UPDATE: There is literally no reason anyone should or would do this anymore, since Double Fine already HD remastered this classic! Go buy it – NOW – http://store.steampowered.com/app/388210/

One of my favourite teenage memories is that of playing Day of the Tentacle on my old 386 PC. I still remember how much the art and animation (quite excellent for it’s day) impacted on me; and even at today’s standards I feel warm affection whenever I see old screen-shots of the LucasArts classic point-and-click adventure game.  Others prefer others, such as Monkey Island or the Original Sam & Max, but for me, the pinnacle of adventure game goodness was the time traveling story of how the 3 protagonists (Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne) stop (evil) Purple Tentacle from taking over the world and enslaving humanity.

I’ve been wanting to replay this game for over a decade, but as operating systems advanced, it seemed like short of a re-make my wishes were likely to remain a fantasy.  Until I discovered ScummVM.  From the ScummVM website:

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

ScummVM supports many adventure games, including LucasArts SCUMM games (such as Monkey Island 1-3, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, …), many of Sierra’s AGI and SCI games (such as King’s Quest 1-6, Space Quest 1-5, …), Discworld 1 and 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress, Broken Sword 1 and 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Gobliiins 1-3, The Legend of Kyrandia 1-3, many of Humongous Entertainment’s children’s SCUMM games (including Freddi Fish and Putt Putt games) and many more.

You can find a full list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often. Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PocketPC, PalmOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, OS/2, PSP, PS2, SymbianOS and many more…

But hands down the BEST news about this is that the ScummVM has binaries available to run on virtually every OS you can imagine (except iOS obviously, or at least, not to my knowledge) and the original DOS versions of all these original adventure games seems to run on any platform.  I’ve only tested this with Day of the Tentacle, but sure enough an ISO of the original DOS game, was simply copied to a folder on my Mac, and the ‘DOTT’ directory in that folder selected as the game folder for ScummVM which detected the game and added it to a list.  Form there, I just selected Day of the Tentacle from the list and hit ‘play’ – which launched right into the game, with sound and everything.

I did the same thing on my kids Windows 7 PC’s and it worked well, although I found that I needed to turn the subtitles and voices on, because the speech audio sample-rate is very low and occasionally difficult to understand.  But then the game is 18 years old and under 300Mb. The menu can be accessed in-game by pressing the F5 key, and the game paused with the space bar.

Other than that, its still as good as the day it was released and hopefully ScummVM will get me through my itch for this classic long enough until a possible remake comes along.  Let’s hope the rumors of a Telltale remake are true!