Welcome to the second part of our LucasArts' Secret History series: "secret," because of LucasArts' bizzare denial of everything they've done pre-2000; "history" because everything you read here is true and actually happened to someone, probably. Thanks once again to Dan "Jayel" Lee for Zak McKracken header image.

Page one: Our review
Page two: Okay, so screw that guy. What does everyone else think?
Page three: Fun things: trivia &c.
Page four: A guided tour from the official hint book

Does this article bring warm teddy-bear memories bubbling up inside your brain, and you want to spread the joy of memory to others? Or perhaps you've only just found out about Zak McKracken and want to honour-trumpet the notes of originality in apology for your ignorance?

The first thing that becomes apparent pretty early on when playing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, LucasFilm Games' (what LucasArts called itself before 1991, for those just joining us) follow-up to Maniac Mansion, is how epic it really is. While the first SCUMM game stuck you inside a single house that you had to think your way through, Zak McKracken sprawls across a plethora of exotic locations that aren't even limited to our own planet. This globe-trotting adventure has you constantly traversing through a whole lot of far-reaching and diverse places ranging from the Sphinx to Mayan temples to the Bermuda Triangle and beyond, creating a scope that I daresay the developer never successfully rivaled in any future efforts.

The storyline is set in the "futuristic" year of 1997 (the game was first released in 1988), and revolves around the titular Zak McKracken, a disenchanted San Francisco tabloid news reporter who would much rather embark on his own novel project than continue to take thankless assignments from his demanding boss, whom he lovingly refers to as "Fathead" – in his head, anyway. To complicate matters, Zak has recently been having a recurring dream, the latest episode of which is displayed during the opening credits sequence. In this peculiar dream he sees, among a lot of bizarre and foreshadowing imagery, a beautiful woman. When he wakes up from the dream yet again and switches on the TV he learns that the woman is a real person, Annie Larris, who's actively collecting strange artifacts and, as it turns out, has had a dream similar to Zak's. Furthermore, Annie's friends, Yale coeds Melissa and Leslie, took a trip to Mars after they were given instructions by aliens through their own dreams to convert their van into a homemade space shuttle and travel to the red planet. Meanwhile, and possibly in relation to all of this, the nation is suffering a severe "Stupidity Epidemic," or then again maybe people are just like that.

Zak makes no qualms about letting you know from the get-go just what kind of game it is: enormous, nonlinear, and downright staggering in its scale.

Zak's adventure begins when he's assigned to investigate an ill-tempered two-headed squirrel who's supposedly been attacking tourists near Mount Ranier, which is incidentally also the location of the first UFO sightings. While exploring the vicious animal's cavernous home Zak stumbles upon an ancient and mysterious artifact, a blue crystal, which finally gives him an excuse to meet Annie of "The Society of Ancient Wisdom," who explains that the intent of their dreams by the beings transmitting them seems to be to get the recipients to build a special machine that requires three powerful crystals, Zak's new artifact being one of them. With the help of Annie and her two improv Mars explorer colleagues, the quartet uncover a devious plot by grotesque, and none too bright, aliens called Caponians to turn humans into helpless idiots – even more so than usual – by infiltrating the Phone Company and employing a heinous Mindbending Machine that will all but eliminate their intelligence, not to mention their interface verbs. Can Zak and his new friends, whose collective dreams are apparently some form of guidance by benevolent beings of higher intelligence, foil the plot of the repulsive Caponians before it's too late?

As you can tell from my less than focused summary, Zak McKracken's plot draws from a lot of inspirations, most prevalently (as you will learn) New Age concepts. The game also takes some amusing jabs at tabloid journalism, pokes at a number of classic outlandish theories, and has some fun with its not-too-distant future setting, depicting the use of a universal "CashCard" for all monetary transactions and offering a tongue-in-cheek take on what a few notable locales will look like in the future. Zak's gameplay inspirations, however, are less interesting, seeming to come exclusively from the kind of hardcore, frustrating adventure games that dominated the market throughout the 80s.

In our previous article I described Maniac Mansion as one of the most complex and ambitious of LucasArts' adventure games, despite being the earliest. Zak McKracken is subject to similar observations, but this time they're all pretty much evident to you right upfront. While Maniac was a complicated game that successfully fooled you into thinking that it was halfway digestible, Zak makes no qualms about letting you know from the get-go just what kind of game it is: enormous, nonlinear, and downright staggering in its scale. By the time the game gets fully underway, you're controlling four characters, two of whom are on Earth and two on Mars (with the convenient but buyable notion of "dream-sharing" being used to explain their privies to each other's progress and discoveries) with very little in the way of direction. Zak is also an incredibly long game, and not just because the puzzles are insanely difficult and the world huge - there's simply a whole lot to do before you can direct your characters to a successful conclusion.

The puzzles are next to impossible, but by Job, the designers really thought of every which way a player would possibly try to solve them.

