Monday, June 16, 2008

Sam & Max Hit the Road

Sam & Max Hit the Road is the first game in the Sam & Max series. It was released for PC in November 1993, for Mac in 1995, and for Linux on October 28, 2014. Sam & Max were the unofficial LucasArts mascots in the 1990's. They appeared in comics in the LucasArts Adventurer newsletter, and the duo appeared in cameos in most LucasArts adventure games, and some of the LucasArts non-adventures as well.  In Sam & Max Hit the Road, they travel across the USA in search of a missing bigfoot.

Sam & Max: Hit the Road was well received, but the road to make a sequel was a bumpy one. Two known sequels were planned, Sam & Max Plunge through Space by Infinite Machine, and Sam & Max: Freelance Police by LucasArts. Both were canceled.  Artwork from both projects have been released over the years, both online and in a now out-of-print sketchbook called The Age of S&M.  A slight reworking of the plot of Sam & Max: Freelance Police was included in a conversation related to a country named Zyzobia in Poker Night 2.  Sequels finally did occur, over a decade after Hit the Road, as Telltale Games began producing Sam & Max games in 2006, and still hold the license to make new games in the franchise. Three seasons of episodic adventure games and two casual poker games starring the duo have been released so far.

Sam & Max Hit the Road is now supported by ScummVM, a program designed to let 2D adventure games run on multiple platforms. With ScummVM, Sam & Max Hit the Road now runs on modern versions of windows, as well as Linux, Mac OS X, and many consoles such as Dreamcast, Wii, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable. For a complete list of platforms supported by ScummVM, see here.

Explore Sam & Max Hit the Road, courtesy of Bumpusville:
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