“Adventure games” nowadays are a generally defunct genre. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, these games were embraced by the sort of insecure gamer who were driven to tears because they lacked the twitchy reflexes needed to avoid frags in First-Person Shooters. These were also the sort of gamers that were easily thrilled by interactive cartoons where the most visceral thrill occurred when you clicked on a colorful background item and— for time in a long, long while — your character doesn’t mumble some variation of “I can’t pick that up.” They were, for the most part, heavily story-based and tediously linear. Naturally, I was a huge fan. What can I say? I’m a sucker for good storytelling and lush visuals. (And… I totally suck at FPS.) At its best, adventure games churn out magically imaginative worlds like The Land of the Dead from Grim Fandango. The best most FPS games can scrounge up is yet another rip-off of the Alien series.
1993 was located at the center of adventure gaming’s Golden Era. It was the year Myst was released, which went on to become the best-selling video game in history until I Finally Have An Excuse To Play With Dollhouses Again (a.k.a. The Sims). Sierra,still cranking out its Quest games, was just starting up the highly acclaimed Gabriel Knight series.
In the same year, LucasArts — with its noble goal of writing games that could be used in film — released two of the most beloved games of all time. The previous year had seen the releases of highly anticipated games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Yet this year would also see the release of two instant classics. The first was the absurd Day of the Tentacle, where a gang of slacker kids must change events at different points in history to stop a sentient tentacle from taking over the world.
The second was based on a little known comic book by Steve Purcell featuring the adventures of a dog detective and his buddy, a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing.” With Sam & Max Hit the Road, the modern day animated descendant of Martin & Lewis finally hit the big time. The game is funny … legit funny, not the kind of torpid video-game funny. The jokes were disarmingly clever, too. Play your cards right, and you got a musical sequence, sung by stuffed and mounted animals, devoted to preservationist John Muir while “Edutainment” flashed in the background. Hit the Road was such a phenomenal sucess that the game has eclipsed he original comics as Sam & Max’s baseline medium. (This is not unlike how discussions on James Bond gravitate toward the movies, while the original Ian Fleming novels are mostly forgotten.)
It’s no surprise, then, that a video game website hosts the latest issue of the Sam & Max comic. Telltale Games produces both the “Sam & Max Season One” game and the illustrated heir to the original comic book series, Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max digital comic.
