Any film nerd will tell you: the best part of owning your favorite movie on DVD is listening to the director commentary. There's a distinctly Special-Feature vibe coming off of this video of Tim Schafer playing the LucasArts classic Day of the Tentacle , and I just can't get enough of it. Though the sequence was originally filmed as bonus content for the Double Fine Adventure documentary, it's just been posted online for all to enjoy.
There are a few places in the gaming universe where we get goodies of similar quality: developer avatars talk to you in Portal and Gunpoint , and special Making Of DVDs come bundled with the high-end special editions of Bethesda's games. One thing I rarely see, however, is a developer reminisce about his own classic game, playing it through decades after release.
“In the original game we put in Maniac Mansion because, when we were doing Monkey Island 2, there's this long animation… this huge animation, which was at the time, like 200k,” Schafer says of the game-within-a-game Easter egg. “And Ron was like, 'why does that number sound so familiar? Oh, that's the size of Maniac Mansion.' The entire game was as big as this one animation in Monkey 2.”
Here are some other highlights:
- Rumor has it that Laverne was based off a developer's ex-girlfriend
- Schafer, Dave Grossman, and Ron Gilbert had their names set up on a random generator so their names would take turns coming first in the credits
- Just like everyone else, Tim Schafer spam-clicks to make Bernard's voice actor do a stuttering dubstep with his lines
This is just part 1 of a continuing series. If you weren't able to get your hands on the Double Fine Adventure documentary, keep an eye on the Double Fine YouTube account for more episodes.
