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"The whole interface for Maniac Mansion came from David. He experimented a little bit with that kind of stuff in Labyrinth, where you could choose things. I hated playing text adventures, where I had to type everything. I just hated that. So it was about coming up with an interface where I could point at the words. Again, it was reducing that verb set, picking from this small set of verbs and small set of nouns and simplifying that."

"You didn't have to guess what word they were looking for," says Chip.

"Yeah," says Ron. "You would just point at the thing or touch the thing."

"You knew what the universe of possibilities was," says Peter.

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Constraints and limitations are a really powerful creative motivator," says Ron. "Sometimes if you remove constraints and limitations, you end up wrecking what you're trying to create. Just because you have too much money or too much technology. I felt, with those early games, especially Maniac Mansion, we were so constrained that we had to make really smart choices on stuff. I think that's a benefit."

"The fact that we couldn't use Star Wars was a constraint," says Chip. "It generated a lot of creativity."

"I think of that as an anti-constraint," exclaims Peter.

"If we could have done Star Wars that's all we would have done," says Ron, "That's all we would have made."

Tags: constraints x | creativity x | limitations x | lucasarts x |