Computer Gaming World opened its review in September 1993 by saying that calling Day of the Tentacle a sequel to Maniac Mansion was “a little like calling the space shuttle a sequel to the slingshot”. To prove the point, LucasArts had put the whole of the 1987 game inside the new one, running on a computer in one of its rooms. Six years had turned the blocky Commodore 64 adventure into something that looked and moved like a Warner Bros. cartoon, and on CD-ROM every line of it was spoken aloud. It was also the first game Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman led themselves, and its central idea was a puzzle that crossed three centuries: an object left in the past could be picked up centuries later, and a toilet could send it through time.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: LucasArts; published in Britain by US Gold.
- Project leaders and designers: Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Peter Chan was lead artist.
- Released: 1993, for PC on floppy disk ($59.95) and CD-ROM ($69.95), and for the Macintosh. Its full title was Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle.
- Engine: SCUMM.
- Predecessor: Maniac Mansion (1987), which is playable inside it.
- Remastered: by Double Fine Productions, released on 22 March 2016.
Two new leaders
After Monkey Island 2, the core of the Monkey Island team moved on to the Maniac Mansion sequel, and Schafer and Grossman, who had been Ron Gilbert’s assistant designers and co-writers, were put in charge. “Dave Grossman and I were co-project leaders on that one,” Schafer told Retro Gamer. “We designed it together, and each wrote half the dialog.” The time travel came from Ron Gilbert, who said he “had always had this story idea for Maniac Mansion II that involved going back in time”. Retro Gamer noted that the game is set five years after the first.
The plot
Dr Fred Edison’s Sludge-O-Matic is dumping toxic waste into the stream behind his house. His two pet tentacles pass by; the Green Tentacle warns the Purple one not to drink it, and Purple drinks anyway. He grows stubby arms, a super-intelligence and a plan for world domination. Green sends a plea for help by hamster to Bernard Bernoulli, the geeky hero of Maniac Mansion, who brings two new friends: Hoagie, a heavy-metal roadie, and Laverne, a medical student. Dr Fred’s plan is to send all three back one day to switch the machine off before Purple can drink. His time machines, the Chron-o-Johns, are converted portable toilets, and they misfire.
Hoagie lands in colonial America, in the time of Benjamin Franklin. Laverne lands in the future, in a world where tentacles rule and keep humans as pets. Bernard ends up back in the present. The player switches between them at will.
Puzzles across time
The three characters help each other by flushing objects through the Chron-o-Johns, and much of the game’s difficulty, as Computer Gaming World’s Charles Ardai explained, came from never knowing “in which era it will turn out to be useful”. A bucket of paint Hoagie finds might be what Bernard needs; three sets of false teeth travel back and forth, “suggesting the rather unpalatable conclusion that dentures are the one truly universal commodity in human history”. Ardai listed some of the tasks. Hoagie plays “three cruel practical jokes on George Washington and one on Betsy Ross” and amends the Constitution, and gets Benjamin Franklin to charge a battery for him. Laverne disguises herself as a tentacle and wins a “best human pet” contest with a corpse as her entry. Bernard deals with the tax inspectors who have tied up Dr Fred in red tape.
The house is the same in each era but changes over the centuries, so the player explores rooms that are, in Ardai’s words, “simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar”. Like the other LucasArts adventures of the time, the game could not be lost. “One cannot die,” Ardai wrote. “One cannot even back one’s characters into a dead end, not even accidentally.” He thought the dialogue gained most from this: no line was a trap, and “the player is never, ever punished for doing something funny”. The graphic adventure entry tells how LucasArts came to design its games this way.
A cartoon in SCUMM
The game ran on SCUMM, the scripting system first written for Maniac Mansion. The interface had been “refined down to the now-standard nine verbs”, such as Give, Talk To, Push and Open, and the verb that suited whatever the pointer rested on was highlighted. Compute! called the mouse-driven SCUMM interface “one of the genre’s most intuitive and friendly”.
