Games Learning from TV: The Sam & Max Story

More recently, Valve's Steam online game distribution platform has renewed interest in the episodic format, pioneered by Valve's own Half-Life: Episode One. Strong though it was, as Episode Two slips into the fall (it was originally scheduled for release last year) it becomes increasingly hard to consider the Half-Life series as "episodic" in the same sense as the Sam & Max games. Sin: Episodes, another first-person shooter episodic series, looks to have died after just one installment as its developer Ritual hit rocky times in December. Making episodic games, like starting your own business or writing a novel, is one of those things that many people talk about but few actually do.

Where Telltale succeeded, and where other episodic designers have failed, is by setting a tight, punishing schedule - and sticking to it. Would you keep watching Lost if there was a year's wait for the next installment? One four-hour Sam & Max episode per month compares closely to a typical TV series' calendar, but it can't have been easy to achieve that pace. Game development already has a reputation for brutal "crunch" periods of intensive work in the weeks leading up to a game's release, but Telltale must have been in crunch mode for six months solid.

Still, the popularity of shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes demonstrate we love series that tell lengthy stories one piece at a time. Sam & Max episodes can comfortably be polished off in an evening, and compare favorably to the cost of a movie ticket or a handful of iTunes songs. No wonder they were successful.

They were also fortunate enough to pick the perfect genre. Adventure games once lined store shelves, attracted huge movie licenses and were tremendously popular, but as 3D graphics became more and more ubiquitous gamers began to demand more from their entertainment than the simplistic graphics the genre usually entailed. These days, they're relegated to a mere aside from small-time, low budget studios.

But the adventure genre is proving a natural fit for the repetition inherent in episodic stories. Who'd want to play the same single-player first-person shooter level over and over again? Nobody - but Sam & Max had the advantage of being able to liven up repeat visits to the same locations (and there were certainly plenty of those) with new dialogue, new puzzles and new jokes. Just like a TV show, once you've built the sets, you can use them scene after scene without much in the way of extra expense.

So what's up next for Telltale and Sam and Max? Season Two, for one thing - it's in the planning stages already. The company recently advertised for Xbox 360 and Wii programmers, leading many to wonder if we might be seeing Sam & Max episodes showing up on Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii Virtual Console at some point in the not too distant future. They'd certainly benefit from the wider exposure, and the Wii's remote would be perfect for a point-and-click adventure game, wouldn't it? Here's hoping.