As you may have read, I spent a good amount of time this morning playing Tim Schafer: The Game, which naturally had me reminiscing about the good old days of point-and-click adventures. Sure, the genre is starting to make a comeback and that’s awesome, but it’s not anywhere near what it was in the early 1990s, when LucasArts was releasing adventure games that would be eventually be hailed as classics. I was originally introduced to the genre with the NES version of Maniac Mansion, and I was thrilled to find out, several years later, that there was actually a sequel to this game: Day of the Tentacle. It soon became an obsession.

I first played DoTT at the house of one of my best friends. We would sit in front of her family’s computer, trying to figure out those damn time-traveling puzzles. We were kids, we couldn’t get very far, and would usually get stuck and give up. She eventually lost interest, but I somehow convinced my parents to buy the game, which by that time was being released in a set with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max Hit the Road (which are also awesome, but I’ve discussed those elsewhere). Finally, I could play Day of the Tentacle on my own time, whenever I wanted! Well, sort of. My parents were kind of strict about how much time my brothers and I could spend on video games, and the computer was shared between my siblings, and my parents, and myself. Still, I had the game, and I was going to finish it.

I remember my excitement the first time I got to the future and found Laverne trapped in the human kennel in a world overrun with tentacles. Playing through this game now, I can probably get there in about 10 minutes, but before I had every nook and cranny of this game committed to memory, and before information about every game ever made was readily available on the internet, this was a huge accomplishment. I made Betsy Ross change the American flag 200 years in the past so I could wear it as a tentacle costume 200 years in the future. I had vacuum cleaners added to the Constitution, froze a hamster so it could fulfill its destiny centuries later, and finally, finally reunited Hoagie, Laverne, and Bernard so that they could take down Purple Tentacle once and for all. I was so close to the end…

And then I got grounded.

Why was I grounded? I really don’t remember. I would guess I was probably mouthing off to my parents, or fighting with my brothers. All I remember is, I wasn’t allowed to use the computer or play video games for an entire week. I couldn’t finish Day of the Tentacle until my grounding was over, and all I could think was, what if one of my brothers beat it first in the meantime?

I don’t remember many details of that particular punishment, but without video games, I’m sure it was a long, boring week. At any rate, Sunday came, and I was free once again. I woke up extraordinarily early, and plopped myself down in front of the computer in my pajamas, vowing not to walk away until the game was complete. A short time later, I was watching the credits roll.

I’ve played through the game again since then, but nothing really compares to the first time you play an adventure game. The puzzles will never be new again, and I’ll never again hit a dead end; I can never recapture that magic. Tim Schafer, one of the game’s designers, is now hailed as an industry legend; the other, Dave Grossman, went on to work for Telltale Games, who are the forerunners in the revitalization of the point-and-click genre (including the awesome Sam & Max episodic series). I may never get another new game in the Maniac Mansion series, but I’ll always remember how the original and its sequel dominated my younger days.

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