The Manhole
1988 video game
The Manhole is an adventure video game in which the player opens a manhole and reveals a gigantic beanstalk, leading to fantastic worlds.
Development
The Manhole runs in black-and-white on Apple's Macintosh line of computers. It was created using the HyperTalk programming language by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who founded the company Cyan and would go on to produce the best-selling adventure game Myst.
Release
The game was first released on floppy disks in 1988 by Cyan, Inc. (now Cyan Worlds) and distributed through mail order. In 1989, it was produced for Activision as a CD-ROM version based on the floppy disk game. This version was the first personal computer game distributed on CD-ROM (although there had already been two games released in late 1988 in Japan for NEC's PC Engine game console on its CD-ROM² format). The game was re-released for MS-DOS twice, once in 1992 by Activision as The Manhole: New and Enhanced (including a Windows 3.1 version) and again in 1995 as The Manhole: CD-ROM Masterpiece Edition by Broderbund, which featured the use of color, music, voice, sound effects, and some new characters. Cyan artist Chuck Carter designed all of the color graphics in about three months using StrataVision 3D. In 2007, the game was released on GameTap. As of February 2011, the game is available from GOG.com, iTunes, and as part of the "Cyan Complete Pack" on Steam.
“The Manhole” enters the record as 1988 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Manhole, video and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7750193. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1989, 1992 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Manhole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.