kartooner

The year was 1993. My brother and I were brows­ing the soft­ware sec­tion at Com­pUSA, thumb­ing through var­i­ous CD’s, see­ing if any of them caught our eye. Off in the cor­ner of the store I can remem­ber a kid play­ing Prince of Per­sia 2 and my brother and I stand­ing behind him in utter amaze­ment. As an observer, the game looked extremely dif­fi­cult and com­pletely dif­fer­ent than your stan­dard Mario adventure.

We decided that while it looked cool enough, we needed some­thing with less action and more humor and game­play. Since we were fans of the King’s Quest series, we opted to search for an adven­ture game in the same vein as the Roberta William’s clas­sics and yet some­thing with spunk. Sev­eral min­utes of search­ing finally yielded some­thing of inter­est. The game, enti­tled Maniac Man­sion: Day of the Ten­ta­cle stood out like a sore thumb.

On a side note I should men­tion that most of the time I pur­chase a prod­uct based entirely on the pack­ag­ing, which is both a good and bad thing. In this instance, the pack­ag­ing for Day of the Ten­ta­cle had a great color scheme (deep pur­ple con­trasted by “slime” green) with what appeared to be a pur­ple ten­ta­cle, ray gun in hand, chas­ing a nerd off the bot­tom right cor­ner of the box. It was pack­ag­ing genius in the purest sense of the word and after scan­ning the box we real­ized it was the sequel to one of our favorite Lucasarts adven­ture games, Maniac Man­sion. At that point I think we both turned to one another and real­ized we were hold­ing some­thing spe­cial and how right we were.

Day of the Ten­ta­cle, also known as DOTT, was the brain­child of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, bet­ter known as the duo respon­si­ble for the orig­i­nal Maniac Man­sion released in 1988. Maniac Man­sion was pow­ered by the Script Cre­ation Util­ity for Maniac Man­sion, SCUMM for short, devel­oped by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder. In later years, SCUMM would serve as the foun­da­tion for sev­eral pop­u­lar Lucasarts titles includ­ing the Mon­key Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig and another Schafer cre­ation, Full Throttle.

In recent times, thanks to the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion and per­sis­tency of fans, a group of devel­op­ers have cre­ated Scum­mVM, a vir­tual machine for clas­sic Lucasarts adven­tures. In a nut­shell, it allows you to run older Lucasarts adven­ture games on mod­ern rigs (PC and OS X), emu­lat­ing to the ‘T’ the SCUMM engine with­out so much as a sput­ter. Due to the fact Scum­mVM is released under a GPL license, the soft­ware has been ported over to run on the Dream­cast con­sole, not to men­tion other gam­ing machines, hand­helds and cell phones even.