The first Lucasfilm game using the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system was obviously Maniac Mansion on the C64. I found the idea to create an interactive graphics adventure with a limited but highly adaptable vocabulary very appealing. Finally adventures became filled with life and action compared to the mere text based parsers with no or little graphics.

I liked to play adventure games like Germlins, Moonlight Shadow, Message from Omega, Robin Hood or all the Rainbird games. But at some point all of these games became very tiresome when you were walking in all directions and were examining every little detail without finding the final clue to a riddle.

Often I got stuck and couldn't continue without some help from a walk through from some magazine. In the SCUMM universe of the Lucasfilm games it was easier to walk through a whole game since all items on the screen would show up in the action field when you moved over it with your cursor. Also the amount of items was usually limited so that the number of combinations of these items was restricted to a few dozen at best.

Later I had to find out that these Lucasfilm adventures could also become boring, but at that time I found this system a lot better than text based adventure games and I wanted to create my own Lucasfilm type adventure on the CPC.

I already had the idea for the story: The main character would wake up on a Caribbean island with no memory of who or where he was. He would have to explore a seemingly deserted island where he would find an empty manor which holds some dark secrets.

I envisioned several locations like a big greenhouse where all the plants would be green and flourishing even though the hero hasn't yet met anybody alive. I also imagined how the interior of the mansion would look like and that our Hero had to find a cave beneath the house that would reveal some of the secrets.

But after creating a horizontal scrolling game screen and setting up an editor for the background graphics I realized that the graphics would be one of the most important parts of the game and but that the one thing I'm really bad at! Envisioning locations is one thing, painting them in 16 colors with 160 * 200 pixels is a completely different thing!

So due to the lack of a good graphics artist I had to abandon the project. I also found out that the SCUMM adventures could be very boring and tedious and so it wasn't such a big deal that I had to move on to a different project.