developed in 1987-88, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders takes place 10 years "into the future", imagining the not-too-distant year of 1997. two of the game's four playable characters are college students who have converted their VW microbus into a spaceship and traveled to Mars.
inside the ship you can find a Digital Audio Tape (a semi reasonable guess for what the near future of consumer audio would be) titled "Razor and the Scummettes Greatest Hit, 'Inda Glop Oda Krell'", and listen to it on the bus's tape deck. here's what it sounds like:
Razor here is almost certainly the Siouxsie Sioux-esque punk rocker gal who was a playable character in Lucasfilm Games' previous adventure game, Maniac Mansion, in which high school students team up to rescue their cheerleader friend and foil a totally different alien invasion from the antagonists in Zak. it would appear that in the 10 years since then Razor has made it big as a musician, at least to the extent that two college students express enjoyment of her work with some enjoyably goofy future-slang:
"ZWOW! Darkeen tones! Razor's a wayhot jamster! She blows poodles over old noizglunk!"
Or maybe "Greatest Hit" implies she was a one-hit wonder. or maybe she's still underground, and Melissa and Leslie are ahead of the curve...
i guess what i like about all this is that it's an earnest if slapdash attempt to sketch a baffling near future of cultural production. what music are The Kids listening to in the far off year of 1997? probably something that just sounds like random noise to us today, in the totally normal year of 1987! and the stuff they say about it makes no sense! oh, and i guess cash will have gone away, everyone pays for stuff with something called a CashCard. the overarching plot point of Zak's 1997 is that "people have been getting stupider" (due to the alien plot of course!), an echo of the broader 1980s/90s anti-TV sentiment that feels very much like a museum piece today.
for no better reason than i bothered to compile them, with the help of this tool:
a possible pay phone conversation at the phone company in San Francisco:
Hello? Hello, who's there? Is this Edna again?
on The King's spaceship:
Now what shall we do with him? Make him clean the meteor slime off our hull?
the wanted poster in Katmandu:
I can't read the words, but there's a photo of a meteor on it! WANTED: For gobs of terrible things, one murderous purple slimy meteor.
(the "Razor and the Scummettes Greatest Hit, Inda Glop Oda Krell" tape from the above post)
the can of gasoline in the hostel on Mars:
I don't need it. It's for a different game.
two somewhat baffling messages from Zak's mother, on his home answering machine:
My friend Jayne's daughter Sally is home from school, and would like to meet you! She's a nice, polite girl, not like that tramp Sandy you brought home last month! This is Ed calling for Sandy. Are we on for the Monster Truck Show tomorrow? I've got the Edsel all polished up and ready to go! I'll pick you up at 7:30. See ya!
based on all the above, i think we can reasonably conclude that it was indeed the creators' intention that Zak takes place in the same fiction as Maniac.
it matters approximately not at all, bordering on easter egg or in-joke in relevance. but there it is. and it does add an imperceptibly small yet odd wrinkle to Maniac Mansion's 1993 sequel, Day of the Tentacle, which ostensibly takes place both between and before and after the other two games.
