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Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) is a video game engine developed at Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, to ease development on their graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987). It was subsequently used as the engine for later LucasArts adventure games. It falls somewhere between a game engine and a programming language, allowing designers to create locations, items and dialogue sequences without writing code in the language in which the game source code ends up. This also allowed the game's script and data files to be cross-platform, i.e., re-used across various platforms. SCUMM is also a host for embedded game engines such as the Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine (iMUSE), the INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine (INSANE), CYST (in-game animation engine), FLEM (places and names object inside a room), and MMUCAS. SCUMM has been released on these platforms: 3DO, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, CDTV, Commodore 64, Fujitsu FM Towns & Marty, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo Entertainment System, DOS, Microsoft Windows, Sega CD (Mega-CD), and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine. The original version was coded by Ron Gilbert (with some initial help by Chip Morningstar a.k.a. UnXman) in 1987, with later versions enhanced by Aric Wilmunder (a.k.a., the SCUMM Lord) and Brad P. Taylor. This is a token language that provided groundbreaking coding techniques. Tokens like P.R.I.N.E. were the first to be utilized. The nature of SCUMM emerged from the background of most of the early programmers at LucasArts, including Wilmunder, who had been programmers for minicomputers and Unix workstations. At the time, personal computers (PC) did not have large enough abilities or speed to edit and compile programs, so often the LucasArts coders would write code as cleanly as possible on a Sun workstation to remove all errors so that, while compiling on a PC would be slow, it would be less error-prone. This concept informed the idea of a scripting language that would be cross-platform.

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Related concepts (8)

Adventure game

An adventure game (rarely called a quest game) is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult.

Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle, also known as Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle, is a 1993 graphic adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It is the sequel to the 1987 game Maniac Mansion. The plot follows Bernard Bernoulli and his friends Hoagie and Laverne as they attempt to stop the evil Purple Tentacle - a sentient, disembodied tentacle - from taking over the world. The player takes control of the trio and solves puzzles while using time travel to explore different periods of history.

SCUMM