A while ago PlayStation gave out free copies of the “remastered” Day of the Tentacle, so I’ve been playing that

The original came out in 1993, and referenced the 1988 Maniac Mansion it sequeled (and the inexplicable Canadian sitcom spinoff that came in between). So there’s some culture lag and that’s interesting

Not so much at object-level so far: it’s only partly “contemporary”, in parallel with Apocalypse Future and Founders-era past, and that that “today” has landline phones and DOS computers seems like a natural part of the already-retro vibe, “mad science” and Elvis and the same vein of midcentury Weird that the B-52s and the swing/burlesque revivals drew from.

This one player character though, premed sophomore Laverne, is so particularly 1993 it’s killing me. Her personality felt hard to place until I realized it’s a combination of things that I’m used to seeing after the fact as distinct period tropes – she’s like halfway between the aetherial ditziness of Phoebe Buffay and the dark bitterness of a Janeane Garofalo character but NOT in a flattering way, like someone assembled a MPDG backwards. Her character animation looks like Delerium of the Endless as drawn in a Slave Labor Graphics book, and all in all I’m starting to think of her as the eponymous girl from The Presidents of the United States of America’s Lump. It’s amazing.