back to article LucasArts Day of the Tentacle

Dr. Fred: I think I've made myself totally clear. Step one, find plans. Step two, save world. Step three, get out of my house! Let's get cracking! Day of the Tentacle Day of the Tentacle: suck it and see Day of the Tentacle generates a lot of good will and happy memories. The reason this was my first choice for a retro …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Thomas 4
    Thumb Down

    Lucasarts....

    ....how far you've fallen. From Day of the Tentacle and Tie Fighter to Force Unleashed II.

    1. Paul Read

      TIE Fighter turned me to the Dark Side

      and don't forget the epic Grim Fandango!

    2. I'm not sleeping...
      Pint

      Golden Era!

      They have made some of the best games I've ever player!

      - The Secret of Monkey Island (1&2)

      - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

      - Day of the Tentacle

      - Sam & Max Hit the Road

      - Full Throttle

      - Grim Fandango

      - Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

      - X-Wing

      - Tie Fighter

      - Dark Force

      - Jedi Knight

      Even if they are a shadow of their former glory, I'll drink to their legacy

      1. Ian Yates
        Holmes

        Some list

        A lot of my favourite games on that list.

        Whatever happened to good storytelling in games?

        /old fogy icon

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Go

      Your'e so right....

      .... Where are the X-Wing/Tie fighter games for the 21st century?

      Thats an IP begging to be updated, and bound to sell in the bucket load (IMHO).

      1. AdamWill

        yikes

        I was gonna say 'they made one', then I looked it up and found X-Wing Alliance was released in 1999. Yikes. Did not realize it was that old.

        Yeah, a new game in that series would be awesome. They had a few more recent Star Wars space-fighting games, but none with the sim-style controls and gameplay of the X-Wing series, sadly. Loved those games.

        I'm sure everyone still remembers the first mission of the fifth campaign in TIE Fighter. Man, did I not see that coming. Classic design =)

        1. Trygve Henriksen

          Loved X-wing...

          Still have it installed on my old Pentium, but alas, my Gravis Analog Pro joystick is getting worn out, and I'm having problems finding a good replacement.

          Incidentally, Rebel Assault and DoT was sold bundled with OS/2 Warp Connect for a while.

          But here in Norway most of the shops had no clue what 'the other box with the IBM logo' was...

          1. LesC
            Thumb Up

            Tie Fighter

            Keep an old Pentium 400 running DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.11 with the os2 workplace shell on an old Biostar mobo (+ full sized Cirrus VLBus VGA) for Tie Fighter to this day - along with an original SB AWE32 with the old type simm sockets and Pana interface. Was just about enough firepower for you to join the dark side... The same machine normally runs Cakewalk and a dumb Fatar midi piano for SWMBO and has done since the mid '90s.

            Amazingly enough Windows 3.11 is still available for Technet subscribers!

            The old Quickshot joystick + 8 bit ISA card still plugs on.

            Loved the TIE Fighter mods (shields, torpedoes) missions and the freighter called Etmon Orlac that needed inspecting :)

        2. Thomas 4

          @AdamWill

          For me, it was Campaign 4, Mission 1 of X-Wing, where you had to defend the galaxy's slowest moving freighter from a Star Destroyer and a never ending wave of TIE Fighters and TIE Bombers, with only one other X-Wing for assistance.

          That was a true gaming challenge and it felt pretty epic when I finally managed to beat it.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        erck

        They'd turn them into some kind of horrible turret shooters with pretty cut scenes with some jedi fps added in for good measure.

  2. Captain Underpants
    Thumb Up

    Only one problem here

    ...which is that LucasArts have, for some reason, not made DotT available on Steam. Get on it, LA, there are loads of us willing to pay cold hard cash for another chance to play the game :)

    1. Powerlord
      Meh

      Steam releases were their non-remakes

      My assumption was that LucasArts released the games they weren't intending to remake on Steam.

      After that, they released the remakes of Secret of Monkey Island, then Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.

      Sadly, LucasArts got a new CEO during the MI2 remake, so chances are we won't see any further remakes.

