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ScummVM was originally a reverse engineered reimplementation of <abbr title="Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion">SCUMM</abbr>, the game engine used in the adventure game Maniac Mansion, and it released on October 8, 2001. SCUMM is notable for its portability, having originally been designed for the Commodore 64, and then later ported to the Apple II and IBM PC. The process technique of using intermediate code in a virtual machine for game development is not new, as it was previously used for text adventure games in the form of the [[wikipedia:Z-machine|Z-machine]]. But LucasArts also used it for manipulating graphics and sound, as doing so alleviated the burden of having to redevelop Maniac Mansion from scratch; by reusing the intermediate code, LucasArts saved and save time on getting subsequent ports to market.

ScummVM is similar; the simplicity of the engine makes it portable to a wide variety of platforms. Unlike a full-fledged system emulator, ScummVM only uses the resources it needs to run the games, like the original SCUMM (though the codebase does have emulators for hardware like sound cards), making the system requirements ''very'' modest and forgiving. Multiple versions of the same game are often supported, such as PC and console versionsports. Support for many games in ScummVM has even been contributed by official developers. Disney even republished Maniac Mansion on Steam using an outdated version of ScummVM.