While browsing through the Ubuntu Software Center this morning I noticed Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen in the repos. Nostalgia kicked in, and I got digging!
This post isn’t just limited to the two great point and click adventure games (and I know its old news, but hey, lets spread the love eh?). They’re both powered by the open source ScummVM engine. You could play other ScummVM as well games easily after installing it. Remember the great, great LucasArts games from the late 80s and 90s? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Islands, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, (omg!) Day of the Tentacle? One of my fondest childhood memories is awaiting every SCUMM based game, and watching the trademarked SCUMM logo fade by at the start of the game.
If you don’t know what SCUMM is, look on the right for the Wikipedia excerpt.
Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) is a scripting language developed at LucasArts (known at the time as Lucasfilm Games) to ease development of the graphical adventure game Maniac Mansion.
It falls somewhere between a game engine and a programming language, allowing designers to create locations, items and dialogue sequences without writing code in the actual language the game source code would end up in. This also meant that the game’s script and data files could be re-used across various platforms. SCUMM is also a host for embedded game engines such as iMUSE (standing for Interactive MUsic Streaming Engine), INSANE (standing for INteractive Streaming ANimation Engine), CYST (in-game animation engine), FLEM (places and names object inside a room), and MMUCUS. SCUMM has been released on the following platforms: 3DO, Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, CDTV, Commodore 64, Fujitsu Towns & Marty, Apple Macintosh, Nintendo Entertainment System, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Sega Mega-CD and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine.
ScummVM however has broadened its scope and supports not only SCUMM based games, but a truckload of titles thats going to make any classic gaming fan rejoice for a long time.
Here’s a short (sort of) list:
- The Curse of Monkey Island
- Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
- The Dig
- Full Throttle
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
- Loom
- Maniac Mansion
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge
- Sam & Max Hit the Road
- The Secret of Monkey Island
- Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
- King’s Quest series
- Simon the Sorceror series
- Legend of Kyrandia series
- and loads more
While running these games conventionally simply won’t work in today’s OSs, ScummVM comes to the rescue, running on everything from the iPhone to Linux and almost every other major OS in the face of the earth (Samsung TV anyone?).
ScummVM has appeared in the official Ubuntu repos, and you can download it via the Software center or using the following command.
1 | sudo apt-get install libfluidsynth1 liblash3 scummvm scummvm-data |
You may then install both Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen from the Ubuntu Software Center. Welcome procrastination, sit back and start solving the great puzzles.
Windows/Mac/iPhone users can download from this link:
http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/
I think by now, you should already where you can download all these classics. Look in the *ahem* usual places 