  3. DZ-Jay

    DoTT!!! Yay!

    Indeed, Day of The Tentacle is one of my most favorite games of all time. I remember playing it back in ye olde BBS days of yore and being absolutely impressed by the graphics, voices, and of course, the incredibly amusing storyline and puzzles.

    I replayed it just last year using DOSBOX, and I must say it has not lost of any of its charms. Wonderful game, a true classic.

    -dZ.

  4. advocate

    Ah those were the days

    games like Day of the Tentacle and Normality were so much better than DN Forver and they cost less. Sigh.... maybe I should create my own chron-o-john and go back a few weeks to stop myself clicking pre-order on steam...

  5. Robert Ramsay

    Hands off that hamster!!!!!

    "Bernard, float over here so I can punch yew"

  6. Ian Ferguson
    Thumb Up

    SCUMM was the best

    Pity it hasn't occurred to them that they could release a HD version of DOTT on iOS and XBox Live and make a bundle, a la Monkey Island.

    DOTT was by far the funniest SCUMM game (I hesitate to say the best, as it was quite short, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis holds a special place in my heart).

    1. AdamWill

      hum

      I always rated Sam 'n' Max the funniest, and Grim Fandango the best. (How can you top Sam 'n' Max's intro?)

  7. Cazzo Enorme

    The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

    My favourite LA game was Full Throttle, closely followed by DoTT. I haven't looked at ScummVM for a while, so I was impressed to see they now support games that I played on the Atari ST such as Personal Nightmare and Elvira.

  8. Richard IV
    Happy

    Laverne! Whatchew doing upsterrs?

    I'm upstairs? I got lost!

    So affected was I by DOTT that my first program read sprintf("Hello, Mr Tentacle Guy")

  9. David Barr

    Remake Maybe?

    Last weekend I finished Monkey Island 2. I grabbed the remakes of both on Steam for not very much. Perhaps Lucasarts intends to remake all of their classics, meaning that we might see Day of the Tentacle appear on Steam.

  10. kraz
    Happy

    Great game

    When I was little, my sister got it for Christmas one year as a way to get her to use the computer more. I remember we played it for ages and had a blast. It seemed big at the time as it came on six floppy disks - huge!

    For my birthday I got Sam and Max Hit the Road and it started a love of adventure games that has lasted since.

    What's amazing now is that I still remember so many of the puzzles and the dialogue. Agree with the people above, I want it on Steam along with all the other Lucasarts adventure games.

    Ah... the good old days when Lucasarts did something other than Star Wars and even the Star Wars games it did were decent. Better stop there otherwise I'll start reminiscing about Civ 2, Theme Park and C&C as well. "When I was your age the PC had its own games and wasn't full of stuff designed for games consoles!".

    1. Montreal Sean

      Takes me back to the good days of PC gaming...

      Leisure Suit Larry 1+2, King's Quest, Full Throttle, Dark Forces 1+2, C&C, Syndicate Wars (the first one)...

      I never got to play DoTT or Maniac Mansion, always wanted to though.

      I've had a Nintendo, and N64, original X-Box, PSP-3000, but nothing has been as much fun as those old PC games.

      1. AdamWill

        nitpick

        "Syndicate Wars (the first one)..."

        The first game was just called Syndicate. Syndicate Wars was the rather flawed sequel.

  11. Tom Servo

    *BEEP* *BEEP*

    But I've installed the bloody soundblaster 16 drivers, what's going on? where's my arsing sound? and wher's my arsing XGA resolution? sodding Windows 3.1.......

    Aaah, happy gaming days.......

    1. Thomas 4

      Pfff

      Probably got your expanded and extended memory mixed up again =P

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It was always...

        ...either the CD-ROM or mouse drivers that did it, ate up those last few kb which meant having to dick about with settings.

        A handfull of custom boot floppies took care of everything :)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Ahh custom boot floppies.

          Anyone else remember the Evesham Micro / Vale machines that had making a games boot disk as part of their start-up menu?

