Sam & Max Hit The Road - Development

Development

Sam & Max Hit the Road was developed by a small team at LucasArts, many of whom had previous experience working on other LucasArts adventure games. The game was designed by Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell and his future wife Collette Michaud, all of whom had worked on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Sam and Max first appeared as video game characters as internal testing material for SCUMM engine programmers recently employed by LucasArts; Steve Purcell created animated versions of the characters and an office backdrop for the programmers to practice on. Soon after, Sam & Max comic strips by Steve Purcell were published in LucasArts' quarterly newsletter. After a positive reaction from fans to the strips and out of a wish to use new characters and settings after the success of the Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion franchises, LucasArts offered in 1992 to create a video game out of the characters.

You try to be aware of the amount of time you have players sitting and watching as opposed to interacting. Fortunately a lot of the humor came out of the way that the characters would respond to the player’s actions. Even observing something in the room could produce a funny response in which case the interactivity is doing the work of the story

“ ” Steve Purcell on finding balance between story and puzzles

The game was based on the 1989 Sam & Max comic On The Road, which featured the two on a journey across the United States. Several of the game's tourist traps were based on real locations experienced by the developers; Steve Purcell recollects a childhood visit to a "Frog Rock"—one of the locations featured in the game—and remembered thinking "That's it? It doesn't even look like a frog!" A chain of "Snuckey's" roadside stores and attractions was a tribute to the Stuckey's chain which Purcell and his family often stopped at during road trips.

Sam & Max was one of the first games to include a full speech soundtrack and music, which for Steve Purcell was a "dream opportunity" to hear his creations speak. Steve Purcell describes casting Bill Farmer in the role of Sam as his audition tape "was very dry; he wasn’t trying too hard to sell the lines". Actor Nick Jameson was cast to voice Max. The game's jazz score was composed by LucasArts' Clint Bajakian, Michael Land and Peter McConnell, and was incorporated into the game using Land and McConnell's iMUSE engine, which allowed for audio to be synchronized with the visuals. High quality versions of four of the game's tracks were included on the CD version of the game. Sam & Max Hit the Road was released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM; only the CD version of the game contained full in-game speech and music. Fans of the game have since recreated the game's MIDI soundtrack in higher quality MP3 format.

As the Sam & Max comics had a more adult tone, Steve Purcell expected LucasArts to cut back "the edgier material" from the game. However, he expressed that he was pleased with how LucasArts allowed him to stay close to his original vision for the game. The game's various minigames were included to allow players to take a break from solving the main game's puzzles and play something "short and silly". Sam & Max Hit the Road also signified a major change in development for games on the SCUMM engine. The user interface was entirely rehauled from that introduced in Maniac Mansion and built upon in subsequent games. Instead of selecting a verb function from a list at the bottom of the screen and clicking on an in-game entity, Sam & Max Hit the Road compressed all verb functions into the mouse cursor, which players could cycle through using the right-mouse button. The inventory was also moved off the main screen to a sub-screen accessible by a small icon on the screen. According to Steve Purcell, this cleared space on the screen to "expand on the excellent backgrounds and also made interaction much quicker and less laborious than LucasArts' previous adventure games" The conversation trees were also affected by this; Michael Stemmle proposed removing the text-based selection menu used in previous LucasArts' adventure games in favor of icons representing topics of discussion as "nothing would kill a joke worse than reading it before you hear it". Several of these innovations were retained for future LucasArts adventure games.