Cover art for the game.
Day Of The Tentacle is a graphic point-and-click adventure game originally released in 1993, as a sequel to Maniac Mansion. With its mix of wacky humor, compelling art/animation and challenging puzzles, it is considered one of the top adventure games of all time.
The plot involves a trio of youngsters, electronic nerd Bernard (who returns as a playable character from the original game) with his two friends; Hoagie, an overweight laidback rock music fan, and Laverne, a hysterical female medical student.
Together, they have to use a time machine to return to the past in order to prevent a mutated sentient Tentacle from ingesting toxic waste that'd give him super-intelligence, enabling him to take over the world. However, the time machine malfunctions and Hoagie is sent 200 years in the past while Laverne is sent 200 years in the future, while Bernard returns to the present. It is up to them to fix the machine and save the world.
The deleted characters[]
Original design of Chester next to final design of Ned/Jed (Chester pixel rendition by SeltsamMitHut).
The first Maniac Mansion game had a wide array of playable characters to choose from. Apart from the compulsary selection of Dave (the hero), the player could choose two others among six ones: Bernard (the nerd), Razor (the rock singer), Wendy (the writer), Syd (the rock musician), Mike (the photographer) and Jeff (the surfer).
Development plans had Day Of The Tentacle use a similar system. The returning characters from the first game were Bernard and Razor, while the new original characters were to be Hoagie, Laverne, Chester and Moonglow.
Chester would have been a thinly, circled-eyed African-American beatnik poet, dressed all in black constantly smoking and holding a cup of steaming coffee (as befitting the beatnik stereotype). His design was modified and reused for the NPC twin brothers Ned and Jed Edison.
Of the accessories, only remains the cup of coffee, a "cappuccino" that Jed produces out of his jacket to offer to his brother Ned during a scene where the latter has a breakdown.
Moonglow original design; pixel rendition by Mister L.
Moonglow would have been a hippie described as a "new age girl with sandals" (as Dave Grossman says), also carrying a crystal shard as a pendant.
Razor was the only other returning character from the original Maniac Mansion, but in contrast to the two previously mentioned ones, no concept art of her for Day Of The Tentacle has been made visible (apart from her pixel renditions for a fan remake of Maniac Mansion in the style of Day Of The Tentacle).
The deleted items[]
The deleted inventory items.
Items that could have been picked up and been part of the inventory would have been a human anatomy chart, a rope noose and a diamond. They can still be seen in the game, but are not pickable.
The rope noose would have been used to pull Ted Edison up to the roof during Bernard's rescue of Dr. Fred. In the final game, a standard rope is used with Ted's body, creating a noose around his neck, instead of using a pre-tied noose.
Laverne cannot pick up the human anatomy chart in the final game, saying that she already has enough of them.
After Bernard aquires the diamond, a cutscene plays where he brings it to Fred's lab. It is never in his inventory during player-controlled gameplay.
The original intro[]
Intro of the game; the bird stops sooner in the final product.
The intro for the game shows a bird happily flying near the Edison mansion, but stops, chokes and faints as it comes near the waste-polluted river.
However, in an old TV preview, it is show that the bird was originally to fly further over the polluted river, revealing in the foreground a tree having odd spiked mushrooms growing on it, and especially a dead bird lying on a branch.