          Think this was one of the first games i completed, and the first decent use of the cd-blaster.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Happy

          Stop this thread please...

          ...it bring up too many memories!

          Or rather..not enough of it.

    2. Ian Yates

      Sound

      I used to love all of the options before games like this.

      "What video type? VGA, XGA, CGA, etc."

      "What soundcard? SB Pro, SB16, SB 2.1, Audigy, etc."

      Never quite being sure which options are best, so always trying a different one only to have the game bail when the first character tries to speak.

      Ah, the "good" old days.

      1. Trevor 3
        Pint

        Aahhhh

        SB16 IRQ 7, voices, SFX, loading DOS into the high memory area, hacky config.sys menu's, trying to get as much of your 640k back so you can play a game....oh man that was when you *had* to know your stuff, and that was when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up....

        Beer so I can cry into it over joyous memories...

        1. Sooty

          @trevor3

          SB16... you really had to know your stuff if you only had a soundblaster 'compaitble' card instead of the real thing.

          It seems amazing now, in the days of high powered graphics cards, that in the good old days it was usually sound that was the major issue. I still remember how much better settlers 2 sounded when i got a SB AWE 64... nowadays, throwing away the soundcard and using integrated was one of the better choinces I made.

    3. Danny 14
      Boffin

      dammit

      where is my 636k bootdisk (with mouse driver!)?

  12. defiler

    Squeaky mattress

    That stupid mattress stalled me for a full 6 hours. Ah - the good old days before walkthroughs available on web browsers. Kids today... Blah blah.

    Oh, and don't forget Maniac Mansion (fully playable) inside Ed's computer.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      lol

      yeah in the olden days we had to wait for the solutions in the back of pc gamer!

  13. David Given
    Thumb Up

    Maniac Mansion

    Don't forget that if, in Day of the Tentacle, you go and use the computer in (mumble)'s bedroom, you end up playing the original Maniac Mansion which DotT is a sequel to.

    Yes, in CGA. With PC speaker music. And it's still awesome.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFkPSZthxNE

    1. thesykes
      Thumb Up

      Maniac Mansion...

      tried playing it. got bored, so went to talk to the horse...

    2. DZ-Jay

      WARNING!

      Make sure not to try that in DOSBOX!! In order to exit it the Maniac Mansion in-game game, you must press CTRL+C, which the DOSBOX simulation passes directly to its virtual kernel, causing you to exit the DOTT game and all back to the DOS prompt.

      This is a known issue with some games in DOSBOX. Make sure to save your DOTT game before playing the Maniac Mansion one.

      -dZ.

      1. Danny 14

        aye

        run dosbox with -startmapper and remap it.

        1. DZ-Jay

          Re: aye

          As far as I know, CTRL+C cannot be remap, since it hooks to a lower level interrupt routine.

          -dZ.

      2. Christos Georgiou
        Boffin

        Gotta love POSIX systems

        stty intr ^@

        dosbox

        stty intr ^c

  14. LPF
    Thumb Up

    Mr Jones I persume ?

    Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis first adventure game I finished from start to end :D

    X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance need a god damn remake, their combat still has not been topped.

    Nothing like running a raid in X-Wing only to have a god damn star destroyer turn up out of no where and the music to kick in.. Man those kids today have no idea what they missed :D

    1. tfewster
      Thumb Up

      Happy memories of Star Destroyers

      Most of the Star Destroyers in X-Wing could be destroyed, if you had the patience to knock down their shield generators and the will to obliterate every enemy; IIRC, the best one was the aptly named "Badi Dea", which launched dozens of attackers as soon as you hit it. If you destroyed all six in each squadron, a new squad would launch - And if you just killed 5 of the 6, the last would occasionally crash itself so a new squad could launch.

      Yep, I had a lot of time & very little money back then

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Happy days...

    Now being relived thanks to scumm on android and <ahem> copying the CD onto the phone... it's tricky picking some things up.... still, nice to hear the voices again.

    Sam N Max also runs quite happily too.. unfortunately these are the only scumm games I actually legally own (OK, maybe copying them onto the phone isn't 100% legit....)