In this sense, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is probably the closest thing to a non-LucasArts adventure that the company ever made. By that I mean its target audience is absolutely and primarily the hardcore adventure gamer. If you want a lengthy, head-scratching graphic adventure whose intended selling point seems to be to test the limits of your sanity, this is a game for you. It's certainly got enough of the quintessential characteristics of its brethren to be recognized as a LucasArts title (polished and with thankful, noticeable attention toward story and characters), but it's probably the black sheep of their adventure product line if it's necessary to indicate one. This is not a jab at the quality of the game – for what it is and what it's trying to be, it's absolutely successful – but Zak McKracken is definitely a game that comes from the "old-school" classic adventure tradition, where the main goal is giving players an extremely stiff challenge that will satisfy any and all masochistic tendencies. It is also doubtlessly the most difficult adventure game in the developer/publisher's SCUMM library. Like was the case with Maniac Mansion, it's significantly less insane than a lot of other adventure games of the time period, but among the elite group it was born into it's a standout. Don't bet on getting through this one without a walkthrough.

Despite the generally obscure nature of the puzzles, there is something that must be said about their design that affords you a certain level of respect, and reminds you that this could indeed have only come from the superlative house of LucasArts. The puzzles are next to impossible, but by Job, the designers really thought of every which way a player would possibly try to solve them. If there are three things in your inventory that you think would make sense for waking up a snoozing bus driver, or digging through a wall of dirt, or retrieving a CashCard from under a desk, this game makes sure all of them work. It's the kind of well thought out (if not logical) puzzle design that you just don't see enough of in adventure games, even ten years later. There is an excellent article on this topic over at Adventure Gamers called "That Doesn't Work!" and Zak McKracken is deservedly praised throughout. If you want to gain some appreciation of the game that you might not have had before, I advise checking the article out.

The game runs on the exact same version of the SCUMM engine that Maniac Mansion did, at least on the user-end. While behind-the-scenes improvements were made to accommodate the game's different goals, the intuitive interface and basic gameplay is identical. Therefore, from a technical standpoint, the game is both extremely impressive and dated in the same way Maniac Mansion was. The visuals and sound are as good as they can be given the limitations placed on a game of the time, although the fan-favorite (and exceedingly rare) FM-TOWNS version of the game boasts 256 colors and a CD audio soundtrack. If you have a few hundred dollars burning a hole in your pocket, it may be something to head over to eBay for.

It's got the necessary level of quality and good humor to earn its place in the LucasArts lineup, but it fails to be a game that's even nearly as accessible as its head-slappingly simple interface and inviting, light-hearted tone promise.

Aside from the love ‘em or hate ‘em nature of the puzzles, other faults that the game shares with its predecessor is the ability to get stuck and the rather frequent opportunities for sudden death. Due to the game's hugeness, these problems are exacerbated because in many cases there's just no way to know why you completely screwed yourself by forgetting to get that one object until you actually hit the dead end, but which point you may have wasted a lot of time making otherwise correct progress. The game also has a few "sustenance" aspects that you need to constantly tend to - your CashCard credit for your Earth couple and your air supply for your Mars couple (essentially creating a time limit situation, at least for awhile). While there's a point in the game where both of these things essentially become irrelevant, it's yet another hindrance for you in a game that really wasn't screaming for more.

Finally, the mazes. My God, the mazes. This game is full of them. It's positively filled to the brim with them. Now, back in the day mazes were a cheap (in terms of space) and effective way to pad the game's running time (apparently as "important" a measure of quality among hardcore gamers back then as it is today), but you'll find yourself having little sympathy for this reasoning when you're trudging through these frustrating and prevalent sections of the game, which seem to exist for no other reason than to ensure that you got the fifty or so hour "value" that had been promised. Granted, many of the mazes are simplistic enough that just following the strategy of "keep going to the farthest end" will eventually lead you victory, but if there's any portion of the game where cuts could have been made, this is it.

But the main problem with Zak, to the extent that it has one, is that it's simply too much. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not for everyone, but Zak is an overwhelming game that I suspect only the most hardcore and old fashioned of adventure gamers – a very much existent but waning audience – are going to fully appreciate. It's got the necessary level of quality and good humor to earn its place in the LucasArts lineup, but it fails to be a game that's even nearly as accessible as its head-slappingly simple interface and inviting, light-hearted tone promise. The bottom line is that your enjoyment of this game is going to have a lot to do with how much you enjoy solving obtuse puzzles that will have you scratching your head for an indeterminate amount of time - and hey, there are definitely people who consider that to be fun. You know who you are, and for the rest of you, if you believe these people don't exist, I direct you to a certain fan sequel as well as a number of impressively exhaustive fan sites.

If Zak McKracken is the one or one of a few LucasArts adventures that you haven't played yet, it's worth your time and you really owe it to yourself to play through it, but don't feel guilty about enlisting in some (or a ton of) outside help along the way. Zak McKracken isn't for everyone, but it's a solid, competently made adventure game from the classic era that delivers the goods – and then some.