Sam & Max

• 1. Introduction

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  Sam & Max is an American media franchise built around a dog and a rabbity creature who work as vigilante private investigators. In 2007, their creator Steve Purcell admitted he was somewhat surprised by how far they had travelled. Their body of work was small. Purcell commented that there was "certainly not enough material to build that relentless traction of an endlessly renewed sitcom or a syndicated comic that has existed since the Korean Conflict". Fans gathered around the pair anyway.

  The oddest part is where it all began: with a younger brother's childhood drawings and an older brother who could not resist mocking them. How did a sibling rivalry grow into comics, a cartoon and a run of video games? Why did one cancelled game provoke a public outcry? And how did a few episodes of a computer adventure change the way games were sold?

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• 2. Brothers at the Drawing Table

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  Dave Purcell often left unfinished comics lying around the house, and his older brother Steve could not leave them alone. Dave had come up with the idea of a detective team made up of a dog and a rabbit. Steve finished the abandoned stories as parodies of the originals. In his versions the characters mixed up each other's names, over-explained things, shot at each other and mocked the way they had been drawn. Steve later described the result as "kind of a parody of the way a kid talks when he's writing comics".

  Over time the mockery gave way to full stories of Steve's own. In the late 1970s, Dave signed the rights to the characters over to him in a contract. The signing took place on Steve's birthday. In 1980, Steve began producing Sam & Max strips for the weekly newsletter of the California College of Arts and Crafts. The look of the characters was still unsettled at that point. Seven years later, Steven Moncuse, the author of Fish Police, offered him the chance to publish his work properly.

  Purcell's own life seeped into the series. Rats and cockroaches appear throughout, and the rats were inspired by his pet rat. Sam and Max sometimes play a game called fizzball, in which the aim is to hit a beer can in mid-air with a solid axe handle. Purcell had invented the game with friends, among them the comic book writers Art Adams and Mike Mignola.

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• 3. The Freelance Police

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  A dilapidated office block in New York City is home base for Sam and Max, who call themselves the Freelance Police. They take on cases as maniacally as possible, often ignoring the law entirely. Their universe is a parody of American popular culture.

  Sam is a brown-coated Irish Wolfhound, described as a "canine shamus". He wears a gray or blue suit with a matching fedora, because it makes people more cooperative when they talk to a six-foot dog. He knows a huge amount about obscure subjects and delivers it in long, elaborate sentences, accurate or not. He also neglects his beloved DeSoto Adventurer badly. Sam rarely loses his temper and stays calm in a panic. When he does snap, he turns savage, and Max usually talks him down. His weapon of choice is an oversized .44 revolver.

  Max is a three-foot, white-furred "hyperkinetic rabbity thing" who prefers to be called a lagomorph. His ears are permanently rigid, and a huge jaw sits fixed in a crazed grin. He loves violence, shows little concern for his own safety, and happily serves as a cable cutter or an impromptu club in Sam's hands. His attention span is short and his memory poor. Yet he can show care, and he is fiercely possessive of Sam. He even says that when he dies, he will take Sam with him. Max carries a Luger pistol. Since he wears no clothes, other characters often wonder where he keeps it. Purcell considers Max to be pure id, the uncoordinated instinct of the human psyche.

  Over the years, several actors have given the pair their voices. Bill Farmer voiced Sam in the first game, Harvey Atkin did so in the cartoon, and David Nowlin took over from Telltale's games onward. Nick Jameson first voiced Max, followed by Robert Tinkler in the cartoon. Andrew Chaikin voiced him in the first Telltale episode before William Kasten replaced him. Dave Boat has played Max from Poker Night 2 onward.

  Their ride is a seemingly indestructible black-and-white 1960 DeSoto Adventurer. It carries them to contemporary and historical settings alike, including the White House, as well as several fictitious places.

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• 4. Ink and Newsletters

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  "Monkeys Violating the Heavenly Temple" was Steve Purcell's first full Sam & Max story. It appeared in the 1987 comic series Sam & Max: Freelance Police, from Fishwrap Productions, the publisher of Fish Police. The Freelance Police travel to the Philippines to stop a volcano god cult. Two shorter stories ran alongside it. "Night of the Gilded Heron-Shark" is a stand-off with gangsters in the duo's office. "Night of the Cringing Wildebeest" follows an investigation into a carnival refreshment booth.

