Game 139: Sam & Max Hit the Road — Introduction (1993)

By Michael

The box cover art gives us subtle clues to our future destinations.

In the spirit of the holidays, we are about to head out on a buddy road trip game. These stories are always the best when the partners are equally matched, such as in this Thanksgiving favorite, this cop-car classic, or this other Thanksgiving favorite... actually, that last one is significant, because the two actors would later become police detective buddies in a TV series 10 years later. And here we are, about to discuss another police game of sorts.

Wait, why do I hear knocking at my door?

“Ahem, I heard there was a police game being played, and... wait! You’re not Alex!”

Yeah, I think he’s taking a break from your adventures until the blog gets to 1997. It seems you took a vacation from game design?

“I was working! Really, I was.”

Okay, but I probably won’t need your help with this title. Neither of the title characters are likely to marry a reformed prostitute, and they’re more likely to run over a speeding motorist than to pull her over.

“I don’t care for your attitude. Remember, I can still take you downtown.”

Seriously, Officer Walls, Alex’s house is just a few doors down. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind an unexpected dinner guest.

“Good luck without me, then. You’re turning your back on the most trusted authority in police procedural adventure gaming in the 19th century!”

Wow. I thought he would never leave.

I really need to install a better deadbolt lock on my door.

Back to the subject at hand, we will be playing Sam & Max Hit the Road, published in 1993 by LucasArts Entertainment. This was the first LucasArts title to be released, on day one, on both floppy and CD, rather than being a later release, as was the case for blog favorite Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. As a result, there’s no question that I will be playing the CD release of the game for the blog.

But first, a little backstory. Who are Sam and Max, and what makes them tick? Besides, perhaps, a bomb that Max might or might not be carrying...

When Steve Purcell was just a kid in the 70s, he and his brother Dave were budding artists. Dave would draw crude comics for his own pleasure, dreaming of the future, and sometimes, big brother Steve would finish the comics, add pages, or mess with the story lines. The characters of Freelance Policemen Sam & Max were created by Dave and were a favorite in his collection.

A crude early comic book cover mock-up by Dave Purcell

As they would later develop, Sam was a “canine shamus” who would battle crime as a freelance policeman alongside his good buddy Max, a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing”. As sometimes happens, while Dave grew out of the characters, Steve embraced them, and took them over for good.

The first officially published Sam & Max strip

So when Steve made his way to art school, he would start to write strips for the school’s newspaper. During the time he was at school, his art style evolved, and got closer to the duo we love today.

Fast forward a few years to 1987, when Purcell would be friends with another comic artist, Steve Moncuse, who published a small, indy book about the Fish Police. Wanting to expand to another comic book in the lineup, Sam & Max: Freelance Police would soon grace the printed page as a bona-fide comic book.

Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple was the first book-length Sam & Max story

The next year, Steve Purcell became connected with LucasFilm Games (soon to be known as LucasArts), doing a lot of the artwork for early game boxes and the company newsletter, The Adventurer. Steve had his hands in a lot of the games of the era, filling a lot of artistic roles.

Early art for Wally’s office in Monkey Island 2

Unlike Sierra On-Line’s newsletter (later renamed to InterAction Magazine), LucasArts printed theirs on newspaper stock instead of making it shelf-worthy, which allowed them to fold the issues smaller and put them into the boxes of their new release games (Sierra waited for you to send in the warranty registration card, and then sent the next few issues to you). Myself and others loved reading the issues of both these newsletters, finding out the news of future releases, even though we knew the reporting was a little bit biased.

From the first issue of The Adventurer

In the pages of the LucasArts newsletter were comics by Steve, using the characters from his earlier comic books, but set in the Lucas environments. The stories were pure Sam & Max, and had little to do with the actual stories from the games, so they were solely entertainment, and not spoilers. The gamers loved them, and asked for more.

During the design of the first Monkey Island game, the programmers needed to be trained in how to use the SCUMM system. Steve had created a mock-up of Sam & Max’s office along with the two characters to be used as a training tool. This would lay the groundwork for a full-fledged game, born of the desire to expand the LucasArts catalog with a new property, as well as answering the fan requests for more of the fluffy bunny and gruff dog from the newsletter pages.

Unlike their other titles, Steve Purcell retained the rights to the characters, which is why the games have continued long after Steve and adventure gaming both departed LucasArts.

