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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.