C64 Game Memories - Revisited 30+ Years later : Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders

Some of my favourite games of the past have been point & click adventure games like Broken Sword, Operation Stealth & Monkey Island which I all played on 16 bit computers in the 1990's.

Before then on the C64, text or text/graphic adventures were very popular in the early 1980's but the graphics were static and you had to use your imagination. That is until Lucasfilm started releasing some iconic 'point and click' adventures in the late 1980's.

The most famous was without doubt Maniac Mansion but my personal favourite was Zack McCracken & The Alien Mindbenders as it was the very first game I played that used the Scumm game engine which would be used on Monkey Island later. For the first time instead of typing in a command like 'go north' you could point your character in the direction and use the commands on screen.

In this game you play Zack, a journalist who is bored of his job and ends up on a mission to stop an Alien race called the Caponians who are draining the intelligence of the human race with the use of their mindbending machine. Unluckily for you the only defense mechanism has been broken up and spread accross earth & mars. It's a bizarre game with definite B-movie vibes.

For me what made Lucasfilm point & click games great was the humour, this game was no exception and its chock full of witty lines and copious amounts of in-jokes too.

All of the Scumm engine point and click games are so playable even today, I would probably play this now on the Amiga or ST version because of the better graphics & sound.