Source: https://www.lucasfilm.com/

Just before the end of the 80s, the C64 had cemented its rock-solid place in living- and children's rooms around the world. The quality of games was constantly increasing, and the majority of representatives were horizontal or vertical scrollers - platformers and shooters. However, friends of the cultivated text adventure also got their money's worth, if thhey did not expect elaborated graphic design.

But that all changed in 1987 with the release of Maniac Mansion. Tremendous. Even today, it is hard to imagine how Ron Gilbert, David Fox, Carl Mey et.al. were able to squeeze so much adventure into so little memory and CPU cycles. Their trick was SCUMM - the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion.

SCUMM is actually a simple language, which can be used to convert human-readable commands into byte-sized tokens, that then would be read by an interpreter that presented the game to the player.

Lucasfilm Games and later LucasArts based all subsequent adventure games on this virtual machine, which was initially extended by Aric Wilmunder and Chip Morningstar and later by a whole army of developers. But the basic principle remained the same.

20 years ago at least 46 people decided to build an independent open source SCUMM virtual machine - ScummVM.

Happy Birthday!

ScummVM has come a long way, and besides the original Adventures by LucasArts, an enormous number of games from other publishers are supported today. For those who love Lucas Adventures, the ScummVM is a perfect replacement and you can enjoy these games still today .