The tentacle, the monkey and the motorcycle

This article was previously published in The Loop Magazine, but as today is the 30th Anniversary of the Mac, and it was such an integral part of my early gaming experience, I thought I’d put it out there.

One of the first computer games I can actually remember playing was Asteroids. I was sitting on the carpet of my best friend’s room and we were taking turns on his machine, probably a Victor 9000, which sported a monochrome green phosphor monitor.

I remember the experience so vividly. The pebbled texture of the 5 ¼" floppy, the ka-chunk sound of the drive lock, the burping and whirring as the machine read the disk and executed the program. The keys had that beefy tension and satisfying clack that you can only find in boutique keyboards now. The games rules were incredibly rudimentary, but there was the beginnings of a real physics engine there, with coast and thrust involved.

For those of you not familiar with these older machines, it’s important to remember that many of them used the disk you inserted as their only program. There was no internal storage and the game essentially took over and became the only function of the device. As limiting as this sounds, it’s actually a very similar concept to the Information Appliance theory that informed the creation of the iPhone, which ‘becomes’ the app you’re running.

It seems silly to think that a game I played so long ago would stick in my head the way it has. I’ve played thousands of games since then that ran the gamut from text adventures to shooters and strategy and more. I even got to play a pre-release build of the very first level of Quake, totally unaware that I was looking at something that would change the face of gaming forever.

But the first few years of my gaming life continue to set the tone for how I play, how I approach creativity and even how I think. And the organization that I have to thank for that, more than any other, is LucasArts.

Founded by George Lucas as Lucasfilm Games in 1982, the studio would go on to publish some of the best games ever made for many platforms including the PC and Mac. The level of artistry, attention to detail and commitment to pushing games forward was and is unparalleled. The company was full to the brim with insane levels of talent and drive.

Last month, new Lucasfilm parent company Disney announced that it would be shutting down LucasArts and shipping off the Star Wars titles to EA. It was a sad day, to be sure, but any gamer can tell you that the studio’s output had been anything but regular over the past few years. A decent title or two popped up here and there, but it was mostly producing weak jobs based on Lucasfilm licenses, with very little hope for great original content.

But it wasn’t always that way. For a stretch of time beginning in the late 1980’s and essentially ending in 2000, LucasArts produced both licensed titles and original properties that set the gold standard for games. More specifically, it produced three titles that I feel exemplify its ‘golden age’: The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle.

Beginning in 1990 with Monkey Island and continuing through 1995’s Full Throttle, a team of designers and writers at LucasArts created some of the best moments of my gaming life. Though there were a lot of contributors to the games and many deserve mention, there are three common threads: Designers Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer.

Through those three, the games took on life that far surpassed their mechanics or their pixels. The writing was witty and engrossing, the puzzles were clever without being frustrating or self-important and the themes were both universal and unique.

Monkey Island was one of the first games I can remember actually buying at a software store. The equivalent of a GameStop that sold PC and Mac titles, Egghead Software was a prime example of the breed. Established in the late 80’s, boomed through the 90’s and crushed by online distribution. But for many years it was my store. Just a few blocks away from my home and filled with box upon box of possibilities. The games section, of course, held a particular thrall for me.

I still remember the vibrant Monkey Island box art, with its promise of swordplay, pirates and adventure — and it delivered. Though the graphics are primitive by today’s standards, they were particularly sumptuous for the time, with detailed backdrops and a few hand-painted interstitial cards that functioned as cutscenes of sorts.

But the game’s design, led by Gilbert, and the writing done by Grossman and Schafer, was what really got me. Like many LucasArts games of the era, it was filled with clever jokes and culture references, but a recent replay showed me just how enduring those turned out being. The script still holds up 20 years later, it’s actually pretty incredible.

One of the things that always stood out for me in the games from that particular crew of creators is the powerful roles for women. Though both Monkey Island and Full Throttle had male protagonists, the women in all three games were smarter, funnier and more capable as a rule. They didn’t need your help, but they were comfortable with things like love and partnership.

The lead female role in Monkey Island is island Governor Elaine Marley, who ends up being kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck. This seems like a typical video game scenario on the surface — another damsel in distress. But there are clues that she’s not as helpless as she appears, including the fact that the pirates make references to her escaping multiple times. And in the denouement (stop reading if you don’t want it spoiled), the player’s character Guybrush Threeepwod shows up to break up her undead wedding only to find that she had already escaped and was about to spring her trap on the unsuspecting groom.

It was a powerful twist for me when I first played it, and drove home that this woman was not an object to be retrieved, but an actor in her own play. A play in which you might be a co-star, rather than a lead. The lessons carried on in my own relationships with women, including my wife, who is very much a star and not in need of rescue.

When you compare Monkey Island to modern titles like the latest Tomb Raider, for instance, you begin to see just how special those games were. Yes, Tomb Raider has a strong female lead, but it also drives home the point in a cloddish, heavy-handed way. The main character is brutalized both emotionally and physically in her journey to becoming a ‘hero’, and that transformation is demonstrated via gruesome death scenes and disturbing character interactions. I’m not saying Tomb Raider isn’t an interesting and entertaining game, because it is. But I’m also not sure how comfortable I’d be with my daughter perceiving a path of pain and brutality as the way that women are converted from meek and indecisive beings into ones of power and purpose.