  More comics followed from other publishers, including Comico Comics and Epic Comics. "Fair Wind to Java" first ran in 1988 as a Munden's Bar story in First Comics' Grimjack, with pyramid-building aliens in Ancient Egypt. In 1989, the three-chapter "On the Road" showed what the pair do on vacation. A Christmas story, "The Damned Don't Dance", came out in 1990. The year 1992 brought "Bad Day On The Moon", about a roach infestation bothering giant rats, and "Beast From The Cereal Aisle", an exorcism at the local supermarket. In 1997, "The Kids Take Over" had the duo wake from cryogenic sleep to find children ruling the world, while "Belly Of The Beast" pitted them against a vampire abducting children at Halloween.

  Purcell joined LucasArts in 1988 as an artist and game designer. When the company launched a quarterly newsletter called The Adventurer in 1990, he was asked to contribute. Between that first issue and 1996, he made twelve Sam & Max strips for it. Some echoed the comic book plots. Others parodied LucasArts games such as Monkey Island and Full Throttle, or the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.

  In 1995, Marlowe & Company gathered every comic and newsletter strip to date in Sam & Max: Surfin' the Highway. The 154-page book was updated and republished in 1996. It went out of print in 1997 and became a high-priced collector's item on services such as eBay. A 197-page twenty-year anniversary edition arrived in 2007, co-designed by Purcell and Jake Rodkin and published by Telltale Games. It was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2009 in the category for graphic album reprints.

  In December 2005, Purcell launched a webcomic on the Telltale Games website. "The Big Sleep" opens with Sam and Max bursting out of their graves at Kilpeck Church in England, marking their return after nearly a decade. In its twelve pages, Max must rescue Sam after earwigs start a colony in his brain. The webcomic ended in April 2007 and won the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic of that year. Its host, Telltale Games, was by then producing something new for the pair.

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• 5. Hit the Road and the Lost Sequels

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  In 1988, the year Purcell joined LucasArts, Sam and Max walked into the company as test material. Purcell made animated versions of the characters and an office backdrop for new SCUMM engine programmers to practice on. In 1992, LucasArts offered him the chance to turn the pair into a game. The company wanted fresh characters after the success of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, and fans had reacted warmly to the newsletter strips.

  Sam & Max Hit the Road was designed by Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, Purcell and his future wife Collette Michaud. It was partly based on the 1989 comic "On the Road", and sent the pair across America in search of an escaped bigfoot. The game was released for DOS in November 1993 to near universal acclaim. Critics praised its humor, voice acting, graphics, music and gameplay. It earned a nomination for the 1994 Annie Award for Best Animated CD-ROM, but the prize went to LucasArts' own Star Wars: Rebel Assault. The game still turns up regularly on lists of top games.

  A sequel was a long time coming. Soon after Hit the Road, a second SCUMM-based game entered planning under Purcell and Dave Grossman, but it was abandoned. Grossman later recalled its highlight as "a giant spaceship shaped like Max's head".

  In September 2001, development began on Sam & Max Plunge Through Space, an Xbox exclusive from Infinite Machine, a small studio of former LucasArts employees. Purcell and designer Chuck Jordan wrote a story in which the duo cross the galaxy to find a stolen Statue of Liberty. Infinite Machine went bankrupt within a year, partly because its first game, New Legends, had failed.

  At the 2002 Electronic Entertainment Expo, LucasArts announced a PC sequel, Sam & Max: Freelance Police. It was to be a point-and-click adventure on a new 3D engine, led by Michael Stemmle. Purcell wrote the story and produced concept art, and Farmer and Jameson were set to return. In March 2004, with development well advanced, LucasArts cancelled the game in a brief press release. It cited "current market place realities and underlying economic considerations".

  Fans reacted strongly, and a petition of 32,000 signatures was later presented to LucasArts. Purcell said he could not understand the decision, since he believed the work was going smoothly. Media commentators suggested that LucasArts was retreating to low-risk Star Wars games. The cancellation is often cited as the culmination of a perceived decline in adventure games. LucasArts later dismissed many designers who had worked on those games, effectively ending its adventure game era.

  The license between Purcell and LucasArts lapsed in 2005, and the characters were about to change hands.

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• 6. Episodes by Telltale

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  Telltale Games was staffed by former LucasArts employees, some of whom had worked on the cancelled Freelance Police. Its first Sam & Max game, Sam & Max Save the World, was a point-and-click adventure on a new 3D engine, different from the one in Freelance Police. It ran for six episodes. Each told a self-contained story, while a plot about hypnotism ran through the whole season. GameTap released the first episode in October 2006, and episodes followed regularly until April 2007. Telltale also made fifteen machinima shorts, released in groups of three between episodes, showing what the duo got up to between cases.

