Day of the Tentacle satirizes pet ownership
I first played Day of the Tentacle at my friend’s house in elementary school. We’d go down into his basement, boot up his father’s DOS computer — which was utterly mysterious to me coming from a family of Macintosh users — and make our way through games like The Dig, Wing Commander III and the aforementioned LucasArts classic. I played the point-and-click adventure sometime in the initial few years after its 1993 release.
In the title, Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne attempt to travel back in time to stop mutated monsters, called tentacles, from taking over the world. Inadvertently, however, Bernard remains in the present day, Hoagie is sent to the American Revolutionary War, and Laverne is stuck in the future, at which point mutants have solidified their power. The characters must solve a series of wacky puzzles to repair their time machines and defeat the tentacles.
The game was remastered in 2016 and since then I’ve replayed the title a number of times. At this point, I’m fairly comfortable calling it one of my favorite games ever made. I had the opportunity in 2017 to interview Dave Grossman for Splice Today. He was a project leader for Day of the Tentacle alongside Tim Schafer. When I asked him what made the title so beloved, he gave a thoughtful answer. In short, the developer believed his game provided a unified experience.
“Everything is in service of this one goal of making you feel like a cartoon character,” Grossman said. “I look like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. I squash and stretch when I walk around. So does everybody else. The lines are funny. Even the puzzles are designed so I have to think like a cartoon character in order to finish this game… Nothing was in argument with the central aesthetic. It felt like all the parts were working together to create this thing.”
On my most recent playthrough of Day of the Tentacle, I decided to focus on Laverne’s storyline. The oddest of the misfit trio, Laverne travels 200 years into the future, by which point tentacles have enslaved humanity. As an animal activist, I was interested in how the absurdist dystopia satirizes pet ownership. The system is obviously much more benign than raising creatures for food, yet it puts animals in a position of perilous dependence.
The game hints at this when Laverne insists to one of her tentacle captors that she doesn’t have an owner. “Gosh, no owner, you say?” A guard responds. “Well, don’t worry about it. I’m sure someone will come adopt you before we have to put you to sleep.” In the real world, we kill millions of healthy pets every year due to overpopulation concerns. Activists opposed to domestication generally support pet adoption as a means of saving lives.
Later, Laverne participates in the equivalent of a dog show, which another human prisoner finds degrading. “The slimy tentacles put humans in humiliating little costumes, do sickening things to their hair, and then force them to parade their ridiculous talents in front of unqualified judges,” he says. Analogous shows for dogs promote the inbreeding of animals in pursuit of specific characteristics or traits. The process frequently has adverse health effects.
Like a pet, Laverne has no control over her existence. Even when it comes to going to the bathroom, she relies on the tentacles to bring her outside for a walk. “OK, human,” the guard says absentmindedly. “Do your business.” There’s, of course, nothing wrong with being so dependent on someone else. However, it’s a relationship that can lead to mistreatment. We see this in horrific cases of abuse and more commonplace examples of thoughtlessness.
Charles Ardai praised Day of the Tentacle in the September 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World. “[The title] is extremely funny without being unplayable, logical without sacrificing the marvelous illogic of cartoondom, and challenging without losing its sense of whimsy,” he wrote. “It may not hold up for 50 years, like the cartoons that inspired it, but I expect that this game will keep entertaining people for quite some time to come.”
Having just replayed the game — approximately 30 years after its release — I’m confident the title will continue to impress for at least another two decades. Day of the Tentacle is one of the very best games the point-and-click adventure genre has to offer. Sure, it has flaws. Like many titles in the category, puzzle solutions often range from too difficult to downright arbitrary. However, Day of the Tentacle remains a masterpiece in my view.