Maniac Mansion (NES, USA)

The NES version of Maniac Mansion is a heavily-censored port of the classic PC point-and-click game where you go through a mansion of (mostly) crazy blue people and tentacle creatures to rescue a cheerleader from a sentient meteor. It's actually pretty fun, and had a kickin' soundtrack.

Compared to the Japanese version, the US game has less cartoony graphics and more detailed rooms.

Unused Music


Track #13 in the NSF is an unused song. Where it was intended to be used is a mystery.

Keypad


On the second floor, go through the Steel Security Door and point the cursor at the wall to the left of it, just above the floor. You should eventually find a Keypad there. Go to it, and your character will walk over and face the door to Dr. Fred's lab, even though it's four rooms away from this particular Keypad. If you use this Keypad at all, you will start an irreversible countdown that ends with the mansion exploding (i.e., Game Over).

This particular Keypad is a leftover from the PC version: as an anti-piracy measure in the days of floppy disks, game developers often forced you to enter a code at some point, which was usually present in the manual or other accessories that were packaged with the game. In Maniac Mansion, you had to use the Keypad and enter a code from the manual to unlock the Steel Security Door, which is always unlocked in the NES version (and really doesn't make it too secure). The Japanese version of the game instead handled this situation by replacing the security door with a regular one.

The fact that the Keypad is on the wrong side of the door in the NES version, your character doesn't correctly face it when prompted, and the thing is completely unnecessary all suggest it was left in by mistake.

Early Character Select
Enabling the code during the opening cutscene will cause what appears to be an early version of the character select screen to appear after it's done. The code must be turned off again while the screen is displayed to avoid continuing directly to the final version.

Of note is the fact that Dave is not automatically selected and the background palette is a brighter shade of blue. Also, Dave and Wendy are transposed with each other, Bernard's glasses are not colored in, and the title graphic seems to be subtly different in many ways.

Poster


Green Tentacle's "Disco Sucks" poster, present in the PC version but cut from this one due to the obvious censorship issue.

Regional Differences
The first 250,000 copies of the US version kept in the ability to microwave Ed's hamster to death, but the next few thousand US copies and European version removed this.

Capitalization Oddity
The text displayed during gameplay is in all capital letters; however, for the text inside of the ROM this is not the case. For example, the text "MANIAC MANSION" in the game is stored as "Maniac Mansion". It is important to note that the capitalization in the ROM is exactly the same as the MS DOS release.