  16. Framitz

    I do remember, but

    I do remember having and playing this game, but I don't remember any details because the game just was not one to remember.

    Played it through, and immediately forgot about it which is a strong indicator that it wasn't all that great.

    I've played a few games that were on my mind for days after finishing them, but they were few and far between.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It was cool, but...

    I still couldn't help hoping for a more forward sequel to Maniac Mansion / Zak McKraken despite how nice this game was. IMO it never did manage to really top either of the first two.

  18. Rob Beard
    Coat

    Good memories

    I remember seeing a demo of DOTT and thinking "I must get that game". I think overall I've bought that and the Monkey Island series of games at least 3 times in the past (and the Monkey Island remakes again on the XBOX).

    It's hard to say which one I like the most out of DOTT and Monkey Island, maybe DOTT trumps MI ever so slightly.

    I remember introducing a couple of friends to DOTT back in the day, they occasionally quote lines from DOTT to me, and I make an iPhone owning friend jealous when I showed him DOTT running in ScummVM on my Galaxy S.

    I hope that Lucas Arts do a remake of DOTT, although saying that it's pretty much spot on all ready.

    Mine is the one with the fake imitation diamond in the pocket.

    Rob

  19. Mystic Megabyte
    Linux

    Free stuff

    SCUMM and two free games are in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

    The Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky

    1. Ian Ferguson
      Thumb Up

      Beneath a Steel Sky

      Another excellent SCUMM game, with an oddly British slant. Available on the iPhone too.

      1. AdamWill

        nope

        BASS wasn't SCUMM, it was from a different company and uses a different engine, with an interface that obviously took a lot of cues from the SCUMM games (as many adventures did at the time). ScummVM has broadened out and runs far more than just SCUMM games now.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Erm voices...

    ... Didnt the voices only come a couple of years later with the advent of CDROM (a 1 speed huge fold out tray as I recall). I remember playing the original release 3.5" floppy of this game, and all "voices" were simply cartoon style Bubble Text. All sound was produced by my state of the art Soundblaster sound card, with a whopping 8 bits of sound, and no wavetable. The whole game sounded like it was being played on a 70's Hammond Organ.

    However, it remains my all time favorite adventure game. I still remember having to <spolier alert> paint tippex on the bottom of the fence, in order to turn the cat that rubbed up against it, into an apparent skunk!

    1. madhatt3r
      Holmes

      i seem to remember

      that the floppy version had the voices during the intro, rest of the game was text. It also took more than 5 floppies...10 or 15 or some crazy amount, like that Sherlock Holmes and the Scalpel thingie.

      And Full throttle being the first complete talkie, only available on CD.

  21. netean

    how the mighty fall

    Considering how old this game, I still think it holds up amazingly well - the dialogue is snappy, gameplay is still good, puzzles still challenging and amusing.

    A lot of the SCUMM games are actually superb in many ways and most hold up suprisingly well in terms of gameplay.

    There was a time that Lucas Arts Games were a dead cert quality game. You didn't have to read a review, you just knew that it would be quality, quality acting, dialogue, gameplay, story, animation etc.

    I'm hard pressed to think of a single title that Lucas arts have released in over a decade that doesn't suck donkey c*c*. (If you even dare mention KOTR - I'll come round and slap you, a game so boring and devoid of ambiance and "star Wars-ness" that the developers should be shot!)

    I can play many of Lucas Arts old games again and again and again (as I can with many of the non LucasArts SCUMM games)

    I wouldn't touch any of their modern garbage with your ten foot pole, let alone my own.

  22. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

    Best game ever

    Because I played this when i was very young and interested me a lot, thank god for ScummVM as it makes it work as good as new :D

    No-one mentioned The Dig? I also thought that was a fantastic game for its time.

