Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine (ScummVM) is a set of game engine recreations.

Outside of some subsystems like audio engines which they are forced to rely on emulation, ScummVM recreates game engines from older languages into more portable C++ code, so that the high-level opcodes in a game's assets will execute in the same manner as their original release, while improving the portability of ScummVM to numerous platforms.

The ScummVM team consider this an improvement over simply running the older games and their executables through an operating system emulator, such as DOSBox, since ScummVM's implements are more lightweight and require less processing power and memory, allowing use on more limited processing environments like mobile devices.

Work on ScummVM started in September 2001 (with the first public release at October[2] and a site launch at November[13]) by computer science student Ludvig Strigeus.

[1] Though Strigeus and Hamm would leave the project in 2002, by then it had a large enough development team to allow it to grow, led by James "Ender" Brown.

[1] Following this shift, the engine's source code was changed from C to C++, and a graphical user interface (GUI) was added.

Though both ScummVM and FreeSCI aimed to reverse engineer the workings of SCI, FreeSCI had stated that they took a more clean-room approach to avoid any legal question about their reverse engineering, and believed the ScummVM project had run afoul of some of Sierra's approaches and thus were hesitant to work together.

[6] By August 2021, the first versions of ScummVM with Director support were released, with the team continuing to work on improving performance.

What we do, we try to search for contact info of people who were working on the titles some developer is interested in, and we're inquiring access to their original source code, if it still exists somewhere.

[18] With increased attention, ScummVM has entered into favorable agreements with adventure game developers to help bring their titles into the engine, or in some cases, being given source code and other assets to work from.

Revolution Software helped the developers with source code and technical advice for its games, and once ScummVM supported the company's Virtual Theatre engine, Revolution released Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware and provided assets from its first two Broken Sword games in an open media format.

[1] Disney, which owns the rights to LucasArts adventure games, released Maniac Mansion on Steam running off ScummVM.

[6] Operation Stealth and Future Wars support was added by integrating another stand-alone recreation of their engine: cinE.

[21] TrollVM has also been integrated into ScummVM adding support for three pre-AGI games: Mickey's Space Adventure, Troll's Tale, and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood.

For example, Revolution Software repackaged their Broken Sword games for a DVD release, using ScummVM with the included sword1 and sword2 engines to support modern computers.

[1] In December 2008, the ScummVM team learned that the Wii ports of three Humongous Entertainment Junior Adventure titles (Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside, and Spy Fox: Dry Cereal) all used the ScummVM engine without proper attribution.

A settlement was made in 2009, in which ScummVM would drop the investigation of the GPL violation, on the condition that Mistic would sell or destroy all GPL-violating copies of the games, make a donation to the Free Software Foundation, and pay the legal fees.

[1] ResidualVM (formerly Residual) was a cross-platform computer program comprising 3D game engine recreations with a common graphical user interface.

[14] ResidualVM was officially available on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, AmigaOS 4, and IRIX.

With increased attention, ResidualVM entered into favorable agreements with adventure game developers to help bring their titles into the engine.

[34] The stable release supports Grim Fandango[35] and Myst III: Exile, which are completable with a few minor glitches.