  Critics responded favorably to Save the World. They praised the humor, graphics and gameplay, though some worried that the puzzles were too easy and the story uneven. Journalists regard it as the first successful application of episodic gaming, since Telltale delivered a steady stream of releases with only small gaps. Earlier attempts had not worked out. Valve's Half-Life series, Ritual Entertainment's SiN Episodes and Telltale's own Bone were all judged unsuccessful for various reasons.

  Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space came next, with five episodes between November 2007 and April 2008. Its overarching story involved time travel and the laundering of the souls of the dead. Episodes appeared on GameTap before general release. Telltale also produced a twenty-minute machinima Christmas special. Reviewers both praised and faulted the game for resembling its predecessor, but the reception was good overall.

  In 2010, Max also appeared in Telltale's casual game Poker Night at the Inventory, beside Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade, the Heavy from Team Fortress 2 and Strong Bad from Homestar Runner. The sequel put Sam and Max alongside Claptrap from Borderlands, Brock Samson from The Venture Bros., Ash Williams from Evil Dead and GLaDOS from Portal.

  HappyGiant developed the virtual reality game Sam & Max: This Time It's Virtual, with Purcell as a design consultant. Stemmle returned as designer and writer, and Jared Emerson-Johnson as composer. It launched in July 2021 for Oculus Quest, with SteamVR and Viveport Infinity versions due in late 2021 and PlayStation VR in 2022. Remasters of all three Telltale seasons appeared between 2020 and 2024. They came from Skunkape Games, a studio of former members of the original team, named after General Skun-ka'pe. Skunkape later remastered Poker Night at the Inventory in 2026.

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• 7. Screen and Sound

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  On the 4th of October 1997, Fox Kids in the United States, YTV in Canada and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom began airing The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police. Nelvana produced the cartoon, which ran for 24 episodes until the 25th of April 1998. Episodes lasted about ten minutes and were often shown in pairs. The first and last were twenty minutes long.

  The show was aimed more at children than the rest of the franchise, though some jokes still targeted adults. The violence was toned down, Sam and Max lost their guns, and the moderate profanity of their other appearances disappeared. As in most of their stories, the duo took missions from their mysterious superior, the commissioner. The show was a success and won the 1998 Gemini Award for Best Animated Program or Series. No second season was ever commissioned. Shout! Factory acquired the DVD rights in 2007. That October, GameTap hosted the series on its website to promote Save the World, and the DVD came out in March 2008.

  Film noir jazz forms the base of the franchise's music, with detours into Dixieland, waltz and mariachi that support the cartoon tone. Hit the Road was one of the first games with a fully scored soundtrack. LucasArts composers Clint Bajakian, Michael Land and Peter McConnell wrote it. Land and McConnell's iMUSE engine synchronized the music with the visuals. The full soundtrack was never released, though audio renders of four of the game's MIDI tracks appeared on the CD version.

  For the three Telltale seasons, Jared Emerson-Johnson wrote the scores, drawing on earlier composing and sound editing work for LucasArts. Live performances replaced the synthesized music common elsewhere in games. The first two seasons got two-disc soundtracks, in July 2007 and September 2008. IGN called the music a "breath of fresh air", and 1UP.com praised it as "top-caliber". Music4Games said its whimsical classical jazz approach suited a universe that treats American popular culture with irreverence.

  Brendan Q. Ferguson, a lead designer on the first two Telltale seasons, said in September 2008 that the scores created the vital atmosphere. Before the music went in, he recalled, playing the games had been an "unrelenting horror".

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• 8. A Small Franchise Endures

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  Critics who later looked back on the comics noted that they won little popularity until Hit the Road arrived in 1993. They had been well received by reviewers, who praised the humor and the style of the stories and characters. Commentators also see the episodic Telltale games as having revived interest in them. Today the series is considered an iconic and influential part of the 1990s games industry and of the adventure genre.

  That success has spawned a range of merchandise, including posters and prints, clothing and sketchbooks of Purcell's work from various stages of the series. Collectable statues of the characters exist too. In 2019, Boss Fight Studios produced a new line of Freelance Police action figures, with prototypes first shown at New York Toy Fair.

  A plush Max followed, perhaps because of references in Purcell's sketchbooks and demand from fans and journalists. Hashtag Collectibles sold it in limited numbers, in collaboration with Purcell. A limited edition plush Sam went on sale in late 2023 through Uncute's website. Max was brought back alongside him for a limited time. In 2024, Max returned once more, this time with Max-themed slippers.

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