    1. AdamWill

      fun facts

      yeah, I liked The Dig, though I think the fact that it's almost entirely joke-free, and some of the extremely hard puzzles, kinda knock it down a few pegs. Fun facts - a lot of the writing on The Dig was done by Orson Scott Card, who also (much more fun fact) wrote quite a lot of the insult swordfight dialog for Monkey Island. yes. Really.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Those were the days

    SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 t3

  24. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

    You kids and youre new-fangled graphics and sound stuff!

    When I was your age, our graphics engine was in our heads!

    We played Infocom adventures and we liked it! Real sentences to type, none of that fancy-shmancy mouse-clicky-thingy!

    Now get off my lawn!

    ObSerious: Oh, for the LucasArts of yore. The days when you saw that guy with the golden arc thingy pop up on your screen and you knew you were in for a treat.

  25. Gusty O'Windflap

    all those in favour...

    say "aye"! I would love to have an up to date X-Wing or TIE Fighter game, it would certainly make use of the old thrustmaster top gun oojamaflip joystick again

  26. Arnie
    Thumb Up

    XBMC?

    Scummvm + XBMC

    That is all

  27. Peter Kay
    Thumb Up

    Awesome

    I do tend to think that whilst DOTT is very funny, the better adventure game is Fate of Atlantis - probably still my favourite adventure game.

    Also, to nitpick, I suspect DOTT was actually released by Lucasfilm Games. If you attach an MT32 sound module to your system it displays 'Lucasfilm Games' on startup.

    It's worth seeking out the original games and an MT32 (rev 2, with the 32 computer game samples) - the sound is an awful lot better than SoundBlaster FM music. Sadly the DOSBox emulation, the special version of SCUMM bundled with the Steam game versions and SCUMMVM aren't quite the same.

    You should also go to www.scummvm.org to play the old SCUMM games cross platform and pick up some free games, mind.

    I disagree that KOTOR isn't Star Warsy - personally I'm finding it to be excellent so far. Jedi Knight is probably the pinnacle of the Lucasarts FPS, although Dark Forces (with iMuse interactive music) and the much easier to get working Jedi Knight Outcast are also a lot of fun.

  28. Jay 2

    c:\>win

    I recall that I set up a DOS boot menu to make life easier when playing games. It had options for all drivers, no drivers and loads of CD-ROM/soundcard/etc combinations. I just couldn't face manually messing about with autoexec.bat/config.sys every time I wanted to play a different game.

  29. Bernard M. Orwell

    Red Five Standing By....

    Ah, Tie Fighter vs X-Wing!

    That was one of the first epically great LAN games that we played. As I recall it was a 20hr marathon and I even had to take a short break to go to work for an hour or so in the middle. I also managed to fall asleep at the control of my Tie-In and woke myself by slamming it into the side of an ISD; something my cohorts have never allowed me to forget even some 17 years later! (or thereabouts).

    In our collective opinion no game has ever replicated the sheer playability of TvX and since then we have been searching endlessly for a game that can step into those vacant shoes.

    C'mon LucasArts, where's the genius you once showed!

    (PS, its kinda interesting what you can do with Unity3D and the assets from TvX...;) )

  30. Christos Georgiou
    Gimp

    Favourite puzzle of DotT

    How is a guy supposed to make it rain?

    Actually, the solution was quite obvious to me, as I bet it was for countless other guys, given the state of the cart outside. I laughed very hard.

    The Dig was a great game, too, which nobody mentioned. That one was the most movie-like adventure experience I had. I believe the original idea was used for some movies later on.

  31. T.a.f.T.

    Fond memories

    My brother pointed gog.com to me; it has lots of nice old titles up there but sadly it does not look like Lucas arts is there :-( There are plenty of other great old games though so hopefully a few of them will get reviewed in future editions of this column?

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Good Times

    My god! I only just remembered this game! I must have played through it about 10 times when I was about 8 years old. So good. There aren't enough point and click adventures.

  33. Rob - Denmark
    Thumb Up

    prompt=[%computername%] $d$s$t$_$p$_$_$+$g

    Oh yes, them good old DOS days.

    I loved DOTT. Felt so great when I had played through it, after I had been 'stuck' quite a few times. Wonder if I still have it somewhere.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like