Games - SCUMM

	Games - SCUMM

SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion and is a scripting language developed at LucasArts (known at the time as Lucasfilm Games) to ease development of the graphical adventure game Maniac Mansion.

It is somewhere between a game engine, and a programming language, allowing designers to create locations, items and dialogue sequences without writing code in the actual language the game source code would end up in. This also meant that the game's script and data files could be re-used across various platforms. SCUMM is also a host for embedded game engines such as iMUSE (standing for Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine), INSANE (standing for INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine), CYST (in-game animation engine), FLEM (places and names object inside a room), MMUCUS. SCUMM has been ported on the following platforms: 3DO, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, CDTV, Commodore 64, Fujitsu Towns & Marty, Apple Macintosh, NES, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Sega Mega CD, and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine.

History

The original version was coded by Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gilbert in 1987, with later versions enhanced by Aric Wilmunder (a.k.a. the SCUMM Lord) and various others.

SCUMM was subsequently reused in many later LucasArts adventure games being both updated and rewritten several times. There are at least 10 known versions of the SCUMM engine, numbered as "version 0" (for the original Commodore 64 version of Maniac Mansion), "version 1", "version 1.5" (for the NES version of Maniac Mansion), and "version 2" up through "version 8". LucasArts finally abandoned the SCUMM engine in 1998 when they switched to GrimE for the game Grim Fandango.

Design

Most SCUMM games feature a verb-object design paradigm. The player-controlled character has an inventory, and the game world is littered with objects with which the player can interact, using a variety of verbs — a large collection of these featured in the early games, but by The Curse of Monkey Island these had been whittled down to "Look at", "Use" (which was context sensitive and could produce various actions — Pick up, push, pull, etc.) and "Talk to".

Puzzles generally involve using the right verb action with the appropriate object — "use cookie cutter with another rubber tree", for example.

"Talk to" produces dialogue sequences, in which the player selects from a list of pre-defined questions or comments, and the character they are talking to replies with a pre-defined response.

The notable exception to this general paradigm is LOOM, which does not use the standard verb/object paradigm, but does feature dialogue sequences.

Versions

Version 0

Maniac Mansion (Commodore 64
version)

Version 1

Maniac Mansion (original PC
version)
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (Commodore 64 and original PC versions)

Version 1.5

Maniac Mansion (NES version)

Version 2

Maniac Mansion (Amiga
and enhanced PC versions)
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (Amiga, Atari ST
, and enhanced PC versions)

Version 3

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (Amiga, EGA/VGA PC, and FM Towns
versions)
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (VGA remake for FM Towns system)
LOOM (Amiga and EGA PC floppy disk versions)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for SCUMM ]

Searches on eBay

scumm