But women’s roles weren’t the only bit of cleverness buried in this trio of games. The puzzles in both Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle probably taught me more about problem solving than any 100 hours of physics or geometry in high school. I honestly think that there should be a class called Logic 101 that has students run through early adventure games for the computer with no outside help.

Day of the Tentacle — a sequel to the original Maniac Mansion game, which was more of a ‘horror’ sendup — with its protagonists split across three different eras and puzzles that dealt with aging items and shuffling them back and forth through time, was a perfect example.

It featured dozens of brain testing situations, but one of my favorites comes when quirky Laverne is stuck in a future ruled by the mutant Purple Tentacle, and incarcerated along with other humans inside the titular mansion. Nerdy Bernard is stuck in the present and can’t help her, but rock and roll roadie Hoagie has been shuttled off to a moment in the past when America’s founding fathers were on a retreat to the mansion. Laverne must have a tentacle costume to blend in and move about, but only has access to a doctor’s office chart of a tentacle. Hoagie has no sewing skills, but happens to be in the same house as Betsy Ross, the seamstress for the first American flag.

Through the use of the Chron-o-Johns (toilets which can flush things back and forth through time), Laverne sends Hoagie the chart. Hoagie slips the chart to Betsy as an updated pattern and poof, the American flag has now been altered to look like a tentacle. Laverne retrieves the flag from the roof in the future and wears it as a costume. It’s a brilliant use of the ‘split across time’ mechanic and still feels completely logical.

There have been other games since that have captured the same spirit of logic and effort — The Longest Journey is a prime example. But the art seems to have been largely lost in modern gaming, which has taken some of the mechanics from these early games, and lost much of the challenge and wit. The LucasArts games, for instance, were one of the first to remove ‘dying’ from the games entirely, and to carefully design them so that you couldn’t reach a dead end. This wasn’t to make them easier — they were plenty hard — it was to remove player frustration and to encourage exploration.

Many games now also remove or mitigate player death through instant reloading or restart points, but they’ve lost the heart of it. The frustration has been removed but it hasn’t been augmented by challenge and delight. And they’ve become less art and more product because of it.

When I say ‘less art’, I am implicitly acknowledging that games are art. Whatever your argument, it’s something that I believe and Full Throttle is the game that made me believe it.

Over a dozen games at LucasArts in this era used the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine that gave players verbs like ‘pull’ or ‘look at’ to use on in-game objects. When the time came to build Full Throttle, the engine was tweaked and prodded to remove the list of verbs from the screen and place them into a contextual menu that resided under a mouse click. This opened up the full screen for visuals, greatly improving the scope. It was also one of the first games to be distributed only on CD-ROM, as it featured a full soundtrack of music and voiceover work.

If you enjoy any of the games today that feel almost like a playable movie, you can thank Full Throttle, because this is where it all started. The player takes on the role of motorcycle gang leader Ben, in an age where cars and bikes are on their way out and hovercars are on their way in. Ben is framed for murder early in the game and must repair his bike and earn the trust of the dead man’s daughter to save the day. But despite the fanciful setting, the themes are universal.

Full Throttle touches on the themes of nostalgia and loyalty, on the relationships between fathers and daughters and the fine line between progress and destruction. It goes about as deep as you want to dig, even though it’s really just a game. And the themes are augmented by a great voice cast that includes Roy Conrad and Mark Hamill, great songs from honest-to-goodness rock band The Gone Jackals and simply gorgeous art from Peter Chan.

Full Throttle was one of the first games that totally qualified as an ‘experience’, rather than something to pass the time. And once that rubicon was crossed, it opened up the door for more cinematic and immersive experiences in gaming.

It’s easy to reminisce about games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, and to wish for a return to this caliber of gaming. But you have to acknowledge that there may be no way to do so, largely due to how connected we are. These games were largely pre-internet experiences, and they were made powerful because of that. Every person experienced them differently, solved puzzles in their own way and communicated solutions back and forth in person. Sitting at the same computer with a friend working out how to hurdle a particular challenge is still totally possible, but also far less likely than it used to be.

But we shouldn’t give up hope entirely. Though LucasArts is dead, its spirit lives on both in those who grew up playing those games and those who created them. It’s not surprising that this small group has managed to find a way to continue making great stuff. Dave Grossman is now at Telltale Games, which makes Monkey Island and Sam and Max titles and was founded by ex-LucasArts members. Schafer founded Double Fine productions, which recently broke Kickstarter records with $3.3M raised to make, you guessed it, an adventure game. Ron Gilbert teamed up with Schafer again for the recent release The Cave and has now gone on to work on his own new game for Apple’s iOS platform called Scurvy Scallywags.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see a powerhouse studio like LucasArts in its prime making the kinds of soulful games that once did. The pressures of performance and budget are enormously high and more and more focus is being put on franchise-ready, salable material then ever.

But I’m glad that it happened once and that I was there to see it. And I’m more hopeful than ever that dozens of other indie developers that are making games for iOS, Android, computers and the Web will carry on in their footsteps.