The case begins at a carnival. Bruno the Bigfoot, frozen in a block of ice as the star exhibit, has escaped, and Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl has gone with him. The Freelance Police take the job: Sam, a laconic dog in a suit, and Max, a hyperactive naked rabbit with a lot of teeth. The trail leads them across America by way of the tourist attractions that line its highways, a miniature golf course with live alligators, the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, a Mystery Vortex and a display of celebrity vegetables. LucasArts built the game with Sam and Max’s creator, the artist Steve Purcell, and the result was rude, violent in a cartoon way and, Computer Gaming World’s reviewer admitted, often laugh-out-loud funny. It also changed how a LucasArts adventure looked.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: LucasArts.
- Designers: Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, Steve Purcell and Collette Michaud.
- Released: 1993 for MS-DOS PCs, $59.95 in the US; a CD-ROM version with full speech followed.
- Engine: SCUMM, with the verb list removed.
- Copy protection: a lookup in the documentation.
- Characters: from Steve Purcell’s comics, first published in 1987.
From comic to game
Sam and Max began as characters Purcell’s brother made up as a child. “My version grew out of my own cruel parodies of his comic books,” Purcell told Retro Gamer. “At some point he lost interest and I continued drawing them.” The Blues Brothers and Penn & Teller were influences, and one of the family’s cars was “a dead ringer for Sam and Max’s Sixties patrol car”. Their first published story, according to Retro Gamer, was the 1987 comic “Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple”.
The comic got Purcell into games. Ken Macklin, an artist at Lucasfilm Games, recommended him on the strength of his first Sam & Max comic, and he was hired, lost his job when his first project was cancelled, and was brought back to paint the box cover of Zak McKracken. He then worked on the animation for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In 1992 LucasArts set out to make a Sam & Max adventure, with, Retro Gamer reported, only seven and a half months until release. Purcell wrote the story, drawing on the comics, family road trips and the book Roadside America, “a hilarious travelogue of America’s goofiest tourist stops”. Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle and Collette Michaud, who had worked on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, joined him. Because time was short, the team storyboarded the game, which Purcell said was a first at LucasArts.
A new kind of LucasArts screen
Every LucasArts adventure since Maniac Mansion had a row of verbs under the picture. Sam & Max took it away. The cursor cycled through walk, talk, use, take and look with the right mouse button, and the inventory lived in a cardboard box in a corner of the screen. Computer Gaming World noted that the change let the game have “the largest characters placed on-screen in a LucasArts graphic adventure”, with the whole screen given over to animation. Purcell thought it may have been Stemmle who first proposed it, and liked it for a comedy: “Nothing would kill a joke worse than reading it before you hear it.”
Conversations changed too. Instead of choosing a line from a menu, the player chose a kind of remark, a question, an exclamation, a non sequitur, or an icon for a person or subject, and the game supplied the words. Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World thought this let the writers “continually surprise the player with their context-sensitive witticisms”. Max was useful in a way the interface could not explain: he could be used on things and people, as an interrogator, a circuit breaker or a knife. “When all else fails, try using Max,” Ardai advised, and the magazine’s adventure columnist Scorpia agreed: “when in doubt—use Max! Hey, it can’t hurt.”
The game had to be finished in two action sequences, Wak-A-Rat at the carnival and Gator Golf, in which Sam hits fish into a swamp to make the alligators form a bridge to Max. Purcell added optional mini-games for players who were stuck: a version of Battleships called Car Bomb, a colouring book, dress-up dolls and a driving game, Highway Surfing. They were meant, he said, “so that when you were tired of trying to solve obscure puzzles you could take a break and play something short and silly”.
The CD-ROM version gave the characters voices. Bill Farmer played Sam. Purcell had imagined Donald Sutherland, but chose Farmer because “he wasn’t trying too hard to sell the lines and he made me laugh”.
Reception
Ardai liked it, but less than Day of the Tentacle. He found the pair “gleefully subversive” and often laughed out loud, but thought “what is funny for the duration of a ten-panel comic strip starts to grate after a few hours of gameplay”, and that the road trip mattered to no one, not even its heroes: “Sam & Max is fine, but lesser.” The puzzles, he said, “tend not to be very hard”. Purcell remembered it differently: the game “sold much better than any of the marketing projections” and won awards, though some buyers were confused, “thinking it was meant to be a cutesy kid’s game”.
Later history
LucasArts began a sequel, Sam & Max: Freelance Police, and cancelled it in March 2004. Three former LucasArts staff founded Telltale that year, and when the rights to the characters went back to Purcell in 2005, he and Telltale made new Sam & Max games, sold in monthly episodes from 2006. Its third season, The Devil’s Playhouse, came out in 2010. After Telltale closed, Skunkape Games, a studio including people who had worked on those games, remastered them; The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered came out in August 2024. Hit the Road itself stayed playable through re-releases and through ScummVM, the program that runs LucasArts’ SCUMM games on modern machines.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 113, December 1993, p. 46: holiday buyer’s guide (the new interface, the largest characters, the tourist attractions, $59.95); p. 122: Sam & Max competition.
- Charles Ardai, “Hit the Road, Max”, Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994, pp. 86–90: review (designers, price, protection, the interface and conversations, the story, Doug the Mole Man, using Max, Wak-A-Rat and Gator Golf, the mini-games, the verdict).
- Scorpia, “Roadside Assistance for Sam & Max”, Computer Gaming World issue 116, March 1994, pp. 86–88: walkthrough hints (Bruno and Trixie, the carnival, Gator Golf, the Mystery Vortex, Bumpusville, Celebrity Vegetables, “use Max”).
- “The Making of Sam & Max Hit the Road”, Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, from p. 32 (reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection vol. 2, 2008, pp. 199–201): Purcell on the characters’ origins, the 1987 comic, joining Lucasfilm Games, the schedule, the story, the interface, the mini-games, the voices, sales, and the rights returning to him.
- Computer Gaming World issue 239, June 2004, p. 34: the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police.
- “Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered launches on Switch August 2024”, Nintendo Life, June 2024 (web, secondary): Skunkape Games and the 2024 remaster. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/06/sam-and-max-the-devils-playhouse-remastered-launches-on-switch-august-2024
- “Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered delayed to spring 2024”, Gematsu, November 2023 (web, secondary): the original season as Telltale’s 2010 release. https://www.gematsu.com/2023/11/sam-max-the-devils-playhouse-remastered-delayed-to-spring-2024-confirmed-for-ps4-xbox-one-switch-and-pc