This is one of my favorite games from my childhood. If you haven't ever played it, you owe it to yourself to purchase the remastered version [1] and play it through (it's only $3.79). It's incredibly entertaining and witty. I doubt this game will ever get stale.
It's not necessary to have played Maniac Mansion beforehand? I'll admit this has been my main hesitation. I remember when Monkey Island III was big in the late 90s, I was hesitant because I hadn't played the two games that came before it.
I ended up doing it anyway at the time, but later I would play all three, and the third one really benefits - in my view anyway - from having played the first two ones, even though they can all stand on their own. So I wonder whether Day of the Tentacle is similar?
You don't need to have played or know anything about Maniac Mansion to enjoy Day of the Tentacle. I would not even recommend to play MM first, because MM is stupendously hard and frustrating compared to DotT. Play it after.
BTW: In the version of DotT I played in the 90s there was a funny easter egg: A computer in the game was running a playable version of Maniac Mansion. I don't know if this is part of the remastered version though.
Remastered has it too. Steam version even has achievements for doing things that require you to get a small way through the original.
Agree on not needing to play Maniac Mansion first, too. I came to the original having no idea that MM even existed. The characters and story are great even if you don't know the references.
DOTT is a totally free-standing game -- and amazing.
They address this in the linked article (also from personal experience) -- you really don't need any context from Maniac Mansion to thoroughly enjoy DOTT and they are really totally different games in style and substance.
The whole George Washington/ Cherry tree thing was strange to me. I felt there was some joke going on there, but no idea why he wanted to 'cut the sucker down'. Today you'd just google it, of course.
Nah. I played it before Monkey island and have never played manic mansion. I remember being addicted to it right away and thinking it was hilarious. I remember having to load about 10 floppy discs sitting next to the PC. Good fun.
> One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground
The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appears. It's not that hard to have something done in one room affect something in another room in the game, but as a player having to think across time as well as space was really cool.
The article goes on to talk about the time travel, so it's not ignored, but it seems that I found it more innovative than the author.
I think the site author comes from an interactive fiction background, so I suppose there were text adventures that did switchable playable characters and time travel before DotT [1], but I don't know of a graphic adventure that beat DotT to it. I found the interaction between the 3 timezones pretty innovative as a kid too and think he does the game a disservice here.
It also opens the game up in terms of how many puzzles you can be thinking about at once; if you're stuck in a traditional 1-protagonist game you might only have one or two things you think you need to do next, at least in a pretty linear game, but now you always have at least 3 things to work out at once...
[1] I'm not a big IF buff, but I guess Infocom's "Suspended" (1983) is a classic game where you can control different "characters" at once, and I really loved "T-Zero" (1991), where you also open up 3 different timezones you can travel between at will, and changes in the past affect the present/future in a slightly DOTT-esque manner - although it's a very different game.
Chrono Trigger was a really good old SNES RPG that had gameplay centered around time travel, where actions in one timeline affected outcomes in another. Not an adventure game, but it's something that your comment reminded me of.
Much less known than Chrono Trigger, but the Game Boy RPG SaGa 3 (known in the west as Final Fantasy Legend III) was a case of Square's attempt at time travel in RPGs that came before CT. It had a lot of thematic elements in common, eg. actions in the past affecting the future, objects that appear in all time eras, separate dimensions that exist outside of the regular time continuum, etc. Unlike CT or DoTT, the eras were only decades apart, so you could also run into the same person as a kid and an adult.
The same team at Square did not work on it, but it should have at least had some influence on CT.
Zork III (1982), Sorcerer (1984), Spellbreaker (1985) and Trinity (1986) all did time travel, and Suspended (1983) did multiple characters.
Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997) definitely did time travel as different playable characters in a graphical adventure, but that was four years after Day of the Tentacle (1993).
Not to mention that intro sequence was breathtaking for the time, especially for a graphic adventure. Lucasarts was hitting on all cylinders back then and DOTT was right there in the middle of it. The game is a work of art. Games as art is something DOTT definitely moved forward.
Probably my favourite LA adventure game, though Sam & Max really does give it a run for its money. I played it at what I suspect was a very formative time of my pre-teens, and I think it did a lot to shape not only my humour, but also my understanding that games could be challenging yet satisfying in how they deliver a story through puzzles and obstacles. I think it struck a very good balance between a hand-holding push-over and being so challenging that you needed to dig out a cheat guide every few minutes. That's largely a credit to its story-telling and design, and I think I was just getting to the age where I was able to appreciate that.
I'm 35 years old and had a similar experience. What you said about it shaping your humour really struck a chord with me (particularly Sam & Max). Maybe because it was the first LA game I played, but I think DoTT is the best, but it led to me playing all the rest.
I got the talkie on CD-ROM for a christmas present one year. I struggled with a lot of it, but my Dad before giving me the present removed the hint/solve book from the box and watched us (me and my younger brother) play and try and figure everything out and just gave us enough of a hint at the right times to make it feel like a really satisfying experience.
