The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for<br>the Nintendo Entertainment System
Douglas Crockford
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About
2019-07-07<br>The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for<br>the Nintendo Entertainment System
Now You're Really Playing with Power: The Untold Story
I was the on-the-edge new-media/technology guy at the<br>LucasArts Entertainment Company, a spin-off of George Lucas's<br>Lucasfilm Ltd. in Marin County, California. Most of my work<br>was (if I may say so myself) "out there", but sometimes I<br>would take on more mundane projects to help out.
One such project was the Nintendo version of Maniac<br>Mansion. This was going to be LucasArt's first Nintendo<br>cartridge. It was an important project, but the management at<br>Games was overloaded and the project was slipping between the<br>cracks. I volunteered to manage its completion.
The original version of Maniac Mansion was designed by Ron<br>Gilbert and Gary Winnick. It is a graphic story game, in<br>which you manipulate three teenagers in order to save Sandy<br>the Cheerleader from Dr. Fred, whose mind is being controlled<br>by an evil purple meteor from Outer Space. I didn't<br>contribute much to the original version beyond the package<br>slogan: His ambition was to rule the world...one teenager at<br>a time!
It is usually necessary to make a game run on several<br>different systems in order to have access to a large enough<br>audience to make it profitable. The process of moving a game<br>to another system is called conversion. It is sort of like<br>shooting a movie twice to get a Betamax version and a VHS<br>version.
In the course of converting to Nintendo, we had to redesign<br>all of the art in order to conform to Nintendo's screen<br>geometry. We also made some changes to adapt the game to a<br>younger audience.
The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going<br>to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad."<br>Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish<br>the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad<br>word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games<br>is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the<br>word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or<br>the act.
The mansion contains a number of arcade video games. One was<br>called KILL THRILL. The name had to be changed. Doug Glen,<br>our Director of Marketing, suggested that we change it to<br>MUFF DIVER, which I thought was a pretty good idea.<br>Unfortunately, I later became aware of the NES Game Standards<br>Policy, which stated in part:
Nintendo will not approve NES cartridges...with sexually<br>suggestive or explicit content
Yikes, MUFF DIVER had to be changed again. In order to<br>minimize the impact on the artwork, I needed to substitute<br>MUFF with another four letter word that was less suggestive<br>that could make sense with DIVER. We settled on the word<br>TUNA.
The standards go on to prohibit
depictions of excessive and gratuitous violence,
which would seem to ban any game in which your character met<br>people, killed them, took their money, and then bought more<br>weapons. But in fact most Nintendo games are still faithful<br>to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret<br>Nintendo's policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are<br>considered clean and wholesome, kids routinely kill<br>creatures, and the only motivation is that they are there.
Clearly, interpreting the standard requires skills beyond<br>mine. There was stuff still in the mansion that I thought was<br>suspect, but I couldn't tell if it was out of bounds. I put<br>it all in a Things in Maniac Mansion list.<br>I gave the list to our friends at Jaleco, and they told me<br>not to worry about it.
The way cartridges got made at that time was you submitted a<br>finished game to Nintendo with a letter of credit. If they<br>accepted the game, they would tell you how many units they<br>would manufacture for you, when, and at what price. We<br>submitted Maniac, hopeful that our labors were completed.
A month later we got a report from Nintendo of America's<br>censors:<br>NOA has discovered the following problems with this<br>program version:
1) There are several places in the screen text that could be<br>felt to be offensive to NES players. Please ammend [sic] the<br>following:
"For a good time EDNA 3444"
This message is written on the wall in the shower in Dead<br>Cousin Ted's bathroom. Obviously, you can't have a good<br>time in a Nintendo cartridge. We couldn't erase the message<br>completely because phoning Nurse Edna is an important event<br>in the game. We changed it to simply "Call Edna 3444".
"getting your brains [sic] sucked out."
This is from Dr. Fred's first scene with Sandy. Dr. Fred<br>actually says "getting your pretty brains sucked out." They<br>didn't state what their objection was. Were they afraid that<br>NES players would be offended by threats against an...