A story is buzzing around the gaming world this morning about a stunt by excellent indie developers Woe Industries, in which 831 players attempted to complete Lucasfilm Games’ 1987 adventure game Manaic Mansion in four hours. Only two people succeeded! Cue much lamenting about the state of modern gamers, decrying of the handholding in current games, and how far we’ve fallen as a species. Except, no! Because no one was ever supposed to complete Maniac Mansion in four hours. It was supposed to take days, weeks even.
The Adventure Game Aptitude Test is a project from Woe Industries, developers of experimental and often satirical games like FromSoft Word (“Like Microsoft Word, but way too hard”) and Dr. Mario Insurance (“The worse your insurance is, the harder it gets”). The project’s website went up in early February, asking for volunteers to take part in the test, where an unrevealed adventure game would be presented to players for them to complete with no guides, no walkthroughs, and no outside help. To ensure this, Woe Industries claimed volunteers were viewed on webcam throughout, with monitoring software on their phones and browsers (apparently using software that colleges use for remote exams). The prize for finishing the game was a pretend diploma, and the results were a bloodbath.
PC Gamer spoke to Woe about the experiment, learning that 4,500 showed an interest, of whom 831 showed up on time for the test, with another 168 showing up too late. Oh, and one person tried to bribe them with the offer of $1,000. Only two were disqualified for cheating, and Woe themselves said they’d never have been able to pass their own test in the time limit. And while the whole thing was clearly done in the spirit of slightly confusing fun, it’s led to discourse.
Much of the response to coverage has been ancient people lamenting the ways of the youth, how they could complete these games with their hands tied behind their backs and a fork poking out of each eye. And to be very fair, an awful lot of people have also leapt in to point out this was a ridiculous demand that no one could have achieved in the ’80s either. But for those not nearly as decrepit as me, let me explain how games like Maniac Mansion were intended to be played.
The Landline Age
Maniac Mansion was a point-and-click adventure from one of the two main powerhouses of the genre, Lucasfilm Games. (This was three years before they’d become known as LucasArts for the next 31 years, before returning to the original name in 2021.) Sierra had been making graphic adventures for a good few years by 1987, already having established King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry by then, series whose early entries used a text parser for much of the interaction.
In 1986, Lucasfilm Games joined in with its first (almost entirely forgotten) adventure, Labyrinth, a sort of meta-concept game not based on the movie but featuring it as a movie. But most importantly, it didn’t use a parser, but instead a “word wheel.” In 1987 Ron Gilbert pushed this idea further with Maniac Mansion which introduced the SCUMM engine (hence it being called Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), in which all of the verbs a player would have to type if it were a Sierra game were instead in the bottom third of the screen, there to click on to build basic sentences. “Push” you’d choose, and then click on the bed on the screen, and your character would try to push the bed. It was groundbreaking, and it was designed to make an already very complicated genre of games a little less unwieldy. But only a little less.
These were games never intended to be played in one sitting. Maniac Mansion is listed on How Long to Beat as typically taking players three hours to finish. So, you might think, the four hours for the experiment was very fair! But no, saying Maniac Mansion is three hours long is like saying an elaborate treasure hunt takes ten minutes. Sure, if you know where the treasure was buried that might be true, but that’s hardly how it’s meant to be found. Graphic adventures of that era were supposed to take you weeks to finish, because you weren’t meant to just sit down and play them all in one sitting.
Getting stuck
A huge part of those games was getting stuck. It’s a phenomenon, for good and bad, that’s almost entirely lost in 2026. Indeed it was largely long gone by 2006. The idea of not knowing something has become an anathema to waking existence. If I don’t know a thing I look it up on Wikipedia, Google it, or check Reddit. Knowledge is now something we reach out for without even looking up. And that’s mostly great. In 1987 however, that simply wasn’t the case. If you didn’t know something, and you also didn’t own an incredibly contemporary set of encyclopedias, you did something completely alien to our current age: you just carried on not knowing. You might make a plan to head to the library later that week to find out, or perhaps wait until a friend was home from work to give them a call to see if they knew. The same applied to not knowing how to proceed in a video game.
Maniac Mansion was no simple game, either. You chose to control three of six possible characters (well, you always had cool kid Dave, but chose which two quirky companions he ventured to the mansion with), solving non-linear puzzles based on their individual abilities, meaning the solution to a situation for you might be very different to that for someone who’d picked different kids for their team. If you don’t have Bernard with you, you won’t be fixing any broken appliances, for instance. And it was very normal for these adventure games to be very hard. People like to describe this today as abstruse and arcane, but at the time it was about offering a welcome degree of challenge. If your new $40 game took only four hours to finish you’d be miserable. It was intentional for it to become part of your life for a good while.
A large part of that was these games living with you while you weren’t playing. You’d get stuck on a puzzle, realize you weren’t getting anywhere that evening, and switch off. The next day, while at school or work, an idea would pop into your head. You’d rush home to give it a go, and perhaps have a breakthrough. Or maybe get frustrated and try something that felt entirely random, and happen upon a solution that made sense in hindsight. (It’s worth noting that even game developers at the time sometimes stumbled in their efforts to cultivate this satisfaction, with lesser adventure designers just putting stupid, random inventory combinations into their games because they thought that was the way.)
Or you’d talk to your friends who were playing too. In my case, I’d phone my dad’s friend Ted, my hand trembling as I pressed the buttons on the plastic telephone, knowing he’d give a friendly sigh as he heard my squeaky 11-year-old voice. I don’t know how Ted had already solved all the puzzles in all the adventure games, but he always had, and he gave excellent hints.
No one has put the sense of space and time surrounding how these games were played better than game writer Aysha I. Farah, who wrote on BlueSky, “You aren’t supposed to beat these games without help though, you were supposed to drag a kitchen chair into your dads office so you can play together.” (This especially spoke to me: the title I gave my dad’s obituary was “Can I bring a chair in?”)
These games would come with bizarre extras in the box, like fake newspapers, or manuals packed with vital clues to solving in-game puzzles, and most infamously of all, premium-rate hint-line numbers you could call if you were stuck. (For peculiar reasons, the UK releases of these games would come with the U.S. hint-line numbers, making them feel even more untouchable.) You’d buy the next issue of your favorite monthly magazine in the hope that it would come with tips or a guide for this game. Readers would write in saying, “I can’t work out how to get the scissors from the nun,” and the magazine would publish it with a hint.
Obviously this isn’t how games can work any more. If you’re stuck, and the game doesn’t just offer to tell you the solution itself, the internet is now 87 percent SEO-baiting guides articles. It makes complete sense than anyone under the age of 350 looks at the notion of getting stuck for a week and being cool with that as complete madness. Perhaps it is! It’s a different age. I know this so well, having grown up in one, and yet being completely native with the present, now unable to cope with the notion of being stuck. But I do wonder how much more interesting Woe Industries’ experiment could have been had these players volunteered to be locked in an internet-less house for a week and given a copy of Maniac Mansion. Whether it would have caused complete breakdowns, or if the ability to slow down and be stuck still exists within humanity.
In the end, I think those two people who finished the game were the losers, while the other 829 deserve a certificate. They’re the ones who were playing it correctly.