Maniac Mansion (1990 on the NES) is a landmark twice over: the debut of the SCUMM engine that ran every LucasArts adventure for the next decade, and one of the only serious attempts to put a verb-and-cursor adventure game on a console controller.

You pick two teenagers to go with Dave, out of six, and each has real skills. Bernard can fix electronics, Syd and Razor can play the piano, Wendy can rewrite a manuscript, Michael can develop photographs in the darkroom. Those skills unlock different solutions, so the mansion has several separate routes through it, and taking the wrong pair means an entire puzzle chain is closed to you.

The design philosophy is what made LucasArts LucasArts. Ron Gilbert wrote his thoughts on this up afterward, and the short version is that dying and dead ends are bad design. Maniac Mansion doesn't quite live up to that yet, since you can absolutely get a character killed and lock yourself out, but you can see the argument being worked out in real time.

Steering a cursor with a D-pad is exactly as awkward as it sounds, and the NES version deals with it by trimming the verb list and building a sensible cursor speed. It works better than it has any right to.

There are multiple endings depending on who you brought and what you did, and famously the option to microwave a hamster, which Nintendo's content policy fought over for the American release. Nintendo of America demanded a list of changes, the developers made most of them, and a few things slipped through anyway, including graffiti in a bathroom that survived to shelves.

A genre that defined PC gaming, squeezed onto a Nintendo. Tentacle included.