There isn’t a similar media franchise to Sam & Max. Point-and-click adventure games and a brief cartoon eventually followed the beloved dog in a suit and his gregarious lagomorph sidekick on their crime-solving, world-saving adventures, which started as a highly regarded comic series by Steve Purcell in the late 1980s.
Sam & Max Creation
Dave, the younger brother of Steve Purcell, came up with the idea for Sam & Max when he was younger. It was a comic about a dog and rabbit detective team. Due to sibling rivalry, Steve frequently completed the unfinished stories in parodies of their original form, making the characters purposefully mix up names, overexplain things, shoot at each other, and mock the way they had been drawn as “kind of a parody of the way a kid talks when he’s writing comics.”
Dave frequently left the comics lying around the house. This changed over time from Steve just making fun of his brother’s work to him developing the characters into his own complete stories. After all, Dave Purcell granted Steve the rights to the characters in the late 1970s, putting his signature on a contract on Steve’s birthday and letting him take the characters in a different direction.
Purcell started drawing comic strips featuring Sam & Max in 1980 for the California College of Arts and Crafts weekly newsletter. The stories shared a style with those that followed when Fish Police author Steven Moncuse allowed Purcell to publish his work officially in 1987, even though the characters’ visuals had not yet been fully developed.
Purcell’s own experiences influenced a lot of the Sam & Max comics. Cockroaches and rats are prevalent throughout the franchise; Purcell’s pet rat served as the inspiration for the former. Another example is when Sam and Max are periodically seen playing a game called “fizzball” in which the goal is to use a solid axe handle to strike a beer can in midair. The game was created by Purcell and his friends, Mike Mignola and Art Adams, who were also comic book writers.
System Requirements
- DirectX: Version 11
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
- Sound Card: DirectX 11 sound device
- OS *: Windows 7 64Bit Service Pack 1
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Graphics: Nvidia GTS 450+ with 1024MB+ VRAM (excluding GT)
Character Detail
Sam, a Freelance Police officer, strikes me as somewhat more composed and nonviolent than his partner Max. Usually, he dresses in a grayish suit reminiscent of film noir, complete with a tie that is striped in blue and black, a hat, and no shoes. He tends to take everything he sees when playing the games, and it seems that he stores the items in a cardboard box that he carries inside his jacket.
A Smith & Wesson Model 29 44 Magnum revolver is always with Sam. Because of its enormous size, it tends to “droop” when held. He is a terrible shot, but he uses it quickly in the comics. He can hit any object with the first shot in the Telltale episodes, but he is hesitant to use it against living things, including bad guys.
The gun only makes one appearance in the animated series, in episode 20, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.” Following their departure from the Commissioner’s daughter’s wedding, Sam says, “I think the Commissioner would be happy with our decision to use tear gas and rubber bullets right now.”
Sam & Max Beyond Time And Space
The second season of Sam & Max’s 3D adventures on the PC makes it abundantly evident right away that the series is known for its bizarre adventures that flagrantly flout established laws of reality. Sam & Max Beyond Time And Space, a five-episode adventure from TellTale Games, begins with a trip to the North Pole where Santa Claus brandishing a gun is battling a demon that loves chaos, and things only get stranger from there.
This entry, like all the best sequels, does almost everything that Sam & Max Save The World did better without sacrificing a bit of its unique charm. Players can immerse themselves in absurdist humor and ridiculous satire for extended periods, and they never grow bored by simply fiddling around with their surroundings.
