On Saturday, March 1, 2026, more than 800 players around the world sat down at their computers at the exact time and faced one of the most cynical challenges in the history of video games: to go through the graphic adventure Maniac Mansion, a classic of the Lucasfilm Games studio from 1987, without any guide. Both succeeded.
Behind the experiment is the studio Woe Industries, which designed AGAT, an abbreviation of Adventure Game Aptitude Test, or in Serbian: Test of the ability to play adventure games. The idea was as simple as it was ruthless: players do not know in advance which title they will play, they have four hours, and throughout the test they must be monitored by legitimate software, which is otherwise common in online academic exams. The webcam and microphone were included to ensure that no one opened another browser window, looked at the phone, and got help from a person who might be sitting out of the frame.
Out of 831 registered candidates who started the test on time, only two reached the goal. That’s a passing rate of 0.24 percent. Woe Industries has boasted that the AGAT is one of the most prestigious and rigorous exams in the world, stating that it beats the SAT, MCAT, and most forklift certifications.
In addition to the official attempts, around 168 players were disqualified for starting the test outside the allowed time frame. Two more formally finished the game, but without a diploma: one for cheating and the other for starting too late. The studio remained consistent with the rules.
Some of the comments that came in were, to put it mildly, creative. One participant sent a confirmation of a potential bank transfer of one thousand dollars instead of a screenshot of the victory screen, which the studio interpreted as an attempt at bribery. Two players sent screenshots from the game Fallout 4 instead of the footage from Maniac Mansion, without any explanation. The studio refused both, with reserved diplomacy.
The two winners finished the game relatively quickly, which made the organizers wonder if maybe they already knew it well before the actual test, although that is not a violation of the rules either. Regardless, Woe Industries emphasized that their surveillance logs were clean.
Maniac Mansion, created in 1987, was a pioneer of graphic adventures and introduced the point-and-click navigation system. It is known for its non-linear structure, a large number of characters for the player to choose from and, perhaps most relevant in this context, for puzzles that even at the time of release were known to confuse players and keep them staring at the wall. In the pre-internet era, solutions were passed on by word of mouth, written instructions in magazines, and hotlines. Today, when every answer is a search away, Woe Industries’ experiment raised the question of how much “gaming skill” is actually worth, which is taken for granted in modern culture.
The answer was brutal: out of close to a thousand volunteers who were confident enough to sign up, only two actually knew what they were doing, reports PC Gamer.