Day of the Tentacle

Boss Fight Books #32

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Video Games, Games

160 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[bubez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get that it's your dream book, on your favourite game, and you're preserving some material recently gone offline (from USgamer), but this isn't the "definitive" book on DotT, nor the definitive history. Sorry, Bob.

The McConnell interview is the most coherent and readable part; the whole "oral history" stuff pairs some chunks of text with almost no context and no observations nor expansion of the concepts and references, and most of them aren't that much interesting or the same concept is basically repeated by different guys (or the same one in different interviews). It kinda feels rushed, just a temporary collage of archival bits to be worked in a substantial book, but published by mistake sandwiched between unfunny/embarassed preface and afterword by a couple of the protagonists.

I guess it's quite impenetrable to someone who hasn't played the game and isn't old, and privileged, enough to remember PC gaming in the early to mid 90s.

I take away some random trivia, like Chuck Jones, Steven Spielberg, and the LucasArts archive unit. The rest is more or less nothing unusual or really interesting, and I haven't read that much on the subject — I never listened to the commentary track on the Remastered past the first couple of minutes!

I am truly saddened by this wasted chance. I am quite sure that Mackey could have done better. Let's hope for a Remastered version of this book?

And, oh, the bit.ly¹ links in the notes to the various interviews are embarassing, especially after Mackey reminded us of the transient nature of the internet, with the remains of USgamer preserved by the Wayback Machine.


¹as for bitly: you should be able to see where a link is going to take you by adding a + sign at the end of the url. I am honestly been avoiding the bitly shortened urls for years, so I don't know if it's still working.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the epilogue to DAY OF THE TENTACLE, Bob Mackey expands on why he endeavored to chronicle the making of one of LucasArts' titular point-and-click classic. To paraphrase: He published it on a website, but knew, as a games journalist, that the neverending deluge of content would push his labor of love off that website's front page and into the ether of page 2 and beyond where no one may ever see it again.

That resonated with me. Like Mackey, I wrote articles and news stories as a member of the games press for years before growing disillusioned. Only a fraction of my content was evergreen. That was by necessity: Games reporters, like journalists of any other beat in any other industry, are expected to cover news as it happens. Most of that news is relevant for a few hours, a few days at best. Then it's gone, buried under a waterfall of more news, more news, more news.

Mackey's DAY OF THE TENTACLE, published by Boss Fight Books, preserves his oral history of that game and expands on it. Whether he set out to write the definitive account of this classic adventure game or not, that's precisely what he did. Mackey talked with members of the original dev team and the 2016 remaster to ask every question a fan of the game and of LucasArts' take on the point-and-click adventure genre could think to ask. Character design, backgrounds, puzzle creation, narrative, soundtrack--all topics are covered in great detail.

I loved point-and-click adventures in the '90s. Mackey observes that many players fell into one of two camps: Sierra On-Line, home of great stories such as King's Quest and Gabriel Knight; or LucasArts, purveyors of Indiana Jones, Maniac Mansion, Full Throttle, and, of course, Day of the Tentacle. I was fortunate and privileged enough to play games from both studios; I've even written thousands of words about them. But DAY OF THE TENTACLE managed to surprise me, and more than once, to boot. I didn't know, for example, that the scripting language and audio system LucasArts designed worked in tandem so that in-game movies (cinematics) and their accompanying soundtracks played at a speed that depended on the speed of the user's PC.

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.

[Jay Slayton-Joslin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book on a great game. The mass interview style for big groups made me a bit lost sometimes, though worked well for the composer. The writer did a good job of expressing their love for the game and their research (which by their own admission was lots of previous interviews). Not sure it would convince someone who wasn't familiar with the game to love it, but it is a game that deserves to be loved.

[Barry · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a disappointment. This book is 90% formatted like an oral history, making it seem like a copy+paste job—which I gather it kind of is. Give me narrative; give me connective tissue. Instead what's here are rambling, unedited quotes with too many commas. The formatting and copyediting mishaps, typically ignorable, here cause the book to feel even more undercooked.

I'm a huge fan of Boss Fight Books. This installment's a big letdown though.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have any passing interest in the video game industry and you aren't reading the Boss Fight Books volumes you are doing yourself a major disservice. Even with video games that I have no history with the books always contain interesting information about the video game it covers, the writer's personal connection to it, and makes me think about video games more critically. Bob Mackey's Day of the Tentacle is no exception. Primarily an oral history of the making of Day of the Tentacle, Mackey uses GDC talks, podcasts, interviews, and his own interviews with the lead creative forces behind Day of the Tentacle to show how such a singular vision was put together by a team of people.
I have no personal connection to Day of the Tentacle. I knew about it, but to learn about some of the ways it was a pioneer within the Point-and-Click genre, and how things like its music worked was fascinating. Bob did a great job of gathering and curating these interviews into clear areas of focus for each chapter. If you're a fan of Day of the Tentacle you should already have this book. This is well worth a look if you're at all curious.

[Bluwacky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of old, transcribed interviews about the development of a classic graphic adventure from 1993. I hesitate to describe this as a book, in some ways; there's some loosely introductory material on some of the topics but there's little to no narrative and there's almost no authorial voice included. Despite Mackey's avowed fandom of the game, the format hamstrings any of that passion coming through; while the retelling of elements of the game's development is technically interesting, it's also really rather dry.

[Ryan Simmons]

As a huge Day of the Tentacle fan, this was a lovely seasoning on top of the fandom. It's ultimately a compilation of old interviews but it entertains fans beginning to end.

While I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, I have played it through multiple times in the past few decades. A decent level of familiarity is definitely a prerequisite for the book. You can't just pick it up and understand what they're talking about when they casually mention the John Hancock thing.

I really enjoy all of the boss fight books. They're always entertaining and interesting.

[Bob Makin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid boss fight book. Not a huge fan of the interviews, could have been compiled together as one whole “making of”, but at the same time that might not have been as interesting as reading this from the horses mouth. Overall an easy read and great subject matter. Could it have been better? Perhaps. But still learned a lot about DOTT

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book that is a collection of interviews and development tidbits about Day of the Tentacle and the remaster in 2016. Very interesting as I am a fan of lucasarts. I hope this isn't the last time we hear from the author.

4/5 stars