The game largely follows a 1988 storyline from the books. I won’t be posting those comics here, because I wouldn’t want to spoil the game for myself or anyone else playing along. But I read them long ago, in a collection of all the published comics at the time, in The Collected Sam & Max: Surfing the Highway, a book I once owned and read lovingly, back in the late 90s. My copy was later water damaged when an apartment I lived in was flooded, so I’ve since lost that. The Telltale Games re-release has also gone out of print, so when I do decide to read again, it will have to be online.

Just around the corner in this story is the animated series

A few years after the game was released, Purcell was approached to make a children’s TV series from the property. Sam & Max: The Animated Series only ran for one season, but is beloved by many and can be found on DVD and the streaming service Tubi today. I’ll take a look at it after the playthrough, but I’m trying not to spoil anything for this gameplay.

A sequel to the game was being worked on around 2001, but the developer went bankrupt before it could be finished. Soon after, LucasArts started work on a sequel, but then abruptly pulled the plug when they decided that they didn’t want to make adventure games anymore. (From this point onward, about 99.999% of the company output was Star Wars titles, and if you surf to lucasarts.com today, it redirects to a Star Wars page).

So, we won’t be talking about the next game in the series until the TAG blog reaches 2006, so I have to make sure to enjoy this experience as much as I can right now. (Those later games, episodic releases from Telltale Games, are being remastered as we speak, with the next release expected for Spring 2024.) Telltale was founded by former LucasArts employees soon after the 2004 Sam & Max cancellation, including a couple of designers from the original Sam & Max game, so it was a no-brainer for them to court Steve Purcell to their lineup.

Now, for the game at hand. For as much as I have said about the game so far, I remember very little. The last time I played it was 17 years ago, back in 2006, before I dug my heels into the Telltale release that was coming out. So, I’m going in blind, I don’t think I remember a single thing about this game, except what the pictures on the game box would tell me. I know we are visiting a very large ball of twine, and I suspect we need to collect that and bring it with us to our playthrough of Grim Fandango in a few game years, to distract the very, very large cat.

I still have many CDs from the 90s, some of which are rather hard to get running on modern systems

In my CD binder, packed back in 1999 before I moved, yet again, between home and college housing, I found an original CD for Sam & Max, so I won’t need to go searching for the game online. Yes, it’s right next to the game Alex just wrapped up -- a neat coincidence, I'd say.

Rear box cover for the original release

So what are we getting ourselves into? Well, this game is, like I hinted at the beginning, a road trip film of sorts. Sam and Max are hopping in their classic DeSoto police radio car to track down a runaway carnival bigfoot monster. Along the way, it will be classic Americana, a spoof of a road trip down historic route 66. For the non-Americans, Route 66 was the longest interstate road until our government started funding wide, long Interstate Highways about 70 years ago. Route 66 was littered with motels, restaurants, and quirky attractions along the way, each one fighting for the attention of mom and dad driving down the road, so they would stop and spend money in their gift shops for the little ones.

Many of the places we will be visiting in this game are in fact real, or parodies of real places. For example, most mentions of the game include the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, which very much exists in rural Kansas. Refreshments will be available at Snuckey’s, a clear parody of Stuckey’s, a chain of midwest gas-and-go stops along busy travel roads. The chain loved the references in the comics and games. Purcell put them in because it reminded him of road trips from his childhood, wanting Dad to pull over at each one.

But enough of this history lesson. On with the game!

It’s the Flying Toasters screensaver!

We start the game with an evil mad scientist aiming an apparatus at a woman bound with rope in his secret lair. It seems that she went out with him on a blind date, and he turned out to be a creep.

“We’ve only gone out three times, and you’re already telling me you just want to be friends? You never gave me a chance, and for that, you’ll fry like a pork sausage!”

“I think I’d rather go out with someone a little more... unpredictable.”

Cue the entrance of our intrepid heroes.

So, we meet our new friends for this game. On the right is Sam. He’s described as a “canine shamus”, who looks very much like McGruff the Crime Dog from the 70s and 80s, but with the suit of Sergeant Friday instead of Peter Falk’s raincoat. He’s ready to take a bite out of crime, quite literally if possible. In this game, he’s voiced by Bill Farmer, who so far has him sounding perfectly like a classic 1950s noir gumshoe.

His more excitable partner on the left of the screen is Max. He’s a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing” that can probably best be described as a cross between a cute, fluffy rabbit doll and Stewie from Family Guy. He’s worse than a gun, because he doesn’t have a safety switch to hold him back, except the strength of Sam at times. He’s eager to do everything we wish, deep down in the back of our minds, could be done to evil criminals, if only we didn’t have a conscience.