The art was the bigger change. Reviewers compared it with the Warner Bros. cartoons of Chuck Jones: Computer Gaming World described “lush and colorful” graphics “with skewed perspectives and grotesque characters”, in which every scene was animated and characters performed “lots of weird, once-in-the-game actions rather than just cycling through a stock series of poses”. Compute! credited the lead artist, Peter Chan, with “a wonderfully inventive, almost surreal edge”. Grossman later explained that Chan had been trying “a particular hybrid of scanned and computer art”, and that he was “pretty sure the main reason we owned a scanner in the first place was that Sierra had one”. The game opened with an animated credits sequence that Compute! thought “good enough to sit through several times”, and which the SCUMM programmer Aric Wilmunder later named among his favourite moments of his LucasArts years.
A talkie
Day of the Tentacle was released on floppy disk and on CD-ROM, and the two were not equal. On floppy the speech stopped after the introduction. The CD-ROM version, Compute! reported, held more than 268MB of sound and “features talking characters throughout”. Grossman said the decision to voice the whole game was taken midway through production, “mainly because full voice was a game-changing thing that was becoming feasible now that enough people had CD-ROM drives, but also partly because Sierra was doing it”.
The best-known voice was Richard Sanders, Les Nessman in the American sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, as Bernard. Ardai named Jane Jacobs as Laverne and Denny Delk as Hoagie, but complained that LucasArts credited only Sanders: he had to search a promotional newsletter for the other two names, and he said the practice “shortchanges both the actors and the audience”. Even the box was a joke; the CD edition came in a triangular one.
Maniac Mansion inside
The complete Maniac Mansion runs on a computer in one of the rooms, and the player can stop and play it from start to finish. Compute! found it there “CGA graphics and PC speaker sounds intact”, and warned that the experience was “like falling through a primordial portal of computer gaming”. Ardai thought the story and puzzles still held up but that “their presentation is downright primitive”, and that only “nostalgia or curiosity” would get a modern player through it. Weird Ed himself appears in the new game too, in what Ardai called “a hilarious cameo”.
Reception and remaster
Ardai concluded that it was “extremely funny without being unplayable” and expected it to keep people entertained “for quite some time to come”; Scott A. May of Compute! called it “terrific fun from start to finish”. In Britain, US Gold sold it for £43. Twenty years later Retro Gamer wrote that “it was Day Of The Tentacle that upped the ante and perfected the graphic adventure genre”. Grossman, asked in 2013 what made it work, pointed to “its strong unified vision. Art, animation, writing, music, and so on, all working toward the common goal of making you feel like you’re a character in a Chuck Jones cartoon.”
Schafer’s Double Fine Productions released Day of the Tentacle Remastered on 22 March 2016, the year after its Grim Fandango remaster. It has new hand-drawn high-resolution art and remastered audio, and the player can switch to the original version at any point. Its commentary track brings back Schafer, Grossman, Peter Chan, the artist Larry Ahern and the composers Peter McConnell and Clint Bajakian. It came out for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Linux and iOS, among other systems.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993, pp. 46–47 and 80: Charles Ardai’s review (the “space shuttle” comparison, Maniac Mansion inside the game, the plot and eras, the puzzles, no deaths or dead ends, the nine verbs, the voice actors and their credits, the triangular CD box, prices, designers).
- Compute! issue 159, December 1993, p. 118: Scott A. May’s review (the hidden Maniac Mansion, the Chron-o-Johns, the SCUMM interface, speech on floppy and CD-ROM, 268MB of sound, Richard Sanders, Peter Chan, the opening credits, prices).
- Edge issue 1, October 1993: UK charts (Day of the Tentacle, US Gold, £43).
- Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 40–43: Tim Schafer profile (the Monkey Island team moving to the sequel; co-project leaders with Grossman; each writing half the dialogue).
- Retro Gamer issue 27, 2006, p. 35: Maniac Mansion reached through a computer inside Day of the Tentacle; p. 39, games guide (set five years after the original; DOS and Macintosh); LucasArts release list (Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle, PC, PC CD-ROM and Mac CD-ROM).
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Gilbert’s time-travel idea for the sequel.
- Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, pp. 72–79, “SCUMM Origins”: Aric Wilmunder on the opening animation.
- Retro Gamer issue 114, 2013, p. 54: “perfected the graphic adventure genre”; Dave Grossman on Peter Chan’s scanned art, the decision to add full speech, and the game’s “unified vision”.
- Double Fine Productions, “Day of the Tentacle Remastered” (web, secondary; the publisher’s own page, accessed September 2026): release date, platforms, art, audio, classic mode and commentary. https://www.doublefine.com/games/day-of-the-tentacle-remastered