It's been a long, strange trip from comic
book ink to episodic game for the dog and rabbit crime-fighting duo Sam &
Max.
When Steve Purcell created the characters twenty years ago he could never
have imagined they would become the first experiment in episodic gaming, a new
form of videogame told in installments like a TV show, instead of one big chunk
like a movie.
"At the time I just wanted to do a comic book that I could feel proud
of. I didn't know if I would ever have a chance to do another one so I put a
lot of effort into it," says the veteran illustrator, who now works in the
Story Development division at Pixar Animation Studios.
The cult comic book series helped land Purcell a job at LucasArts where the
company took a liking to his critter creations. They made cameos in many titles
and in 1993 appeared in their own PC adventure game, "Sam & Max Hit
the Road." It took nine years for LucasArts to announce the sequel would
go into production. Between that time Sam & Max appeared in an animated TV
series from 1997-1998 on the now-defunct Fox Kids Network, further expanding
the reach of the franchise.
But in 2004 LucasArts abruptly halted production of the sequel title
"Freelance Police" and cancelled the game for good, much to the
disappointment of Purcell and the game developers. Instead of leaving their
passion project on the drawing room floor, several of these LucasArts employees
left to start their own vidgame banner, Telltale Games.
"As soon as the rights to Sam & Max finally reverted back to Steve
Purcell, we leaped at the chance to be able to make it because that's something
we had all loved from the beginning," says Telltale designer and writer
Brendan Ferguson, who along with lead designer and writer Dave Grossman
developed all six episodes of "Sam & Max: Season One."
The many mediums Sam & Max have ventured into over the years helped
secure a distribution partnership with Turner's videogame download service
GameTap, which also liked that it appealed to a somewhat older demo than the
typical teen-driven vidgame.
"Being able to use a franchise that was going to cross a lot of age
demographics was important to me," says Rick Sanchez, VP of Content at
GameTap.
But perhaps the more important reason Sam & Max was a good fit for
GameTap is the episodic gaming model.
"These are essentially comic book characters who live their existence
in episodic format so they just make sense for an episodic game," notes
Sanchez. "You didn't have to have some really drawn out dense stories to
make them work. You could have a really wacky, simple story that you could play
in four or five hours and feel really good about."
Now GameTap is using the Sam & Max model of an episode-a-month release
schedule with other games. The company recently announced that its popular
multiplayer online game "Myst Online: Uru Live" is being turned into
an episodic game and a 24 episode series titled "American McGee's
Grimm," based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, will launch in the spring
of 2008.
Though he has a full time job at Pixar, the Sam & Max writers took
Purcell out for dinner frequently to brainstorm story ideas for the games.
"Our office is between where he works at Pixar and where he lives so we
can just rope him in on his way by," says Grossman. "He comes up with
a lot of crazy ideas and we do our best to work them all in and that's part of
what makes it fun."
Twenty years after creating Sam & Max, Purcell indeed seems to have no
shortage of wacky concepts for the anthropomorphic dog and his
"rabbity-thing" sidekick.
"We would go to a local restaurant and bat around ideas for each
episode," says Purcell. "For me I was always looking for what's
tangible in each episode. What's fun to do when you become a lunatic rabbit
President?"
Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117966230.html