To people considering buying it, given so much praise here and in the article, I would like to just ask you to take note of the following quote:
> "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy"
Personally, this caveat did apply so much to me. I bought and played the game, all way to the end, trying to give it a chance, but in my case, I found it plain boring. If you like slapstick, that's probably your gold nugget indeed, based on the glowing reviews. Me, I don't; I need at least some substance (?). I loved Loom, I enjoyed The Monkey Island (esp. the 1st one in the series), as well as the Indiana Jones games. I found amusement in their lightheartedness and casual humour. I liked Grim Fandango too. But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them. To me, they're both just super boring.
I think it's probably to do with the fact that many of us here played it when it was first out and were either kids or much younger than we were now. My memory of that game is amazing, but I highly doubt I'd pick it up off the shelf today as my tastes have changed.
After trying The Witness recently, I came to the realisation that I only really enjoy puzzle/adventure games when playing with friends. Probably because I was playing all these old games with friends standing around a PC when I grew up.
"But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them."
I really, really like almost anything that involves manifesting the inside of the mind, as long as it's halfway decently done. (That is, it doesn't have to be excellent, just not terrible.)
But even as one who rather liked the game, I will say Psychonauts has a particularly horrible pacing problem where it takes too long to get to the first level, and the first level is (IMHO) the worst one in the game that most fails to take advantage of the premise, and then it takes too long to get to the second level, which is the second worst one in the game in terms of taking advantage of the premise. Also both those levels are themselves too long; I'm pretty sure they're padded out to try to make all the major levels similar in length, but "learn how to use the jumping controls" simply doesn't warrant the same amount of time as "resolve a paranoid schizophrenic's conspiracy issues". Things don't really start feeling unique until the third level, but it's a lot to swallow to get that far. I've tried to replay it a couple of times and bounced off of this; if I ever try again I'm going to try to go online and steal someone's save file just before the third level.
As much as I liked it, I've had a really hard time recommending it to anyone for this reason.
One of the things that's interesting to me is the resources available at the time - in terms of help.
With a game like this now (Say, the excellent Thimbleweed Park - you played it, right?), if you get truly, epically stuck, there's a walk-through no more than a few clicks away. And you'll probably admit defeat and go there after a few hours.
When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.
> When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.
Completely agree. Unlike today, there was really no alternative to really thinking "deep" and trying to figure something out on your own. If push really came to shove, you went to the local bookstore and hopefully they had a magazine or guide available. I miss those times. :)
On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.
(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)
But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.
I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.
The flipside is of course that some of those games were near impossible without some kind of hint. The old Hitchhiker's Guide game is the one that comes to mind for me. I read all of the books multiple times as a kid but never got more than halfway through the game. It was just plain cruel to the player.
Day of the Tentacle even includes its own hint line as a part of a puzzle!
(LucasArts had 1-800-STAR-WARS set up as its hint line. It still plays as an obvious Star Wars joke in the game today, but for kids that were familiar with the hint line it was much more on-the-nose joke about bothering your parents to call for a hint.)
One Chanukah I bought my brother Ocarina of Time for N64 and the guide book. I gave him the game on day one and book on day eight, so he had to struggle through eight days without hints. I thought it was both evil and brilliant, although I might be biased.
Yeah, walkthroughs whether on the Internet or old dial-ups BBSes, have been around since the invention of the adventure game, or at least the Leisure Suit Larry series.
Another commenter linked to the remastered (hi-res) version for desktop, but it's also available for iPad for $4.99... and if tablets aren't the perfect medium for original point-and-click adventure games then I don't know what is:
I wonder if it will last. A lot of games got ported to iOS at one point or the other, then fell by the wayside with OS updates. This happened even to big titles like Lego Harry Potter.
A little more 'evolved' (not scumm) but 'Grim Fandango' was also recently updated (well in the last few years) for newer platforms. Ron Gilbert & Co's Thimbleweed Park perhaps deserves a mention here too .
While Loom will always have a special place in my heart, DotT is possibly the best all-around adventure game from my childhood; particularly considering that the LA games have aged far better than most of the others.
The funny thing about Loom for me is that I remember the situation and people that were playing the game more than the actual game's story. It was a blast playing after school with a group that argued and explored together. I'm not even sure we finished the thing.
Loom just clicked with me for some reason. It was the first adventure game I completed 100% on my own, and I did so fairly quickly.
The other adventure games I had played to that point I was only able to finish by playing in parallel with several friends and when one of us got stuck, we would help each other. Hero's Quest was the first game I completed in this manner (we were stuck on King's Quest until someone downloaded a hint guide from a BBS; that game was primarily difficult because how easy it was to get in an unwinnable state).
Yup, hate how Curse of Monkey Island is almost always forgotten when talking about the series because Gilbert wasn't involved. The game is incredibly beautiful, voice talent flawless and impeccably casted. I wish they had created other adventure games with that iteration of the SCUMM engine.
