Maniac Mansion
The "Maniac Mansion" team wanted to retain the structure of a text-based adventure game, but without the standard command-line interface. Gilbert and Winnick were frustrated by the genre's text parsers and frequent game over screens. While in college, Gilbert had enjoyed "Colossal Cave Adventure" and the games of Infocom, but he disliked their lack of visuals. He found the inclusion of graphics in Sierra On-Line games, such as "King's Quest", to be a step in the right direction, but these games still require the player to type, and to guess which commands must be input. In response, Gilbert programmed a point-and-click graphical user interface that displays every possible command. Fox had made a similar attempt to streamline Lucasfilm's earlier "" and he conceived the entirety of "Maniac Mansion"s interface, according to Gilbert. Forty input commands were planned at first, but the number was gradually reduced to 12. Gilbert finished the "Maniac Mansion" engine—which he later named "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion" (SCUMM)—after roughly one year of work. Although the game was designed for the Commodore 64, the SCUMM engine allowed it to be ported easily to other platforms.