Name: Sam & Max Hit the Road
Platform: PC
Year Released: 1993



Among the many gifts I received this holiday season was the Rob Smith book Rogue Leaders: The History of LucasArts, which details the rise of one of the most prominent publishers in video games. Those of us who were gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s remember a time when the name “LucasArts” was synonymous with point-and-click adventure games, and Rogue Leaders has been serving as a fitting trip down memory lane. The book made me so nostalgic for the adventure games of my childhood that I was pretty much forced to acquire a copy of Sam & Max Hit the Road, which I remembered as being a clever and hilarious point-and-click adventure. Fifteen years later, the game is still addictive and fun to play.


It’s been at least a decade since I last played Sam & Max Hit the Road, so playing it again has been like starting fresh, with most of the puzzles long gone from my memory. Though some locations and characters became familiar once I saw them again, most of the plot, and the order to go about doing things, remained fuzzy in my mind. Even without the nostalgia factor, there is a lot to like about Sam & Max early on. First of all, the verbose dog and psychotic rabbit that make up the Freelance Police are great characters. Their dialogue, as well as that of almost every character in the game, is really well-written, and the voice-acting is surprisingly good for a fifteen-year-old game. Sure, there are plenty of times when the voices don’t even come close to matching the way a character’s lips are moving, but that’s forgivable because this game does so many other things right.


LucasArts games of this era had a very distinct style as far as art and animation, and Sam & Max falls into that category. The animation is great, the characters are quirky, and the story is interesting, although very bizarre. Since point-and-click games are all about the story and characters, a compelling narrative is necessary in order for the game to work. Luckily, that is the case with this game. As Freelance Police, Sam and Max have been hired by the commissioner to track down a runaway Sasquatch, who has recently escaped the nearby carnival. The adventure takes the duo all over the country in a crazy chase that goes beyond just the Bigfoot mystery. Oh yes, it’s definitely ridiculous, but when you’re playing a game starring a talking dog and rabbit, you probably expect that.

In addition to the straight storyline, Sam & Max offers a handful of mini-games that help break up the action and provide some silly fun. Most of them are simple, like car-surfing with Max and jumping over highway signs, playing dress up and putting crazy outfits and accessories on the duo, or filling in a color-by-numbers image. There’s also a game called “Car Bomb” that’s essentially Battleship with cars, which is as fun as it is silly. Honestly, this is the sort of thing that more games of the genre could have used, since many of them were completely straightforward.


Despite everything it has going for it, Sam & Max suffers the same problem of almost every game in the genre: little to no replay value. Once you’ve beaten it, there’s really no reason to play through it again, unless many years have passed and you’ve forgotten everything. Sure, it might be fun to breeze through it if you’re fixing for a little nostalgic humor, but without some kind of incentive to play the game again (like multiple endings), you probably won’t be coming back after you played it once.

When I was younger, I didn’t really understand everything that went into making this game, and why it was so great. I didn’t know what the words “SCUMM” or “iMuse” meant (the ever-evolving graphical and sound engines developed by LucasArts for use in their games), and I didn’t know that this was one of the first games to include a complete speech soundtrack and had a (for the time) revolutionary use of music. In fact, I only got this game because it came bundled with Day of the Tentacle, which I wanted because it was the sequel to one of my favorite games. As a result, I completely fell in love with PC adventure games, not to mention Sam and Max themselves. After several cancelled projects over the last fifteen years, the duo are back in an episodic adventure that has managed to capture the tone of the original game wonderfully. Being able to play through Sam & Max Hit the Road again reminded me why I love these games to begin with, and has made me even more anxious for Sam & Max Season Two to hit the Wii.

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