I loved CoMI as much as the first two games. It seemed to ignore the basic premise of the story which was a hard pill to swallow (still is), but apart from that I found the humor, graphics and everything else to be at least on par.
Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, floppy disks and dreaming of one day getting a huge 17" CRT monitor on a Pentium, that was my early teenage years.
I had a 17" CRT monitor on a 286, with a Trident 8900 SVGA card driving it. Hard to credit in these days, where even using a non SSD equipped computer is painful, I used to happily wait several seconds for Program Manager to repaint itself.
It was really good but I think it came out at a time where people were moving away from the genre. I don't remember it getting the attention it deserved.
Man, this takes me back. For me, the two pinnacles of my childhood PC gaming were easily Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle. I was so thrilled when Ron Gilbert announced his Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park. Hopefully Disney one day sells him back the rights to Monkey Island, I'd love a true sequel by its creator.
I'd love that too - although I have to say I didn't really like the endings to MI2 or Thimbleweed Park, so I might love it even more if RG writes everything except the ending...
Yeah, the MI2 ending was definitely bizarre, but for me it was an off-the-wall way that made me really interested to see what happens next... Kind of like the ending of Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
Apparently Ron had a final chapter in mind for Monkey Island, but with Disney/Lucas owning the rights, we'll probably never see it. I'm guessing the last chapter might do a bit of retconning on the final moments of Part 2, but no one outside of Ron apparently knows how it ends. :(
This game captured a magical point in gaming where me my brother and my mother were playing on our PC, and my cousin and uncle were playing on another at the same time, keeping each other up to date on progress.
We all were blocked at the same point until my uncle found the puzzle where you have to close a door to get the keys, and as soon as he found it he phoned my mom and we all progressed.
That type of puzzle discovery hasn't happened since. Amazing game and amazing memory.
I had the same experience with a friend and Simon the Sorcerer. We would play separately and call each other to compare progress. I was happy when I beat him with about 30 minutes. I need to replay that game with my kids.
Walkthroughs in text today are OK because you can read until the first mention of something you haven't done to get unstuck, but nothing beats a real person giving you appropriate hints. Also, there's the Universal Hint System [1] that gives you more and more detailed hints when you're stuck, but I haven't used it in a real situation. I looked up a puzzle now that I was stuck on in Day of the Tentacle, but couldn't find it.
Shigero Miyamoto has talked about this about The Legend of Zelda. They purposely added secret stuff in that game with absolutely no hints, almost impossible to find for a single player, to encourage people to talk about the game in school and elsewhere. You could only find the secrets when discussing the game with others, which was what they intended. Imagine getting a hint at school and having to wait until you can run home and test it; that way you're thinking about the game all day!
Speaking of obscure, getting Washington to cut down the cherry tree by painting the fruit red got me stuck as a kid in Sweden. I hadn't heard the cherry tree myth (and now only through the game) and even if they gave hints in the dialogue, I didn't get those either. I don't even remember if I got past it or if I gave up.
I replayed the remastered game a couple of years ago on PS4 with my daughter who was seven years old, and this time the only thing I was stuck on was the cat puzzle with the squeaky mattresses. I read a blog post just now about that puzzle, and it's special because you use the Use verb on two different things outside of your inventory. You usually go inventory->world or inventory->inventory, but here it's world->world. So I had to look up that one solution in the whole game.
Playing as an adult, it's much easier to keep in mind what clues you have and what the open puzzles are. As a kid, I would just start using everything with everything else, and the hints from failed interactions wouldn't clue me in. Now I see they make a really god job at telling you why things don't work and what you should try instead.
I was pleasantly surprised that my daughter thought the game was hilarious. I expected her to get bored quickly, but we played through it all together.
The puzzle that blocked me for days was that of reading some kind of boring manual to a horse to make it sleep. I still remember myself (a kid) jumping all around the room.
This game taught me that humour and story can be conveyed extremely effectively through player choices. It was eye opening (and hilariously satisfying).
The strong coherence between story, time, and gameplay was really really striking
I still love all those games, and play them from time to time using ScummVM [1], which I installed on my PC and Mac. Back at the time, I bought them in boxed editions and was so thrilled to get them! I still have those original games as part of my greatest 80's collection items. The SCUMM engine is also very interesting to look at, internally.
One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground
So, friggin what. I dearly wish more game designers (and not a few critics) would remember that a lot of these games are meant to be fun. I don't want some message or insight or innovation all the time. I often want to sit down and spend some time having fun and unwinding. Its not a negative, its like the comfort of an old book that I've decided to reread.
Plus, fun and funny are damn tough to get right. Its so much easier to do drama than comedy because a so-so drama is still ok, but a so-so comedy is just bad.
I have so many good memories of playing this game with friends back in the 90s. I played it again recently with my teenager nephews and they loved it. The humor still works and the puzzles are challenging.
[1]: https://www.gog.com/game/day_of_the_tentacle_remastered