Sign-up available for Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

In-depth film documentary in pre-production from the creators of TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming

SCUMM may not sound very pleasant, but without it we'd have never have had many of our most beloved adventure games, and who knows where the genre would be today. Of course, that's because it has a whole different meaning than the one you'll find in the dictionary. In fact, it's not a word at all, but rather an acronym for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, the engine custom built by Ron Gilbert back in the early days of Lucasfilm Games. It went on to provide the foundation for many more classic adventures in the late 80s and 90s, including The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, The Dig, Loom, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, as well as popular "Junior Adventures" at Gilbert's Humongous Entertainment (Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, Spy Fox). And yet the legacy of SCUMM extends far beyond that, its influence on the genre incalculable over the years. In other words: ripe for an in-depth retrospective. 

Enter CREATORVC and its upcoming film documentary Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story, which promises to explore how SCUMM "revolutionized adventure gaming and spawned some of the greatest point-and-click classics of all time." No stranger to such projects, the company collaborates with experienced industry professionals and is best known for its In Search of Darkness series, as well as FPS: First Person Shooter and last year's acclaimed TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming. (The latter has its own significant adventure game component through interviews with genre legends like Sierra co-founders Ken and Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen, among many others.) Reprising their roles from TerrorBytes on the new SCUMM doc will be writer/director Richard Moss and producer Daniel Richardson. For Moss it's "one of [his] dream projects” whose goal is to "preserve the legacy of an iconic chapter in gaming history in close collaboration with the people who made it and the fans who still adore these games today."

The SCUMM Story is expected to run "close to three hours" and feature a "game-by-game developer-led retrospective" featuring twenty-plus interviews with Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts icons such as confirmed guest Ron Gilbert, as well as "Zak McKracken designer David Fox, SCUMM engine programmer Aric Wilmunder, Monkey Island and Freddi Fish co-writer/designer Tami Borowick, and background artist Mark Ferrari, with many more to come." As well as being a "joyful and in-depth retrospective journey through the travails of SCUMM development" that celebrates its "greatest moments, the inventive satire, and the ingenious innovations," the documentary will also explore the "cultural impact" of the SCUMM era, a "glorious, all-too-brief era where the creatives got to call the shots." Beyond the games themselves, the film aims to include "numerous breakout discussion segments ... about things like the SCUMM University internal training program, the overarching design philosophies Ron Gilbert and co put at the core of their games, [and] the impact of new technologies such as the arrival of 'talkies' when the CD-ROM format took off."

Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story is still in pre-production, with a crowdfunding campaign planned to help finance its development. Before that, however, there are other important ways for fans to support the project. CREATORVC has created a newsletter sign-up page with the goal of achieving one thousand signatures, from which they hope to recruit an "online focus group to help test and refine the concept and to make sure there’s enough demand to bring the documentary to market." Without hitting that target, the future of the documentary itself may be in doubt. Richard Moss is also active online in seeking out public feedback, including Adventure Game Hotspot's very own forum, so it's a great chance to be involved in helping to shape the project's direction. 

To learn more about Passport to Adventure: The SCUMM Story and the driving force behind it, Laura Cress had a chat with Moss, who offers plenty more details about what to expect.