It follows teenage protagonist Dave Miller as he attempts to rescue his girlfriend Sandy Pantz from a mad scientist, whose mind has been enslaved by a sentient meteor.

The game was conceived in 1985 by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who sought to tell a comedic story based on horror film and B-movie clichés.

While earlier adventure titles had relied on command lines, Gilbert disliked such systems, and he developed Maniac Mansion's simpler point-and-click interface as a replacement.

[6][7] The player starts the game by choosing two out of six characters to accompany protagonist Dave Miller: Bernard, Jeff, Michael, Razor, Syd, and Wendy.

[10][11] Maniac Mansion features cutscenes, a word coined by Ron Gilbert,[12][13] that interrupt gameplay to advance the story and inform the player about offscreen events.

[6][10] The game takes place in the mansion of the fictional Edison family: Dr. Fred, a mad scientist; Nurse Edna, his wife; and their son Weird Ed.

The intro sequence shows that a sentient meteor crashed near the mansion twenty years earlier; it brainwashed the Edisons and directed Dr. Fred to obtain human brains for use in experiments.

[18] Although Gilbert wrote much of the foundational code for Maniac Mansion, the majority of the game's events were programmed by Lucasfilm employee David Fox.

Winnick's concept art inspired him to add new elements to the game: for example, Fox allowed the player to place a hamster inside the kitchen's microwave.

[27] Because of the project's nonlinear puzzle design, the team struggled to prevent no-win scenarios, in which the player unexpectedly became unable to complete the game.

[18][29] Fox had made a similar attempt to streamline Lucasfilm's earlier Labyrinth: The Computer Game and he conceived the entirety of Maniac Mansion's interface, according to Gilbert.

The 16-bit versions of Maniac Mansion featured a copy protection system requiring the user to enter graphical symbols out of a code book included with the game.

[34] In September 1990[35] Jaleco released an American version of Maniac Mansion as the first NES title developed by Lucasfilm Games in cooperation with Realtime Associates.

After reading the NES Game Standards Policy for himself, Crockford suspected that further elements of Maniac Mansion could be problematic, and he sent a list of questionable content to Jaleco.

[38][39] Late in development, Jaleco commissioned Realtime Associates to provide background music, which no previous version of Maniac Mansion had featured.

[51] In describing Maniac Mansion as Lucasfilms' "breakthrough game", Matthew Castillo of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine praised the "B-movie" horror elements, the use of cutscenes and the visuals.

[54] The game's humor received praise from Zzap!64, whose reviewers called the point-and-click controls "tremendous" and the total package "innovative and polished".

He considered the game to be Lucasfilm's best, and he recommended it to Commodore 64 and Apple II users unable to run titles with better visuals, such as those from Sierra On-Line.

[14] Writing for VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worley stated that the game's plot and premise were typical of the horror genre, but they praised the interface and execution.

In this command-driven game — adapted from the computer hit — three buddies venture into a sinister haunted mansion and wind up juggling a bunch of wacky story lines".

[19] In the early 1990s, LucasArts tasked Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, both of whom had worked on the Monkey Island series, with designing a sequel to Maniac Mansion.

The first game's nonlinear design was discarded, and the team implemented a Chuck Jones-inspired visual style, alongside numerous puzzles based on time travel.

[17] Eurogamer's Kristan Reed agreed: he believed that the design was "infinitely more elegant and intuitive" than its predecessors and that it freed players from "guessing-game frustration".

Writing in the game studies journal Kinephanos, Jonathan Lessard argued that Maniac Mansion led a "Casual Revolution" in the late 1980s, which opened the adventure genre to a wider audience.

For example, the game relies on timers rather than events to trigger cutscenes, which occasionally results in awkward transitions: Gilbert worked to avoid this flaw with the Monkey Island series.

In their view, Maniac Mansion—along with Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards—inaugurated a "new era of humor-based adventure games".

[78] This belief was shared by Reed, who wrote that Maniac Mansion "set in motion a captivating chapter in the history of gaming" that encompassed wit, invention, and style.

[85] Maniac Mansion enthusiasts have drawn fan art of its characters, participated in tentacle-themed cosplay and produced a trailer for a fictitious film adaptation of the game.

[88] A remake with three-dimensional graphics called Meteor Mess was created by the German developer Vampyr Games,[89][90] and, as of 2011, another group in Germany produced one with art direction similar to that of Day of the Tentacle.

[93] In December 2017, Disney, which gained rights to the LucasArts games following its acquisition of Lucasfilm, published Maniac Mansion running atop the ScummVM virtual machine to various digital storefronts.