Tass Times in Tonetown
1986 video game
Tass Times in Tonetown is an adventure game published by Activision in 1986. It was designed by Michael Berlyn and Muffy McClung Berlyn and programmed by Rebecca Heineman of Interplay (credited as Bill Heineman) in cooperation with Brainwave Creations.
Tass Times was released for the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Mac, and IBM PC compatibles. It was the first commercial game for the IIGS.
Plot
The plot of the game involves the player getting sucked into Tonetown, a surreal alternate world seemingly based on a distillation of 1980s culture, with overtones of punk and new wave culture (such as pink hair, etc.). 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". Game designer Michael Berlyn gives the following source for the word:
Muffy and I were employed there [at Harvard], 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 narrative begins with the player character inside a cabin belonging to "Gramps", a relative and inventor who has gone missing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tass Times in Tonetown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.