Games - Tass Times in Tonetown

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	Games - Tass Times in Tonetown

Tass Times in Tonetown (hereafter "Tass Times") was an adventure-themed computer game released in 1986 by Activision for multiple computer platforms. It was written by veteran Infocom designer Michael Berlyn and programmed by Bill Heineman of Interplay Productions, in cooperation with Brainwave Creations.

"Tass Times" was available for the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Apple IIGS, and for the PC. MobyGames notes that the PC port was released in the form of a "booter", or a program bundled with its own boot disk, making the program effectively OS-agnostic.

According to ), the game had the distinction of being the first game made available for the IIGS.

The basic plot of the game involved the player getting sucked into Tonetown, a surreal alternate world seemingly based on a distillation of 1980s culture, with overtones of punk culture (such as pink hair, etc.). Tonetown is seemingly a world created by the imagination of the unnamed main character's relative Gramps, who is sucked into Tonetown through a hoop and held captive by the villainous Franklin Snarl. Snarl himself is a surreal combination of a pig, a raccoon and (most obviously) a crocodile. While in Tonetown, the player uses guitar picks as currency and partakes of Tonetown culture, including its party culture, its "tass" music, and such delicacies as "GloBurgers". A major supporting character in the game is Ennio the Legend, a.k.a. Gramps's dog Spot in the real world. As Ennio, Spot can talk and wisecrack, and he's a popular figure with the locals of Tonetown. One unusual feature is that entering the word "burger" into the text causes instant death for the character.

The game belonged to the now-extinct format of "graphical text adventures". Somewhat like classical text adventures or the early Sierra games, players could use text commands (e.g. "TAKE HOOPLET") to interact with the game, but like Lucasarts adventure games (or the later Sierra games), they could also use an intuitive GUI. It was possible to complete the game using solely a mouse. The player viewed the world of the game through a small window at the top left of the screen in which their surroundings were displayed. Much like The Bard's Tale, this view was static (or mostly so); it was not animated, though it was context-sensitive (players could click on objects in this window rather than typing their names).

The word "Tass" in the title refers to an adjective used within the parallel world of Tonetown. Its basic meaning is somewhat akin to "cool" or "hip". According to :

On the meaning of Tass: "Muffy and I were employed there, teaching creative writing. And the motto of Harvard is 'Veritas,' which means 'truth.' We took to saying 'very tass' to mean, 'very true,' or 'too true.' Our students picked it up and started applying it to something that was cool. So very tass turned into very hip or cool."

The game's distinctive world and quirky humor made it memorable for many players long beyond its mid-1980s release. A floppy disk bearing the label "Tass Times in Tonetown" has even been sighted on the popular cartoon site "Homestar Runner". .

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Tass Times in Tonetown ]

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