“Looks like a marginally volatile hostage situation, Max.”

“Ooh! Does this mean we get to kick some puffy, white, mad scientist butt?”

“Can’t think of a reason not to!”

And so the introduction shows us the modus operandi for the anthropomorphic duo, which is to arrive at a crime scene, quickly deduce that evil is afoot and open up a can of Andy Sipowicz on it. The violence in this sequence is mostly off-screen.

And it turns out that the evil scientist was really an evil robot.

“That’s no head, Max, it’s one damned ugly time bomb!”

“Maybe we can ditch the head somewhere while the credits are running. Mind if I drive?”

“Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.”

So, the credits roll, with black & white film noir style images above and below. Of special note on this screen would be co-designer Collette Michaud. During the making of this game, she and Steve Purcell married.

As a bit of game trivia, there was talk about making the game black and white, like the comics. They decided against it, but who knows, it might have worked. The next year, a black & white movie made millions and spawned a movie empire for a convenience store clerk. More recently, a black and white adventure game surpassed its Kickstarter goals and is in active development.

And now, let’s break the fourth wall.

Hey, let’s not forget about the bomb.

Just then, the phone starts to ring. I’ve done my best to screenshot as much of the animation as I could, but basically, Sam makes sure that Max doesn’t answer the phone.

And this brings us to the end of the introduction sequence, and now we can explore the game world. But first, let’s take a look at the interface.

Gone are the verbs and inventory taking up a third of the screen; Day of the Tentacle would be their last game to ever have that. With this game, they emulated Sierra (a little), and then would go on to do either a coin interface (Full Throttle, Curse of Monkey Island) or even flirt with tank controls (Grim Fandango).

From the game manual

Just as in the Sierra SCI1 games, the right mouse button cycles through the choices, walk, use, talk, look, pick up. Each icon has two states, one that shows it can be used, one that says no. For example, if you pass the look cursor (an eyeball) over something it doesn’t have a description for, the eyelid shuts. You can still use keyboard shortcuts to select the icons as well, just as the SCUMM past. So, clicking W for walk, U for use, P for pick up, and T for talk help speed the process. The A and S keys cycle through the inventory, including Max as a usable object. (More on that soon.) However, if you don’t want to use the keyboard, Sierra’s use of the middle mouse button would have saved a lot of time (switching between walk and the currently selected icon), and being able to quickly move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen to select an icon was another great way to avoid using the keyboard.

But these are very small gripes. On the plus side, we are no longer losing a third of the screen to the interface, which was one of LucasArts’ few notable mistakes of the past.

In the bottom left of the game screen is a cardboard box. That’s your inventory. Click on there, and you’ll see all your worldly possessions. Sadly, we don’t have any right now. You can also click on icons here instead of using the right mouse button, for use either in the box (say, looking at an inventory item) or to carry out of the box.

So now, let’s talk about the Max icon. It’s not like the previous LucasArts games, where the icon of another player means changing who is in charge. It’s basically a way for Sam to use Max as a solution, much like Officer Bonds uses his gun.

Everything that doesn’t advance the plot is usually entertaining. Using the answering machine, for example, at this time plays us a spam message.

Also, have you noticed how many LucasArts games require the use of answering machines? Seriously. Maniac Mansion. Zak McKracken. Day of the Tentacle. Grim Fandango. I’m sure there’s probably one hidden in a Tie-Fighter game somewhere, no doubt.

Using the darts, Max will remove them from the board, step away, and throw them, miraculously landing in the same configuration. He’s pretty talented.

Walking to the right, the screen scrolls with us, and as I try to collect the moldy sandwich on the floor, Max jumps in and feeds it to his roach farm. Cute animations the whole way.

In the closet is a blacklight bulb. I pick that up. Back on Max’s desk, I turn on the TV, and it’s nothing but static. Moving the antenna around, and suddenly I’m watching a quality show.

Oh, wait, that’s not it.

So, this seems like a great time to pause the game and ask you to place your wagers. This is the first in the series, so there’s not much to compare it to. Recent LucasArts games have been scoring rather high lately, but as lawyers often say in their ads, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” The most recent cartoonish LucasArts game, Day of the Tentacle, scored a very healthy 72. Where will this one land?

Session Time: 10 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introductory post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 20 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.