The Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine, which we all know better as ScummVM, turns 20 this week, and anyone who has ever enjoyed a classic adventure game on a modern PC (or mobile device!) over the last two decades probably owes its creators a drink or two.
Originally released in October 2001 by Ludvig Strigeus (with help from Vincent Hamm), the original plan was just to get Monkey Island 2 running in an emulator. That one game soon became two (Fate of Atlantis), and as word of ScummVM’s success grew, so too did the team size and the number of games (and engines) it supported.
Over the last 20 years ScummVM has grown from something mostly associated with playing old Lucasarts adventures into a program that can now run games from 64 different engines, from Myst to Might & Magic.
To further back that up, to celebrate the program’s birthday the team have announced ScummVM 2.5.0, with a list of additions and improvements they call “tremendous”.
First up, these games now work:
- Little Big Adventure
- Red Comrades 1: Save the Galaxy
- Red Comrades 2: For the Great Justice
- Transylvania
- Crimson Crown
- OO-Topos
- Glulx interactive fiction games
- Private Eye
- AGS Games versions 2.5+
- Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy
- The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
- Crusader: No Remorse
- L-ZONE
- Spaceship Warlock
- Grim Fandango
- The Longest Journey
- Myst 3: Exile
Grim Fandango! Little Big Adventure! Crusader: No Remorse! This rules. But that’s not all, there are also tweaks under the good for everything from the desktop interface to the DS version of ScummVM:
Besides the new games and game versions, ScummVM 2.5.0 brings many notable improvements and new features. We have completed a major rework of the GUI: We now support Unicode characters everywhere. The GUI also adapts to high resolutions used in HiDPI screens. The Nintendo DS port has been significantly rewritten. We added GOG and Steam achievements to a large number of Wintermute games and enabled KeyMapper in more games. Thanks to the work of one of our GSoC students, we have now added an option for text-to-speech to the games Sfinx, Soltys and The Griffon Legend.
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You can download the latest ScummVM release at the project’s site.