Games Learning from TV: The Sam & Max Story

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Popular anthropomorphic crime-fighting duo Sam and Max made a long-awaited return to PC screens all around the world last year, as San Rafael-based development studio Telltale Games unveiled their season of six bite-sized, four-hour adventure game episodes. Sam and Max's first season wraps up this week, capping an outstanding series that's impressive both for the quality of the games it produced, and the innovative way Telltale applied concepts familiar to TV drama series addicts to the video game world.

Who are Sam and Max, anyway? They're a duo of freelance detectives, one a six-foot talking dog and the other a four-foot talking rabbit. Both are drawn to each other through a shared affection for violence (preferably as random and senseless as possible, although they're not fussy). They solve mysteries, rescue unfortunate hostages, and save the world. Packed with witty asides, hilarious exchanges and delicious sight-gags, their games have a well-deserved reputation of being some of the funniest around.

Originally created by comic book writer Steve Purcell in 1987, the pair first appeared on computer screens in 1993 in an adventure game called Sam & Max Hit the Road. Despite achieving considerable critical success, gathering a large number of fans, and spawning a spin-off TV cartoon series, no attempt was made to bring Sam and Max back to the gaming world until 2002, when publisher Activision announced another adventure game was in production. When that game was canceled in 2004, it looked like we'd seen the last of the pair.

Not so. Much to everyone's surprise, small studio Telltale Games picked up the license last year and, with the cooperation of Purcell as co-designer, embarked upon creating a six-part series of shorter, leaner Sam and Max stories, released through a variety of online distribution methods. The final episode of Season One goes on sale on Telltale's site this week. Each Sam & Max episode takes just four hours or so to play from start to finish, which isn't much compared to full-priced games. But then, an episode only costs $8.95 from the creators' web site. Each one told a self-contained (and inevitably surreal) story, but plot threads and running jokes spanned the whole season. Hence the "episodic" handle, of course: you'll recognize the format from just about any TV drama.

Telltale's series isn't the first time episodic style gaming has been tried, but so far it's by far the most successful attempt. Origin's Wing Commander: Secret Ops is usually named as the first episodic game - it began in 1998, picking up the storyline from the successful series of Wing Commander space combat games. Secret Ops didn't do well, and ended when the Origin studio responsible for its development was closed by uberpublisher EA.

As the Internet became more ubiquitous, it became easier to distribute episodic content to buyers without having to worry about distributing multiple releases to retail stores. The early years of this century saw some publishers and developers flirting with the concept, but most abandoned the unproven format for the more familiar territory of a standard box. Indigo Prophecy, a dark 2005 PC adventure game, was originally conceived as an episodic game, but when it eventually reached gamers the plan had been abandoned.