Sam & Max Hit the Road: A Road Trip Through Roadside Kitsch

Some adventure games aim to be epic. Sam & Max Hit the Road aims to be funny, and it succeeds by treating the American highway as a source of endless absurdity: giant balls of twine, gator-themed mini golf, desert attractions of dubious authenticity. It is a road-trip game in which the road itself is the joke.

The game was released by LucasArts in 1993 and is based on the comic characters created by Steve Purcell. Sam is a dog in a suit and hat, the calm and verbose half of the “Freelance Police”; Max is a hyperkinetic “rabbity thing” with a taste for violence. The two are hired to track down a Bigfoot who has gone missing from a roadside carnival, and their trail leads across the country, from small-town oddities to more eccentric places, in an investigation that is largely an excuse to visit strange locations and meet strange people.

The design credit is usually given to Sean Clark and Michael Stemmle, who led the project at LucasArts. It used the company’s SCUMM engine, but with an important interface change. Earlier LucasArts adventures used a list of verbs at the bottom of the screen, such as “Pick up” or “Talk to”. This game replaced it with a context-sensitive cursor: you cycled through a set of icons, including walking, looking, talking, picking up and using, and applied the current one to whatever was in front of you. The change made the interface cleaner and reduced the busywork that verb lists could encourage, and the approach became common in later adventures.

The game also had a full voice track on CD-ROM, with Bill Farmer, known for voicing Goofy, as Sam and Nick Jameson as Max. Voiced adventure games were becoming common in the early 1990s as CD-ROM drives spread, but Hit the Road used the format well: the delivery of the dialogue is a big part of the humor, and both actors sell the characters’ odd rhythm.

The puzzles follow classic adventure logic, with occasional leaps that can require patience, but the game frames them in a way that keeps the momentum. It is often pointed to for its mini-games, including the gator golf course, and for the deadpan absurdity of its scenes. As with most LucasArts adventures of the period, the design is forgiving rather than punishing, which suits its tone. It is a game in which you are supposed to enjoy the trip.

Its legacy has been complicated. The game did not spawn a direct sequel at the time. LucasArts did begin work on Sam & Max: Freelance Police in the early 2000s but cancelled it in 2004. The story might have ended there, but Telltale Games, the studio founded by several former LucasArts staff, licensed the characters and released episodic Sam & Max adventures beginning in 2006, with Purcell involved. Those games introduced the pair to a new audience and helped revive the point-and-click format.

Today, Hit the Road is best found through digital storefronts and through the ScummVM project, which can run the original game data on modern systems. It is worth a visit if you want to see LucasArts at its most anarchic.

The opinion part: it is the least self-serious of the studio’s classics, and the better for it. It has no grand ambitions beyond making you laugh, and it turns out that is enough. A road trip through kitsch is a fine thing to preserve.