. Very nice. But, yeah, I feel like this game is not very faithful to the Maniac Mansion formula. And I don't think any game would be as ambitious in terms of giving you seven characters to play with. That was only in place because Tim and Gary, sorry, Ron and Gary, didn't know what they could do. They didn't know their limitations. But, Phil, what did you think of this game compared to Maniac Mansion?

I'm just curious. Yeah, like I said, I played this back-to-back with, as a teenager, when I finally went back and finished Maniac Mansion. I played this immediately afterwards, and it, yeah, I like this game a lot more. Obviously, it's made, like, years later, so it's got, like, a lot more polish and everything. Yeah, it's much more sophisticated. too in terms of design and stuff like that. But also, I just feel like the writing is a lot sharper and funnier. Not that Maniac Mansion's writing is horrible by any means, but it just feels better here.

There's not a lot of formative. It is, yeah. I mean, there's not a lot of writing and dialogue in Maniac Mansion. I mean, I think Inventure Games would get a lot of free jokes in by including like a look-at command where characters would describe an object. And you don't get that for a lot of objects in Maniac Mansion. There's no look at. There's read. And very few objects can be read.

So they didn't work in too many jokes like that, but you get a lot of extra writing when you have commands like that. And you have voice acting and characters can say more and you have more characterization that way. Michael, how did you feel about this game? Well, initially, I remember being kind of disappointed that it didn't carry over the you can pick three characters from a pool of seven thing from Maniac Mansion. But really, like, going back and playing the original, all that means is that, like, you have two different sets of puzzles that you have to do, either one of which will get you past the purple tentacle at the end of the game. So it's not really that big in innovation. It just kind of seems that way.

But, yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed data tentacle. I love the writing. I kind of like that Bernard went from being like a 1950s-style nerd to just being like this slouchy. I'm Bernard Bernoulli. And he's voiced by Les Nesman from WKRP in Cincinnati. Oh, wow. He really is. Yeah.

Yeah, this game, I feel, is. I feel like adventure games are unfairly maligned. I mean, I would say 10% of them are worth playing just because of all these design problems. But I feel like the tentacles age very well. There are no dead ends. I feel the puzzles are logical. And it has one of the best implementations of a time mechanic I've ever seen in a game. It's sort of like this and Chrono Trigger are still the gold standard.

Nothing else has really topped those two games for me in terms of how they use time as a mechanic. Like in this game, the things you do in the past directly affect the future. And you can send things through time and that affects how the item changes and things like that. Like, I feel like this is the game has a very good, a very good use of time travel that I don't see in a lot of other games like, like Final Fantasy 13-2. That was just, I enjoyed that game, but the time travel element was just like confusing and not implemented very well. I can't even remember what it did, but it just was like... I forgot that game had time travel involved. It's like, you're in the past, except it said a brown mountains are now purple and that's it.

It's like there's two new NPCs. I don't know. We're going to be able to be. I'm sorry. And so, I'm going to be. I'm a lot. And so, I'm going to be. And so, I'm going to be.

And so... Oh, I'm... ...and... ...a... ...a... ...and... ...and... ...a...

...it... I did want to talk about, I just realized we didn't talk about the various endings. And Jeremy mentioned Wendy's ending is the best. Michael brought this up when we recorded Bidginam Apocalypse a few days ago. So there are a number of... This must have been like one of the earliest games with multiple endings, right? Yeah, yeah, there are... I mean, it's just based off the character you choose, but...

I think. there are five or six, and only a few of them are tied into specific characters. So Wendy's ending is, if you rewrite the Purple Meteors, not Purple Measures, just the Meteor's memoirs, instead of wanting to take over the world, he is now a successful writer. And the last thing you see is him on David Letterman, giving an intertogether. He calls Wink. Oh, Wink. I don't think Wink Martindale ever hosted a talk show. No, but I mean, at least on the PC version, the host has like a gap in his teeth.

And he's got a jar of pencils. Yeah, and the cityscape behind him and everything like that. So that's one of the endings. Another ending is, so there are various ways to get rid of the purple meteor, and you can have him arrested by the meteor police. And that's one of the endings you can get with Bernard. You need Bernard to fix the radio to radio the meteor police. And Michael was telling me, I forgot about this. You can get the purple, you can get the meteor, his writing contract, but also call the meteor police.

