Sam & Max Hit the Road - Doug The Moleman

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Published on May 7, 2023 4:30:01 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU0KAqaaB0o

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Sam & Max Hit the Road is a Point and Click Adventure developed and published by LucasArts for MS-DOS but was later ported to MAC OS, and updated for Windows. It originally released in North America in November of 1993.

Sam & Max was created by Steve Purcell and the game based on the series was developed by a small team at LucasArts. Prior to being employed at LucasArts, Steve Purcell had developed the Sam & Max characters and started publishing stories about them around 1987. These had caught attention of some of the LucasArts developers, and Purcell was brought in to help draw the cover art for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, then eventually worked on character animations in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Sam and Max characters were originally used as internal testing material for SCUMM engine; 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 to create a video game out of the characters.

As the Sam & Max comics had a more adult tone, Steve Purcell expected LucasArts to cut back "the edgier material" from the game, but expressed that he was pleased with how LucasArts allowed him to stay close to his original vision for the game.

Sam and Max paved the way for future adventure games by Lucas Arts, as it rehauled the user interface. 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.

The games soundtrack was composed by Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell, and Michael Z. Land.