Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVMs unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive
ScummVM was born on September 17, 2001, at 5:57pm GMT+1. The program was meant as an interpreter that could play classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Day of the Tentacle in a virtual machine VM.As for the name, “SCUMM” was the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” itself a reference to the first LucasArts game that relied on the companys proprietary game design tool. Expanded and revised through the years, SCUMM helped LucasArts build a huge line of popular adventure games in the 1980s and 1990s, but the DOS-based games became increasingly difficult to play on modern systems.ScummVM addressed this problem. Little did its earliest developers know, however, that it would grow far beyond its origins, taking on a life of its own as more than 100 people contributed a million lines of code over the next decade. Today, ScummVM has become almost a general-purpose adventure game interpreter that can run on nearly any architecture. How did an ever-changing group of volunteers manage to do it—and avoid being sued out of existence?
via Ars Technica.
