Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders casts the player as a tabloid journalist who works his way up from writing nonsense about two-headed squirrels to uncovering a genuine alien conspiracy. Aliens are controlling humanity through a telephone switchboard and gradually dulling the intelligence of the entire planet; Zak, together with student Annie and two girls imprisoned on Mars, tries to piece together an ancient artifact that can stop the conspiracy. The game runs on an improved SCUMM engine and is controlled the same way as Maniac Mansion — by clicking verbs and objects in the bottom bar.

The key difference is in scale. Zak travels by plane across the entire globe, from San Francisco through Cairo and Kathmandu to Mexico, with Mars and sunken Atlantis added on top, and the player freely switches between four characters, passing items between them. The openness is enormous, but also demanding: money for plane tickets is limited, maps and codes had to be looked up in the accompanying printed materials, and some item combinations are quite far-fetched. That's exactly why the game has a reputation as one of the hardest adventures of its time, one that's tough to get through without your own notes.

Technically, it was a showcase DOS title of the late 1980s: an EGA palette, static screens packed with detail, and music that gained noticeably fuller sound on a better sound card than on the PC speaker. The mood is a mix of conspiracy theories, ufology, and gentle parody of tabloid journalism, giving the game its own oddly melancholic tone. It gained a cult following at the time, especially in Europe, where it's remembered more fondly today than in America. Today, Zak is interesting mainly as evidence of how ambitious adventure games could be before the studio smoothed them into a friendlier and fairer form. Anyone who enjoys adventures with a lot of travel and a bit of getting lost will find here one of the most sprawling game worlds the PC of that era offered — and, at the same time, a reminder of a time when a computer game inseparably came with a notebook full of your own notes.