Writer Orson Scott Card praised it as a step toward "computer games a valid storytelling art". Maniac Mansion was critically acclaimed: reviewers lauded its graphics, cutscenes, animation, and humor. A port for the Nintendo Entertainment System had to be reworked heavily, in response to Nintendo of America’s concerns that the game was inappropriate for children. After its release, Maniac Mansion was ported to several platforms. To speed up production, he created a game engine called SCUMM, which was used in many later LucasArts titles. 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. They mapped out the project as a paper-and-pencil game before coding commenced. 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. Initially released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, Maniac Mansion was Lucasfilm Games' first self-published product. Gameplay is non-linear, and the game must be completed in different ways based on the player's choice of characters.
The player uses a point-and-click interface to guide Dave and two of his six playable friends through the scientist's mansion while solving puzzles and avoiding dangers. 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. “Little scaryy.Maniac Mansion is a 1987 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. “Seriously, after that massive meteor in california a few weeks ago, the one that hit russia, and now this hugee one tonight,” wrote a Twitter user by the name of Olivia, referring to the Russia incident and a mass shooting star sighting on the West Coast last night. There were no confirmed reports Friday night that the greenish streak spotted by so many actually impacted anywhere.Įven if it didn’t, the mere possibility was enough to send chills down some stargazers’ spines. The related flash and boom shattered glass in buildings and left about 1,000 people hurt, authorities said. More recently, a meteor exploded over the steppes of southwestern Russia on February 15, a blast that scientists at Canada’s University of Western Ontario estimated had the energy of about 30 early nuclear bombs. There are exceptions, like the massive asteroid that many experts believe killed off dinosaurs. And some of them do strike the Earth, though they tend to be small when they do and strike unpopulated areas on land or plunge into the world’s oceans.
And then there are asteroids, which JPL describes as “a relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the sun” often in what are called asteroid belts.Īs anyone who has seen a shooting star can attest, such otherworldly objects do enter the Earth’s atmosphere. It may be a meteor, which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory defines as “light phenomena” from a meteoroid - which is itself a comet or asteroid orbiting the sun - that “enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes.”Ī meteoroid that gets through the atmosphere and hits the Earth is a meteorite. Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for NORAD, said his agency heard about the sightings, too, and can confirm it was not from anything man-made, like a plane or falling satellite. The Federal Aviation Administration fielded calls about a meteor from Virginia to Maine, said agency spokeswoman Arlene Salac. “It’s all over the news now! I thought it is some kind of firework…” “OMG I saw a real meteor in the Brooklyn’s sky,” wrote one person on Twitter, with the handle Curious Sergey. Through Friday night, new reports of meteor sightings appeared every few seconds on Twitter, some of them from the metropolises of New York City and Washington. That was just the tip of the online iceberg. “Frankly, I didn’t think too much of it.”īut his tune changed once he posted something about the presumed meteor on a local social media webpage, which triggered a quick and hearty response.
“It didn’t last more than eight or nine seconds, then it disappeared,” said Guy, a spokesman for Sussex County, Delaware. eastern seaboard with reports of “a thin streak of blue-greenish-white” from people like Chip Guy, who was driving in eastern Maryland when he and his family he spotted it. Though you might get that sense from social media. The streaking ball of fire Friday night above the East Coast did not, for now at least, signal the end to civilization as we know it. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.