SCUMM

I mean, because it seems to iterate, certainly.

Well, you know, my experience is I'm used to SCUMM, and you guys used to be able to iterate that pretty immediately, and you iterate this pretty immediately.

So I don't know how similar to SCUMM it is.

I just like to say that because that's the engine that I was the most familiar with.

Yeah, I mean, it's not similar in the language it uses, but it is similar in philosophy.

So that's why you get that really fast iteration with this engine.

For me, I guess growing up on using SCUMM for adventure games, it was a really easy move over to this transition because of that.

Because the thought process, my thought process in order to implement something was pretty much the same.

I did not play this game in 1993.

I've only played it through SCUMM, basically through emulation.

The first time I played it, I want to say, was about 10 years ago, and I was enthralled.

The total package, again, of the voice acting and the interesting plot, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

And over time, that evolved into, like, the computer being a little better at this, and then this is, like, the visual representation of that.

Um, like, LucasArts games had the SCUMM engine where th- down at the lower left of the screen you'd have, like, nine verbs.

So y- you could literally click on, like, look at, and then you click on the thing you wanna look at.

Or cl-

Um, but, uh, while earlier adventure titles had relied on, uh, command lines, such as typing in text, uh, Gilbert, which he's pretty famous for this, disliked such systems, and he developed Maniac Mans- Mansion's simpler point-and-click interface as a replacement.

Um, and to speed up production, they created SCUMM, which Bob, I know you've talked a lot about in your history discussing th- you know, th- these s- these games.

Right.

Uh, Script Utility...

So this, this not, this does not bode well for me.

[laughs]

Well, it wouldn't be two people s- talking about SCUMM if one of us didn't do that, and I was gonna get it wrong anyway.

Yeah.

He did all the scripting, the programming.

He created the SCUMM engine.

The SCUMM engine stands for Scripting Utility.

for Maniac Mansion that was eventually used in many, many different games, including The Secret of Monkey Island and others.

Speaking of The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert was also the man behind that and Monkey Island 2 LeChuck's Revenge.

And I got a lot of games that way.

But I never played the DOS version until...

I was out of college, I was living in nearby Virginia Beach, and I really got into the SCUMM engine emulator, which I think is called SCUMM VM.