I am old enough to remember when text adventures were a mainstream genre. Or at least, I was brought up on old enough computers to remember Commodore 64 text adventures, games told in writing that you interacted with in writing. You explored, you collected stuff, you solved puzzles, you probably got some jokes. North, north, north, examine cave, get sick squid, get pocket lint, get cape, wear cape, fly, and so on.
As well as modern text-based games, there are other game genres that hold echoes of the text adventure. We met one evolution in the Dizzy series, platform games with simplified text adventure bits added on. And then there were graphic adventures, text adventure gameplay but with a visual interface. LucasArts, originally Lucasfilm Games, were responsible for one of the most literal interpretations of this evolution in their game adaptation of the film Labyrinth. It starts as a text adventure where you type commands to move around a town centre and go to a cinema to watch the film. Then, in a bravura Wizard of Oz monochrome-to-colour moment, David Bowie appears on the screen and drags the player character into a visual labyrinth, wherein they make their actions by picking preselected words from a list at the bottom of the screen.
From there, LucasArts evolved into leaders in the point and click graphic adventure genre, famous for a particular type of smart and incisive humour. That, more than anything, made them the first game developer that I would name myself a fan of and follow. They made exactly my kind of game, enough so to overcome the handicap of being American, even at a time when I was still instinctively dismissing the tonally similar The Simpsons for little other reason. An American accent doesn’t show as strongly in text. I didn’t play all LucasArts’s games, or even all their adventure games though. I count seven I played, and I only unequivocally loved the first two Monkey Island games.
While those Monkey Island games – the original with its rousing adventure story and especially the sequel with its layered deconstruction of the same – introduced new ways of playing and of thinking that had a huge effect on me, Day of the Tentacle was less momentous. It’s a less ambitious game in many aspects. As a loose sequel to their early Maniac Mansion, it takes place entirely within one mansion, not even that big by mansion standards, and it parodies B-movies in an easygoing kind of way that it feels like LucasArts could do in their sleep. It may still have the most complex narrative I’ve covered in this project to date, but that’s the nature of the genre, which without characters and stories draped over the bare frame of putting objects together would quickly look inadequate.
For that puzzle-solving and interacting with the world, Day of the Tentacle uses the same point and click interface of words and inventory graphics that was in place by Monkey Island 2 and doesn’t change it at all except by making it in a wackier font. That is at least in keeping with the bulbous ugliness of its art in general, which nails a particular cartoon aesthetic that’s an OK fit for the story, but feels like a waste of artist Peter Chan’s abilities compared to Monkey Island 2’s gorgeous vistas.
Where Day of the Tentacle’s interface and story about invasion by sapient tentacles don’t bring much new, though, it does one more significant element of its story and mechanics – time travel. When its intro sequence includes a dramatic statement about going “back… to the mansion!” it’s an invocation of Back to the Future, and like the second of those films we have a story that goes an equal distance into both the past and the future, in this case 200 years. Rather than sending a character to all of those, it has one time machine accident split its three main characters across past/present/future and lets you switch between them at any time. It’s in how Day of the Tentacle uses that structure that it does something special of its own.
Before talking the mechanics, let’s note here that here we are at entry #90 and Day of the Tentacle is the very first game I’ve written about to make it compulsory to play as a female character! Even if it’s only part of the time. Not only that, but as lightly sketched as Laverne is (though less so than Bernard = nerd and Hoagie = rock dude) she still has more to her character than being the girl, and the fact that she’s a medical student is more significant to her characterisation.
Laverne is trapped in the future, Bernard the present and Hoagie the past, but they are able to interact in a limited way. Their portaloo time machines (‘Chron-O-Johns’) allow you to transfer most inventory objects between them. At the price of a little added fiddliness, this increases the number of possible interactions and opens up the game’s scope to include the three overlaid versions of the mansion. More important than this simple transfer of objects is transferring them the long way, the one-way conveyor belt of time which makes for Day of the Tentacle’s best puzzles.
In the future, Laverne is initially stuck up a tree. There is no direct solution for her. Taunt George Washington into cutting down the same tree four hundred years earlier, though, and the problem is solved. At one point a bottle of wine in a time capsule becomes, with the magic of time, the vinegar that you need. Other puzzles involve playing fast and loose with history, changing the American constitution and the design of the American flag to suit your needs.
Each of those uses of time travel is the kind of thing that might be a smart throwaway gag in another medium, but is particularly well suited to computer games and to the point-and-click in particular. To work out how to make progress, you have to start thinking harder about time travel rules and their implications, and working out a solution is a deeper and more rewarding experience as a result. Unless you get stuck and have to resort to the helpline, but you can appreciate the humourous results then too. I still wouldn’t recommend Day of the Tentacle as anyone’s first graphic adventure or LucasArts game, but it does still show them pushing things forward.
PC chart, Edge 002, November 1993