Contrary to what many believe, the first computer game was not Pong. No, the first game to require a computer to run it was something called Adventure, a text affair that resided on a mainframe at an American university in the late '60s, and the subsequent text-based adventure games that appeared on home computers up until the mid '80s all followed this type 'Go North' model of input. By 1987, however, adventure games were very much the poor relation of the gaming genres. We'd all moved on. Even The Pawn, a lavishly packaged, graphically beautiful epic adventure from Magnetic Scrolls, released in 1986 for the Amiga and Atari ST, still relied on the player typing in his commands. Who wanted to do that?

And then this week, 12 years ago, the game that was to directly lead to the whole adventuring genre being given a revitalising kick up the arse was released. Maniac Mansion, created by Lucasfilm (it was some years before they became LucasArts) and published by Activision, was a disk-only Commodore 64 romp based on a combination of old 'B' movies featuring mad scientists and the current vogue (it's the '80s, remember) of splatter flicks such as Friday the 13th, and The Rocky Horror Show, especially the humour. Did I mention humour? Although many previous adventure games had made attempts at being funny, it was generally accepted that, perhaps because programmers wrote them, the jokes were... geeky.

Maniac Mansion was genuinely funny, which was an innovation in itself, but the groundbreaking part was the lack of typing. The player's joystick controlled a cursor which was used to select objects in the animation window and then highlight a verb or noun from the vocabulary list at the bottom of the screen. It might sound clumsy but, for the time, it was fast, effective and a lot more fun than trying endless permutations of the same phrase, which could be frustrating rather than fun.