ScummVM turns 20 and now supports Grim Fandango and Myst 3: Exile

The scripting 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 device) mobile!) over the past two decades probably owes its creators a drink or two.

Originally published in October 2001 by Ludvig Strigeus (with assistance from Vincent Hamm), the initial plan was just to get Monkey Island 2 running in an emulator. This game quickly became two (The fate of Atlantis), and as the rumor of ScummVM’s success grew, so did the team size and number of games (and engines) supported.

Over the past 20 years, ScummVM has grown from something primarily associated with old Lucasarts adventures to a program that can now run games from 64 different engines, from Myst To Power and magic.

To reinforce that, to celebrate the anniversary of the program, the team announced ScummVM 2.5.0, with a list of additions and improvements they call “huge”.

First of all, these games are now working:

• Little big adventure
• Red Comrades 1: Save the Galaxy
• Red Comrades 2: For Great Justice
• Transylvania
• Purple crown
• OO-Topos
• Glulx interactive fiction games
• Private detective
• 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 trip
• Myst 3: Exile

Grim Fandango! Little big adventure! Crusader: no remorse! This rule. But that’s not all, there are also tweaks under the voucher for everything from the desktop interface to the DS version of ScummVM:

Besides new games and game releases, ScummVM 2.5.0 brings many notable improvements and new features. We have completed a major overhaul of the GUI: we now support Unicode characters everywhere. The graphical interface also adapts to the high resolutions used in HiDPI screens. The Nintendo DS port has been significantly rewritten. We’ve added GOG and Steam Achievements to a lot of Wintermute games and enabled KeyMapper in more games. Thanks to the work of one of our GSoC students, we have now added a text-to-speech option to games Sphinx, Soltys and The legend of the griffin.

You can download the latest version of ScummVM on the project site.