Bob Mackey is a writer, podcaster, and video game historian, and has been the co-host of the classic gaming podcast, Retronauts, since 2011. He's also the co-host and co-creator of the Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon podcasts, and transitioned to being a full-time podcaster after video game websites simply stopped existing. You can find him in Vancouver, BC with his wife and parrot, though often not at the same time. This is his first book.

Day of the Tentacle by Bob Mackey

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.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Bob Mackey's oral history of Day of the Tentacle sweeps you back through time to some of the earliest days at venerable adventure game studio LucasArts. Day of the Tentacle was (and remains) a fantastic game, and its origin story makes for compulsive reading. -David L. Craddock, curator, StoryBundle

 

REVIEWS

  • "A wonderfully nostalgic look not just at the game itself, but the whole genre that was super exciting in the early 90s."

    – Goodreads reviewer

  • "Bob did an excellent job. [...] It shines a light on a game I had previously passed over and shared the game's history with me."

    – Paul Werkema

  • "Mackey's passion and thorough research emanate from every chapter of this book. It's a quick, entertaining, and insightful read for fans of Day of the Tentacle, for fans of all adventure games, and for fans of how great games are made."

    – David L. Craddock
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Stars and Slime Forever

Day of the Tentacle's use of a vital moment of American history—the writing of The Constitution—made for an inspired choice, and allowed figures like John Hancock, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin to be drawn into the story of three college co-eds trying to stop an evil tentacle from taking over the world. Relying on such a specific chunk of Americana wasn't without its problems, though...

TS: Going back to the formation of the country was just something that led to a lot of great puzzles. We could change the Constitution to include things that would help you solve puzzles, and it just naturally seemed really funny to us.

DG: You'll notice it's not real American history, but sort of legendary American history. Everybody is sort of fifth-grade interpretations of the things [we've] heard, so you get George Washington's cherry tree and the wooden teeth. So, when we were talking about American history, those things were all coming up, and I think the specific moment that we chose within that came out of a desire to literally change the country in a frivolous way by editing the Constitution. That was an idea that occurred to us. "Oh, yeah, if they're making the Constitution, then we can put stuff in it, and it will be silly and arbitrary and that'll be great." So, that was why [we decided on] exact dates for [the past], just so we could muck around with the Constitution.

TS: It's kind of a spoof of taking the bigger, more comical stereotypes about George Washington and the cherry tree. Then again, if you don't know the story about George and the cherry tree, that might be a weird puzzle to [solve]. But then, they're solved the way all adventure game puzzles are solved, which is just: You talk to all the characters and try all the objects, and eventually something gives you a hint.

With all the US history in the game, some at LucasArts were concerned with DotT's reception overseas.

DG: We figured we were doing things that were sort of so basic that they would be universal, and we weren't right about that. But that was what we thought, and we just went for it. I guess by that time, we knew already that basically a third of our audience was in Germany, so we probably should have thought more about that.

TS: Specifically, marketing and management were like, "You guys, no one knows who Ben Franklin is outside this country. This is not going to sell, but let's try it." And they told us it sold better in France than in America. Sold more in Germany than in America. And, the fact is, in Europe they're just better educated about American history than we are about European history.

DG: It doesn't, in retrospect, seem to have hurt [sales] very much. The game is still a success, and people are still talking about it. So I feel like we must have done something good. But if I had it to do over again, we might think a little bit more globally about it.