Day of the Tentacle

Six years after helping the Edison family defeat the designs of a malevolent meteor in Maniac Mansion, college student and classic nerd Bernard Bernoulli once again finds himself at the front door of the infamous mansion. With two weird friends, Hoagie and Laverne, Bernard must stop the evil Purple Tentacle from conquering the world—by freezing hamsters, pushing old ladies down the stairs, abusing Swiss bank accounts, and ever so slightly changing some of the most significant moments in American history. Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer’s 1993 time-trotting point-and-click adventure game Day of the Tentacle brought LucasArts' game design to a new standard of excellence with smart puzzles, hilarious characters, and an animation style that harkened back to classic Warner Bros. cartoons. And somehow, they fit it all on a fat stack of floppy disks! In this definitive oral history as told by the game’s designers, musicians, and artists, writer Bob Mackey tells the inside story of Day of the Tentacle’s lightning-in-a-bottle production, and reveals how two first-time directors boiled down the lessons of past adventure games into a tight and satisfying experience, how their team grappled with evolving technology to achieve the coveted status of multimedia at the dawn of the CD-ROM age, and how a remastered edition brought Tentacle to a new generation of fans.