Speaking at GDC last week, Ron Gilbert said that he'd love to see a new and updated version of Maniac Mansion, similar to 2009's Monkey Island re-releases, which brought the classic adventure game back with revamped graphics and voice acting. Gilbert created the original Maniac Mansion in 1987 and has been contemplating the changes he would make to his first game.
Eurogamer were sitting in on Friday's Classic Game Postmortem session, where Gilbert said "I would love for them to re-release Maniac Mansion the same way they did the Monkey Island games. I think that would be really neat," adding that "I've often thought it would be fun to go through the game and fix a lot of the problems I mentioned and get the puzzle structure more like we did in Monkey Island.
"But then other times I think 'do I really want to do that?' Maybe the game really needs to have those flaws. Isn't that a little bit like George Lucas going back and fixing all those problems with Star Wars? Maybe the game really needs to be what it is back then."
Maniac Mansion was the first game to use Lucasart's SCUMM adventure game software. The technology was later used to create a number of classic adventure games, including both Monkey Island games, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. Lucasarts own the rights to Maniac Mansion, and haven't made any noises about a remake. Gilbert is currently working on an unnanounced project with Tim Schafer at Double Fine. Would you want to see any other Lucasarts adventures remade?
