SCUMM is the video game engine used for The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion and it was developed at Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, to ease development on their early graphic adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987).
It was also used in a number of other LucasArts adventure game titles including Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders, Full Throttle and The Dig.
Before the creation of SCUMM, most interactive fiction and adventure games used a text parser in which users would have to type commands into the interface. SCUMM revolutionized the adventure game genre by having the command verbs on screen. This had a number of advantages, including efficiency, ease of play, and the fact that in most text-based games, players were not told what verbs would actually be valid to use. SCUMM allowed the game to be played almost entirely by use of the mouse as opposed to the keyboard. The system worked by clicking on one of the verb options available (which varies from game to game) and then clicking on the object which the player would like to interact with (e.g. 'Pick up' followed by 'shovel').
The system in Maniac Mansion had a lot more verbs than later games. The options were simplified and streamlined for the better in the classic era of adventure games. 'Maniac Mansion' required players to click the verb 'Walk to' while the later games made that the default option when no other verb was highlighted. Verbs such as 'turn on' and 'turn off' were combined with the much more straight forward 'Use', while options like 'read' and 'what is' became the much simpler 'Look at'. 'Look at' also benefited from being the right-click default.
'Maniac Mansion's' fifteen verbs were reduced to nine for later games. The earliest Secret of Monkey Island versions still had a high number of verbs, but in remasters these were reduced. Within the Monkey Island series itself, the nine that came to be used for the first two games were further simplified and became three for Curse of Monkey Island. Instead of written verbs, the game represented various actions with a mouth, eyes, and hand.
Emulator[]
More recent computers have some difficulty running the older SCUMM games. As such, an emulator which allows smooth functioning called ScummVM has been created.
Trivia[]
Scumm is also the source of the name of the Scumm Bar.
External link[]
- SCUMM history
- SCUMM on Wikipedia