The Game: Day of the Tentacle (1993)
Original Platform: Windows PC
Version We Played: Day of the Tentacle Remastered, PS4
Verdict: I Feel Like I Could Take on the World!
Mad geniuses Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman are responsible, either individually or jointly, for some of the wackiest, funniest, most brain-breakingly absurd puzzle-adventure games of all time.
The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts. All unmistakable products of the hilariously off-kilter minds of Schafer/Grossman – not forgetting Ron Gilbert – who together formed the inventive nerve centre of LucasArts (then) and Double Fine Productions (now).
Schafer and Grossman’s Day of the Tentacle, released in 1993 for early home computers, was only a moderate success – too strange for most, too convoluted for others – but immediately earned a cult reputation amongst the kinds of dorks who quote Monty Python endlessly and carry The Prisoner lunchboxes.
I am one of those dorks, but I was too young for Tentacle when it released, and it would be years still before my first encounter with the holy triumvirate of Schafer/Grossman/Gilbert – as it happens, through a remaster of their shared masterpiece, 1990’s The Secret of Monkey Island.
More recently, at the urging of my best Vancouver gaming buddy, I finally carved out the time for Day of the Tentacle, which he had long insisted was the best point-and-click game of all time, to which my counterpoint was that Grim Fandango exists.
Grim Fandango still exists (and heck, it got a remaster too), but there’s no question Day of the Tentacle is a formidable entry in the cult canon. Tentacle can, given the vintage and the brains behind it, tip into unfair absurdity, but for the most part it’s a fun, funny, point-and-click adventure, made vastly more enjoyable by the quick availability of online strategy guides.
Here, then, are your Toronto Guardian “Late to the Game” thoughts on Day of the Tentacle.
To truly appreciate Day of the Tentacle, one needs to understand the state of PC gaming in the early 1990s.
While console gamers were already reaping the benefits of the so-called console wars – Super Mario World debuted in 1990, Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 – PC gaming predominantly involved a more high-minded mix of strategy titles, Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games, and lots and lots of puzzles. Unlike their console cousins, PC games had a reputation for seriousness, and, to a certain degree, colourlessness: instead of the bright, buoyant worlds of console games (which PC gamers largely sniffed their noses at), PC titles were characterized by serious games with serious names like King’s Quest, Civilization, and Ultima Underworld. There were exceptions – Duke Nukem features (now badly-outdated) humour, Lemmings was delightfully silly, and there’s even a Monty Python CD-ROM out there somewhere – but by and large PC gaming, and PC gamers, happily embraced a reputation for more “adult” fare.
One notable categorical exception could be found in the point-and-click genre. Largely (though not exclusively) the purview of LucasArts Games, point-and-clicks represented a counterpoint to all those dour, M-for-Mature titles taking up multiple floppy disks on home PCs.
Instead of medieval-styled high drama or epic sci-fi adventure, point-and-clicks were irreverent and more than a bit Pythoneseque, rewarding players as much for the answers they got wrong – which inevitably invited a comic rejoinder from the game – as for their ability to penetrate the games’ deliberately upside-down logic. To take only the most famous example (one we’ve referenced before), players seeking The Secret of Monkey Island would regularly hit a progression wall courtesy the ridiculously described “rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle”.
Day of the Tentacle is the sequel to Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s 1987 Maniac Mansion, though you need not have played the original to appreciate its successor, which takes Mansion’s bespoke SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system and absolutely runs with it. Gamers of a certain vintage will recognise SCUMM instantly: it’s that interface where you interact with options like “Look At”, “Pick Up”, “Use”, etc.
In Day of the Tentacle, players are tasked with preventing a purple anthropomorphic tentacle from taking over the world. It’s all kind of your fault – in the opening, your well-meaning but hopelessly naïve protagonist Bernard Bernoulli frees the diabolical Purple Tentacle at the behest of its kinder brother, Green Tentacle – and it’s up to you and your friends to (re)capture Purple and save the world. This, of course, involves novelty fake barf, evil IRS agents, and time travel.
Yes, unlike its predecessor, Day of the Tentacle is a time travel game, getting great mileage out of its repeated trips back and forth through various periods of history, interacting with figures like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and a mummy named Ted. Similar to the Back to the Future trilogy (which had concluded in 1990 and is an overt influence on this game), much of the fun comes from stumbling into key moments in history, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which apparently required a lot more wine-based cajoling than history class taught us).
Puzzles send your trio of heroes ping-ponging back and forth between time periods, trying to glean information – or obtain key items – from one setting to be used in another. It’s quite a lot of back and forth, though luckily, as mentioned earlier, even your wrong answers are still rewarded with funny comic bits. (Poor Ben Franklin and his kite-flying.)
