Holy Cripes on Toast!!!

[Spazz]

<a href="http://www.adventuregamers.com/newsitem ... 1061">Rasp Rasp Rasp</a>

<b>Telltale Games secures rights to Sam & Max</b>

Telltale Games disclosed tonight what many adventure fans have been waiting to hear for over a year: Sam & Max is making a comeback.

The announcement came during a special event, "The Future of Digital Entertainment," which took place in the San Francisco office of consulting firm AT Kearney. The evening started with presentations by Pixar Supervising Animator Alan Barillaro and AT Kearney Vice President John Ciacchella, focusing on the direction of the digital entertainment industry. Telltale principals Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner, and Troy Molander then took the floor to talk about Telltale's corporate goals, development process, and market strategy. The presentation closed with the surprise announcement that Telltale has entered into an agreement with Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell to reintroduce the popular dog and rabbit team to the digital age.

The deal was inked only days ago, and few details are available as of now. Telltale stresses that the game will not be Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the LucasArts title whose highly-publicized 2004 cancellation was widely mourned by fans. New content will be developed, and the game will be implemented in an episodic format similar to that of Telltale's Bone games. Purcell, who works at Pixar, says he will be as involved with the Sam & Max project as he can be.

"If there's a better match, I don't know who it is… I trust them," Purcell said, when asked why he chose to work with Telltale. Purcell knows the Telltale team from their LucasArts days and is comfortable with their handling of the upcoming first Bone game, which is adapted from the well-known comic by Jeff Smith. When LucasArts' hold on the Sam & Max rights ran out this spring, Purcell and Telltale had the freedom to move forward.

Telltale has positioned itself as a company intent on delivering high-quality, story-driven games to an audience hungry for interactivity. "Around a year ago, we left the bosom of the game industry because we saw opportunity," Connors said of the team's departure from LucasArts. According to Bruner, Telltale's plan for licenses such as Bone and Sam & Max is "bigger than video games. It's interactive entertainment."

Adventure Gamers will provide more details about the Sam & Max project as they become available. For now, disillusioned fans can stop signing petitions and set aside the bitterness over all those false rumors. We spoke; they listened.

[Locit]

^_^

[j-man]

Thank fucking God. I just hope they can track down the voice actors from the TV show; I never was a fan of the Hit The Road voices.

[Esrever]

Damn it. I was going to post that yesterday, but then I figured that no one else here would care!

It's great news, of course. Although it's a shame they won't be able to use any of the stuff from the original cancelled sequel. I suppose Lucas Arts still owns all the content that they made for them, from the art to the models to the script. I wonder if that will make things difficult for the Telltale guys. They're in a very unusual position... they all know, in detail, all of the content from the cancelled game, but if they reproduce any of it too closely they'd be infringing on Lucas Arts' rights. Tricky!

I wonder if Mike Stemme will be involved in the new game...

I liked the Hit the Road voices better, myself. But the TV guys were good too. They might be hard to use though, since those voice actors are canucks...

[Adam Adamant]

Surely if Lucas Arts' rights to Sam and Max has expired then the only thing they have claim to is the specific material they produced. As long as Telltale don't use the actual material they can do what they want.

[Esrever]

Right, but it becomes a little tricky with a game that relies so much on dialogue.

I mean some things are obvious... they'll have to make new character models and so on. It's OK if the models happen to look similar or identical to the old models as long as they are built from scratch. But what about a particular joke, or conversation? All that writing is owned by Lucas Arts too, isn't it? I just wonder how much of it they could get away with transposing over to the new game.

[Koosh Koosh!]

I want more Sam and Max comics. Now.

[Esrever]

Unfortunately Steve produces them at a rate of approximately one page every ten thousand years.

Steve is a really bizarre cartoonist. Pretty much the only comics he ever draws are Sam and Max ones, and he draws them incredibly infrequently. And yet... they are so good! But they've always been this sort of side thing for him. He's working at Pixar now, but back in the day he used to do a ton of freelance work, and you'd see his name pop up in all kinds of random places. He did some enemy design for the original Toejam and Earl, for example.

[Nova]

I hope I don’t die before this new Sam&Max game is released and I’m able to play it.

[Kishi]

I like the idea that Nova is a frail old man just barely able to type, desperately holding on to every moment he has left. It would almost excuse his atrocities.

[Adam Adamant]

Have people here actually completed Hit the Road? I know I started it but I really had a hard time getting anywhere. It took me like a bazillion years just to get into the carnival right at the start. I want to play it but I don't want to use a walkthrough. I did that with Day of the Tentacle and without even realising it used the walkthrough for almost the whole game.

[Zeta]

The part with the magnets was the hardest part of Hit the Road because they really don't make it obvious that there are three in the room. So I kept on playing around with just two.

I also had a hell of a time finding Frog Rock.

[Esrever]

I think there were a couple of random item merges that required me to turn to a FAQ, but it's been so long since I've played that I'm having trouble remembering.