Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a point-and-click adventure from Lucasfilm Games built on the SCUMM engine, which later also gave rise to Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The player takes on the role of tabloid reporter Zak McKracken, who, while investigating a strange fax message, uncovers a conspiracy by aliens planning to use the telephone network to deafen and dumb down all of humanity, and is gradually joined by other playable characters with whom he must travel across several cities around the world and beyond Earth to foil the plot.

On the Amiga, the game offered clear control via command icons and the mouse, which avoided the frustration of guessing exact text commands typical of older adventures, while retaining considerable puzzle difficulty, including notoriously well-known puzzles requiring coordination and combining items across multiple simultaneously played characters on different continents. The graphics and music matched the period standard for Lucasfilm Games and gave the game a light, comedic tone with a good dose of exaggeration and parody of conspiracy theories, typical of the studio's early games. The Amiga's color palette also allowed for a livelier and more legible depiction of individual locations than on the less colorful competing home computers.

Zak McKracken was among the works that helped popularize icon-based adventure controls in the era after Maniac Mansion and showed that the genre could work with a playful sci-fi story full of exaggeration and bizarre characters. Traveling between real and fictional destinations around the world gave the game a sense of adventure that went beyond ordinary adventures set in a single city or mansion. On the Amiga it became one of Lucasfilm Games' favorite titles, and it is still remembered today as a pleasantly wacky classic full of eccentric side characters, alien conspiracies, and dry American humor.

Why play: For fans of wacky sci-fi stories and globe-trotting travel, Zak McKracken offers playful icon-based controls and dry humor that make it a pleasantly bizarre Lucasfilm Games classic.