Day of the Tentacle’s 1993 release date places it at the precise turning point when home consoles – or as my mom would say, “Nintendos” – tiptoed past PC gaming to become the standard-bearer for interactive home entertainment. The video game crash of 1983 may have temporarily set back the cause of home gaming, but at this point, nearly a decade later, consoles had more than proven they were here to say. (For reference, the best-selling video game for June 1993, the month Day of the Tentacle released, was the Super Nintendo Star Fox, followed closely by the Genesis conversion of Street Fighter II.)
The PC-based Day of the Tentacle arrived at an inopportune moment for other reasons as well. The biggest game on PC that year? The ultraviolent DOOM (the all-caps stylisation is in the original), with its hellish landscape of grotesque monsters and gory weaponry. Other major PC titles of 1993 included the deeply serious point-and-click Myst (September 1993, Cyan), full-motion-video puzzler The 7th Guest (April 1993, Trilobyte), and the wildly popular Star Wars: X-Wing (February 1993, also published by LucasArts). Together, these games would come to be known as the holy trinity of the CD-ROM, spurring drive sales amongst PC gamers eager to keep pace with their fancy new graphics.
Day of the Tentacle did not so much stick out like a sore thumb among all this high-minded seriousness as get overlooked in a sea of fancier, more mature games. If Myst and 7th Guest deployed the point-and-click template for artistic, sophisticated purposes, and DOOM just blew stuff up, Tentacle was the outlier: it looked like a Saturday morning cartoon, had the humour of a Saturday morning cartoon, and starred a bunch of dorks geeking out about history.
Tentacle can also be tough, particularly as its puzzles become more and more complex and/or oblique. The latter-day inheritors of this tradition – your Broken Ages, Psychonautses, your Machinariums – are a lot better at avoiding Tentacle/Monkey Island levels of absurdity, with puzzles that adhere more closely to something resembling human logic, albeit at the expense of the truly out-there humour of their forebears.
For my money, the modern era is ever-so-slightly the better one: there is nothing in, say, Thimbleweed Park (2017), which comes close to as infuriating as half the puzzles in those early LucasArts games. That said, it’s not hard to feel nostalgic for the kookier, funnier shenanigans of those early games.
And Day of the Tentacle is very funny. It’s a comedy, in fact, a genre which still remains criminally underexplored in the medium. (Arguably the funniest game of recent years is 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth.) Each step on the journey, each failed puzzle, each unexpected dialogue sequence – and there’s a lot of dialogue – is usually good for a laugh, if not a groan and an eye-roll. If you’re going to play it, my only tip is to attempt every possible interaction – “Open” the hamster; “Use” the dentures on Nurse Edna – just to see the result.
With a dizzying array of locations and time periods to explore, not to mention items to collect and test out, you can spend a fair amount of Day of the Tentacle just trying random things to see what happens. That’s fine up to a point, but, in all honesty, you may be begging for a little more direction after a while.
Back in 1993, LucasArts printed a guidebook which can either hint or outright spoil the game, depending on how far you dig in. The wiser course of action, in my view, is to drop by some friendly message boards to ask for a spoiler-free nudge in the right direction. I wouldn’t outright endorse cheating by looking up the answer… though that’s an option if you find yourself in a particularly frustrating dead end. (Cough, cough, not that that ever happened to me.)
In its remastered format, which is the version I’d recommend to anyone, Day of the Tentacle looks lovely, with completely redrawn 2D graphics and the option to instantly switch to the original visuals with a button tap. The voice acting has been cleaned up, and there’s an optional director’s commentary (if you want to listen to a bunch of very funny game designers talk about their very funny game), but aside from that, it’s essentially the same game, which is how it should be.
Once you’ve finished Day of the Tentacle, there’s plenty more to explore if you’re jonesing for more SCUMM-style shenanigans. The Monkey Island games (which will probably get their own Late to the Game entry at some point, as I try to catch up on the sequels) are a great choice, if only for the glory that is insult swordfighting. As mentioned, the recentish Broken Age (a Tim Schafer production) is a fine inheritor of the tradition, with better graphics and a whole lot of famous voices.
As Bernard Bernoulli might say, give pick up use open look at push close talk to pull.
Wiser words were never uttered.
***
Final Score: 9 out of 10 Chron-o-Johns
Day of the Tentacle Remastered is available on PS4/5, Xbox One, iOS, OS X, PlayStation Vita (lol), Windows, and Linux.
