Meteor Mess - A Maniac Mansion Remake
Meteor Mess is a remake of Maniac Mansion. It's a fan project and a homage to a game that has a special place in our lives.
This version contains new rooms, objects and puzzles and even a complete new way to solve the game.
Project History
The idea to start the Meteor Mess project was born somewhere back in 2008. Sascha and Thomas started working on their first adventure game using the 3D engine GameStudio by Conitec. After having gathered the first experiences with the game engine, they decided to build a SCUMM-like adventure construction kit that they simply called GAS (GameStudio Adventure System).
Both are great fans of Maniac Mansion and so they had the idea to build and enhance GAS by creating a Maniac Mansion remake with it.
The Meteor Mess project began on July 26th 2008 and over the next 12 months Sascha and Thomas spent a lot of their spare time with it. Sascha was responsible for coding, while Thomas did all the modeling stuff. Although there were quite a few months where neither of them found any time to work on the project, they made steady progress.
In the middle of 2009, Heiko joined the team to help Sascha. At this point about 75% of the story was playable, but there were still quite lot of bugs and missing features. Now armed with two developers the game's progress went faster and smoother.
Around October 2009 Ron joined as voice director and at the end of the year the team decided to go in for the AUM retro contest, which meant that a demo of Meteor Mess needed to be ready by February 2010. So all worked hard, and they managed to finish a first demo just in time.
On February 17th 2010 the team got great news. Meteor Mess was voted on first place.
This early alpha demo contained a lot of placeholders and used mostly lowres textures, but now that the project was public, the team grew by other enthusiasts.
Since then, many years have passed and the team has worked hard to complete this Maniac Mansion remake project until it was finally released on October 5th, 2022.