It’s Time to Bring Back SCUMM-style Gaming

Back in 1987, a little company called Lucasfilm Gaming threw together a new video game engine called SCUMM. This stood for “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” as it was made specifically to create the 1987 classic point-and-click adventure game. If you were playing adventure games in the ‘90s, there’s a good chance you played some SCUMM titles, even if you’d never heard of the engine that made them possible. Lucasfilm Games continued producing amazing content for years, though its final release came in 1998, and there hasn’t been a SCUMM game since then, aside from remasters.

When SCUMM was developed, the point-and-click adventure game genre wasn’t new, as 1984’s Enchanted Scepters helped to develop the concept. Back then, there weren’t many options with point-and-click interfaces. SCUMM changed it from being largely guesswork carried out by the player, as Maniac Mansion included every available option once the player clicks somewhere. This redefined adventure games, and the SCUMM model became highly influential, helping the genre dominate the 1990s, as it included some of the decade’s best titles. Sadly, the popularity of both the genre and the interface waned around the turn of the century.

SCUMM Gave Players New Ways to Experience Adventures

Without getting into SCUMM’s technical aspects, it primarily allows for a verb-object mechanic within a game’s framework. The player character has an inventory, while the gameworld is littered with various objects that they can interact with in a variety of ways. They use verbs for these interactions, and initially, the actions available to the player would present as text at the bottom of the game. In later titles, clicking produced icons that indicated the verb that could be applied to a specific object. These included talk, pull, pick up, consume, and other similar actions as they related to the objects spread about the world.

While this all sounds rudimentary compared to today’s gaming options, in the ‘90s, it was a masterful way to tell an interactive story. Several prominent titles arose via SCUMM, including those in the Monkey Island and Sam & Max franchises, as well as popular one-offs like Loom, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, The Dig, and Grim Fandango. By now, you may be wondering why I’m arguing that these types of games deserve a comeback, and that’s fair. Modern adventure games are significantly more complex, but if you know anything about the current game industry, you’re aware of the power of nostalgia.

First and foremost, point-and-click games still exist, and several excellent ones have been released recently by independent developers. These are fantastic story-driven titles that fans of old SCUMM-style games should check out. The Beekeeper’s Picnic and Rosewater were released in 2025 to overwhelming critical acclaim. While these are fantastic, we’ve collectively lost large studios and AAA developers of adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, leaving only small studios to release passion projects that aren’t seen or played by nearly enough people. SCUMM needs to make a return, but with new, original games developed with enough financial backing to revitalize the genre.

SCUMM-Style Adventure Games Deserve a Comeback

If modern 2D platformers and other retro themes, mechanics, and pixel-based games have proven anything, it’s that the old ways of programming games haven’t gone anywhere. There’s a resurgence of development in 8 and 16-bit-style games that have been wildly popular and well-received by the gaming public. SCUMM’s adventure games from the 1990s and the many clones it inspired have all but disappeared save for indie devs, so putting some more attention on the game engine that made them possible is a no-brainer. There’s definitely a market for these kinds of adventure games, and it can grow if only large publishers would embrace it once more.

Do you miss SCUMM-style games? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

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