To celebrate the remastered release of arguably LucasArts’ most iconic adventure game, games™ speaks to co-lead designer Dave Grossman about its creation
This was yours and Tim Schafer’s first lead role. Do you feel it gave you a drive to create something unique and special?
Yes, but maybe not for the reasons you would think. I mean certainly it was exciting for us to be in the driver’s seat but I think part of the success of that game was that we figured out early on not to overdirect people too much. So we had a core vision of what we wanted to do – which was the ‘living inside an old Warner Bros cartoon’ thing – and that was really good for giving people marching orders and keeping everything on track, but a big part of it was just getting a really good team together and then let them do what they do best to try and draw the best out of them. Anybody that was doing animation for something was usually given some basic framework of what was supposed to happen in a situation, and they could just dress it up however they wanted to and they generally made it way funnier than we initially imagined. So yeah, I think us being in charge was important, but I think, because we were new to it, we didn’t have the kind of egos we do now.
Did you find this new role challenging?
We were somewhat prepared because we had been tailing Ron Gilbert for a couple of years and even today I still emulate his leadership style to some degree. He was very good at having the vision in his head and people would pitch ideas at him and he would either go ‘That’s great’ or he was like ‘Um, I don’t think that fits’ and then he would tell you why. And that was always super helpful for getting you onto the next idea, because you could realise that the tone was wrong or something is going on that is not fitting quite right in Ron’s brain. That kind of nurturing, high communication style and always asking people questions about the thing they’re working on is something that I’ve taken into my own style with my career.
And also we had some knowledge and exposure to all the production parts, like how much different things cost and all the different pieces that go together. Because leading a project at LucasArts in those days was a combination of both creative leadership and also being responsible for a budget and a bunch of people – which is not a thing that happens all that often any more in this industry.
What was the benefit of returning to Maniac Mansion?
The good part about it was that because it had been five years since the original one had come out the technology had changed, you could do a lot more with art and so forth, so part of our marching orders was ‘Don’t worry about matching the style of the original, just do something new but using that same kind of concept and world and characters’. So then we were able to go off and do the sort of Chuck Jones cartoon thing that we did do.
Did you have a particular design goal?
The idea was ‘Okay, let’s be funny but let’s get the player into the headspace of a cartoon character’. And so we were always looking for opportunities to do that, to get them into a space where thinking like a regular human being would just get you into trouble and thinking like a cartoon character would bring you success.
How did you go about ensuring that players would approach the game in this way?
Well we had a huge playtest session for friends and family and had them come and play the game while it was in a sort of alpha plus-state. That was always a great process for figuring out where you had gone wrong with the design of some puzzle or the information’s not coming across. The beauty of it was that you could just see them stuck on something and you could just ask them ‘What are you thinking about right now?’ and you could give them a hint and then you could think about how to implement that into the game so that you didn’t have to come over and give them advice.
From these sessions, did you implement any changes into the gameplay?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Because especially in those old days at LucasArts, it was fairly easy to change stuff pretty late into the game. With Day Of The Tentacle, that was the first moment where we actually recorded voices for it, and that was the point where you kind of have to stop changing dialogue, once you do that. But that happened way at the end. A lot of games these days you do that early so you can animate to it, but there wasn’t any actual lipsyncing or anything in this, so we did the voice recording pretty late. So that meant we could redesign stuff and there wasn’t a lot of art money committed to it yet and we were more agile about that than a lot of things these days.
Day Of The Tentacle was the first LucasArts adventure to use voice acting. How did you approach this new area of game development?
Yeah, I mean there’s always a few things with voice acting. You might have ideas in your head about what the characters might sound like, and some of them are too close together and so you have to change your thinking about it because you want people to be able to easily distinguish the voices if they’re onscreen together. That kind of thing. It was really hard to cast Bernard, I remember.
We went back and forth and we listened to lots and lots of takes from people and none of them felt right, and I think partly it was because he’s kind of the centre of everything as the one holdover character from the original game and he’s kind of the glue that holds the other two together just socially speaking. So I think he needed to be a little more grounded as a real person as the rest of them, and everything that we heard was a little bit too cartoony – which is an odd thing to say since we were trying to make a cartoon. So what we wanted was a real person who sounded a bit like a cartoon, and it was hard to articulate that.
I don’t think we knew exactly what it was that was wrong for quite a while – and finally one day an idea just dropped into my head ‘You know, he should sound like Les Nessman from WKRP’ and then someone said ‘I know that guy’s agent, maybe we can just get him?’. We were like ‘That would be cool!’ And lo and behold, it was!
How was it working alongside Tim when creating the humour for the game?
Yeah, we had a good dynamic, actually. We seemed to be on the same page about a lot of things, and if we weren’t it was usually super clear, super fast which way we were going to go. We would just start talking about it and somebody would just clearly be more right, or care about it more than the other one. So it was pretty comfortable working dynamic. We didn’t really get into fights about anything, which I have come to realise is a little bit unusual. It’s hard to find good partners – I’ve had a few others over the years – but you need to hang onto them when you get them.
Did you find the creative process to be markedly different from other, perhaps more traditional games?
That’s interesting because so much else changed just about the way you develop games in general between the time we were working on that game and the first time I worked on a drama, which is something I’ve done a lot less of. I think that with a comedy you can start a lot of stuff earlier, you need some basic good ideas and then when you’re sort of filling in the space between them you can be pretty larky about it. I think you can trust yourself to make the art and do the music and do a lot of the production work without understanding some of the details of what’s going to fit in the middle. And I think that’s less true for a drama, you want to kind of have a clear, more detailed, more cohesive plan before you start putting any real money into it. And again I think that boils down to that thing of if a small piece goes wrong, the whole thing can come tumbling down like a house of cards, and I think that’s less true for comedy.
Did you find the game changed much during the development from what you had originally designed or planned?
Not in a significant way, no. It just kept getting better and better every time we saw some detail somebody was putting on the screen. It got closer to what we wanted, you know? The trickiest challenges were about technical limitations of what we could do on screen. Because we were after this animation style with lots of squashing and stretching and characters being really large on screen, but this was early in the days of VGA and the heavily pixelated characters – 320×200, I think the game might’ve been – anyways, the small number of pixels on screen and the limited 256 colour palette and so we had to pull some technical tricks behind the scenes to get some of the stuff to work at all. An actual full screen animation just was not possible by conventional means, you just couldn’t move the pixels around.
Did you feel at the time that you were creating something special?
Well you can’t really predict what the public is going to think about anything. I think we were conscious that we were making something good, I think, it made us laugh anyway. And that’s mostly all you’ve got at the end of the day, your own opinion and the opinions of anyone you show it to, you know, ‘is this good?’. But you can’t predict if 25 years later people will still be talking about it, that almost seems random. You can hope for that, but you can’t tell that it’s going to happen in advance.
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