And he's arrested on the talk show. That's great. I forgot about that. Yeah, that's right. I got that. I called the meteor police. And then, like, you have to wait, like, five or six minutes from the show up. And it was like, I just finally said, you know, screw this.

I just want to finish the game. So I went through and did Wendy's thing. And then, yeah, the guy just shows up in the middle of the talk. That's great. I love that. So I feel like only two endings are specific to characters. So, like, Bernard has, can fix the radio when you can rewrite the memoirs. But getting the recording contract for a green tentacle only gets you past purple tentacle, I think.

He will come in and, like, push him out of the way. That's basically all it does is doesn't affect the ending. You can put the meteor in the trunk. of the Edsel and blasted off in the space, and I think that's it. But you can also, there's also different endings if you kill one of the kids, especially Dave. If you kill Dave, the ending is pretty funny. But if you kill one of the other kids, I don't think they comment on it very much.

Like, Sandy is not happy when Dave is, Dave's grave is in the front yard. And when you kill someone, it's kind of a great, morbid little joke. When you kill someone, and you can still switch to their character, but all you see is their grave, and it's just like, I can't reach it. Like, if you try to click on anything, it's like, I can't reach it. So clearly there's some sort of consciousness happening there. But who knows if they were buried alive? I don't know.

But yes, that was our Maniac Mansion episode. I hope you all enjoyed it. And thank you so much, Phil, for coming to our studio for the first time. Yeah, thank you for having you. I'd love to come back anytime. I think you might have been on. I'm trying to think of other retronauts you've been on. If you want to go back in time, nine years.

Yeah, I remember being on a Half-Life episode. That's right, yeah. That was probably... Many moons ago. 2008 or something like that. Yeah. So, yeah, Phil has been on now two episodes. So hopefully he'll come back.

This was a great chat. And let's wrap up. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. And my other podcast is Talking Simpsons every Wednesday on the Lasertime podcast network. Go to Talking Simpsons.com and find that. Or look for Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine every week is a new episode of the show. We're going in chronological order. I'm guessing we'll be in season six by the time this episode launches.

We've had the great Bill Oakley on our show. He is the showrunner for season 7 and 8, and he's written a lot of great episodes before that. So, yeah, check out Talking Simpsons. Find an episode you like and download our corresponding episode. You should enjoy it. Everyone else, where can we find you? Phil?

I am at Twitter.com slash P. Kohler, and I am on polygod.com. I review a lot of video games, so if you ever go to our review section, there's a pretty good chance you'll find something I wrote. Cool. And Michael. I'm on Twitter at Wikiparas, and I host a weekly podcast. also on the Laser Time Network called Vigigame Apocalypse that is very loose and crude compared to this show

and it's stringent control of facts. I have total control of facts. That goes up every Friday. This is not fake news, by the way. And who else is here? Jeremy. Oh, it's me, Jeremy Parrish. You will find me on Twitter as GameSpite.

And, of course, you can find me at Retronauts, because that's what I'm doing, Retronauts. Awesome. Retronuts.com. And I should mention our Patreon. It's very important. that we mentioned that because it's how Retronauts is supported. Thanks to all of you out there, we're able to do things like bonus episodes.

We have two micros a month now, so now we do six episodes every month. They're not really micros anymore. No, they're like 45 minutes long. Yes, I'm trying to make them smaller. I swear, I just have, I talk too much. But, yeah, if you go to Retronauts.com, sorry, patreon.com slash Retronauts. You can find out how to give to our show. If everybody just gave us a dollar a month, we could just do amazing things.

But if you want to give more, there are incentives on top of that, I said earlier, $3 a month gets you every episode a week ahead of time at a higher bit rate and with no ads. So if those ads have you gritting your teeth and being mad at us talking about underwear and pillows and things like that, well, this is your way out of those ads and you can get a higher quality podcast with that tier. But there's more tiers on top of that, including things like t-shirts and zines and things like that. So go to patreon.com slash retronauts for more about that. And that's the end of our show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

And Caller Number 9 for Wants, $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire. was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue. Thank you.