Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle

About the game

Day of the Tentacle sends three gloriously unqualified teenagers — nerd Bernard, metalhead Hoagie and twitchy med student Laverne — to stop Purple Tentacle, who has drunk toxic sludge, grown arms, and resolved to conquer the world. The time machine malfunctions immediately, stranding Hoagie two hundred years in the past with the American founding fathers and Laverne in a tentacle-ruled future, while Bernard holds down the present.

The triple-timeline structure is the finest puzzle architecture the genre ever produced. The three kids can flush small objects to each other through time, but the real currency is causality: change the design of the flag in 1793 and the future changes with it; persuade a founding father to put a vacuum cleaner in the basement and history obliges. Every solution is a joke, and every joke is a mechanism.

Presented as a playable Chuck Jones cartoon — squash-and-stretch animation, full voice acting on CD — it refined the no-death LucasArts philosophy into something effortless. It regularly tops lists of the best adventure games ever made, and its causality puzzles remain the genre's high-water mark.

Technical notes

SCUMM engine with full CD voice acting and cel-animation production values; famously includes the entire original Maniac Mansion playable on an in-game computer. Documented in DOS and Mac releases.