Maniac Mansion

In Maniac Mansion you find a chainsaw. That looked very helpful for some special problems, but you couldn't find the gasoline.

A lot of talk was generated whether ther really was gasoline to find anywhere in the adventure. It wasn't.

The successor game [Zak McCracken]? had the gasoline, but alas, no chainsaw.

For years to come that was an in-joke.

You can find both Maniac Mansion (and Zak McCracken, I think) in the successor game Day of the Tentacle, where there is an old computer which runs Maniac Mansion.