The Purple Tentacle, seen here shortly after his mutation in the opening cinematic, is the main antagonist in Day of the Tentacle.

Day of the Tentacle characters (left to right) John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, Hoagie and George Washington

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Day of the Tentacle

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (DoTT) is a graphical adventure game, originally released in 1993, and published by LucasArts. It is the eighth game to use the SCUMM engine. more...

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The game was released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM, with the CD-ROM version featuring a full voiceover soundtrack. Day of the Tentacle was designed by Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer.

Gameplay

Day of the Tentacle follows the point-and-click two-dimensional adventure game formula, first established by the original Maniac Mansion. Players direct the controllable characters around the game world by clicking with the computer mouse. To interact with the game world, players choose from a set of commands arrayed on the screen and then on an object in the world. This was the last SCUMM game to use the original interface of having the bottom half of the screen taken up by a verb selection and inventory; starting with the next game to use the SCUMM engine, Sam and Max Hit the Road, the engine was modified to scroll through a more concise list of verbs with the right mouse button and to have a separate screen for the inventory. This formula carried on to later games in the franchise, such as The Dig, Full Throttle and The Curse of Monkey Island. In Day of the Tentacle, the player can switch between any one of the three playable characters at any time, though two of the characters must first be unlocked by the completion of certain puzzles. The three protagonists can also share inventory items amongst themselves (at least, those items that can be stowed in a toilet), a feature that plays into many of the game's puzzles.

In Maniac Mansion, the playable characters can be killed by various sequences of events. LucasArts adopted a different philosophy towards its adventure games in 1990, beginning with The Secret of Monkey Island. Their philosophy was that the game should not punish the player for exploring the game world. Accordingly, in most of the adventure games released by LucasArts after Monkey Island, including Day of the Tentacle, the player character(s) cannot die.

Story

Day of the Tentacle begins five years after the events in Maniac Mansion. Of the seven playable characters in the first game, only Bernard Bernoulli, a stereotypical nerd character, makes a return appearance. This time, Bernard has a starring role, as he leads his two house mates, Hoagie (voiced by Denny Delk) and Laverne (voiced by Jane Jacobs), back to the Mansion. One of Dr. Fred Edison's two creations, the Purple Tentacle, drinks industrial waste from the Mansion, growing two stubby appendages for arms and an appetite for global domination. Bernard and friends plan to travel back in time, using Dr. Fred's Port-a-Potty-turned-time machines (dubbed "Chron-o-John"s), to turn off the toxic waste producing machine therefore stopping Purple from drinking the toxic waste in the first place.