The reason why Telltale Games exists, even if it wasn’t their first game to come out. The story goes that a team at LucasArts was handling follow-ups for Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road, but the projects got cancelled over concerns that there wasn’t a market for adventure games anymore. Key personnel still very much interested in making adventure games bailed on LucasArts and formed Telltale. The goal was always to make an episodic Sam & Max title, but Telltale worked their way up to it, first producing a small tech demo (Telltale Texas Hold ‘Em), then earn capital through a couple easy-to-obtain licenses (Jeff Smith’s Bone, CSI). With money in their pockets and Steve Purchell’s blessing, Telltale took their big swing and produced what is probably Sam & Max’s biggest, best-known incarnation.

…and before we go any further, let us stop to admire the significance of all this. Please, indulge me for a couple paragraphs.

Sam & Max are essentially underground comix characters, created by Steve Purchell…’s brother. When they were kids, Purchell’s kid brother Dave drew these comics of a rabbit and dog detective, and Steve drew over-the-top parodies of them to mess with his brother. Dave gave Steve the rights to these dorkuses as a birthday present one year, and Steve developed them into the verbose, satirical, gleefully insane Freelance Police we know and love today.

The characters debuted in a series of comics, which Purchell published as a side hustle to his day job. Eventually, that day job was to be an animator and illustrator for LucasArts (we have Purchell to thank for the fabulous coverart for titles like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken). LucasArts put out a quarterly periodical, to which Purchell started contributing Sam & Max comics… really because he could. The fine folks at LucasArts loved the Freelance Police so much that they started hiding them into games (this is jumping ahead a little bit, but my go-to example is Max inexplicably showing up as a friendly NPC in Jedi Knight). Eventually, someone at LucasArts realized they technically had full rights to the characters, so with Purchell on-board, the studio put out Sam & Max Hit the Road. Then there was the TV show, and more comics, and…

…well, not to put too fine a point on it - an entire game studio, one that has won countless awards for producing several of the most important games of its era, was founded with the express purpose of producing a new Sam & Max video game. Two studios, if we count the later Skunkape Games. All this from a kid messing with his little brother. You gotta love that.

With all this established, and knowing the house Sam & Max built out of Telltale, I’ve always found it striking how unconfident Telltale’s run of Sam & Max starts. It’s never bad, but it takes until “The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball” - the third episode - before you really feel like Telltale gets what they want to do with these characters and this world. Before then, you have “Culture Shock”, which frankly feels so aimless and inconsequential within the scope of Season One that I can’t think of it as anything but a pilot episode. The main villain of the season doesn’t even show up! “Situation: Comedy” is a good high concept and feels like a better introduction to the characters, but it’s wanting for a big capstone or highlight moment to sell the whole thing (though I can’t hate Mr. Featherly, and there are lots of good throwaway lines during the ‘Cooking Without Looking’ segment).

But “The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball” is where it starts to pick up. ‘Ted E. Bear’s Mafia-Free Playland and Casino’ is the joke that finally sold me on Sam & Max. And then ‘Just You And Me (And Ted E. Bear)’ really sold me on it. I think a decent amount of the first two episodes feel like they’re just extreme examples of adventure game silliness, and it isn’t until you hit that third episode and the change of scenery that you finally get, “oh, no, this just happens to be the heightened reality these characters exist in; adventure game silliness is part of the joke here”.

(as a quick aside - I’ll comment on changes made overall in the remake if I ever get around to playing that version, but I’m a little bummed that they changed the explanation for the ‘skinbodies’, since that was a favorite line as well. Definitely get why they made that change though)

The rest of the season is hit after hit. “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” has a ton of great dadaist political commentary and introduces one of the all-time greatest Sam & Max side characters in Agent Superball (plus, West Dakota). “Reality 2.0” is a fun send-up of internet and video game culture, with a decent amount of the jokes still holding up. “Bright Side of the Moon” is probably a step down from its predecessors, but there are still plenty of classic moments, like the complete lack of an explanation for how Sam & Max can drive to the moon, the payoff for Bosco’s Inconvenience, and the final confrontation.

I honestly think “Save the World” remains my favorite set of Sam & Max’s video game outings? “Hit the Road” is probably stronger overall, but I don’t think the series has given me anything as nakedly funny as a lot of this season’s highlights. Later Telltale seasons have their moments - “The Devil’s Playhouse” comes pretty close at times - but this is my easy pick for the one to play to get you into Sam & Max. Just… stick with it for a couple episodes.

Sam and Max: Save the World is such a fun point and click adventure mixing noir with the inherent zaniness of its anthropomorphic characters. In complete honesty, I like to follow walkthroughs with these kind of adventures--my brain isn't in it for the puzzle aspect of it.

That being said, it serves as a good indicator of the stories to be able to hold my attention both in intrigue and in its comedic writing. It's great, lighthearted wacky fun with some really strong lead characters.

On another note, the WAR song is one of my favorite gaming moments I've experienced in recent years. Even after all of these years, I still find myself coming back to it.

This is a hell of a fun series. This was the first season of the Sam & Max games and what I loved was that this brought Telltale Games into the limelight. It also brought back the much loved duo who hadn't been in a game since their old classic "Sam & Max hit the road" so I am so damn glad this was made

I originally bought all the seasons off the Telltale website before they were made available on steam. What I love most about these games is they keep the humour, bring in new characters and they even have the original creator on standby to help with the development which I loved! Not to mention, the final villain is always a difficult one to discover.

I believe that this was the series that put TellTale on the map and the fact that they even had the creator on board to help them with the game (much like how they had Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future) certainly made sure that they have become such a massive Indy company now.

Lame humor, poor voice acting, and an embarrassingly constant reuse of the same assets make Sam & Max Save the World a disappointing continuation of one of the most impressive adventure games of its day. Playing this immediately after Sam & Max Hit the Road only makes the later game's weaknesses that much more pronounced. While the earlier game was hilarious, stylish, and found new ways of elevating the form, this is just a hacky retread with some of the laziest attempts at humor I've ever seen.

Rather than six episodes, this really feels more like six stitched together unfinished fan-made demos. The fact that there are only a handful of character models reused over and over only heightens the firmly established amateurish vibe, like someone put it together using some kind of cheap game making utility. The voice acting isn't all bad, but the line readings of both main characters mar an already weak script. The actors just don't have any feel for the characters beyond the extremely broad strokes, with a stultifying lack of energy (especially Sam) and a dearth of comic timing (especially Max). I'd be perhaps a bit more inclined to forgive it as a relic of mid-2000s low quality voice-acting if it weren't for the fact that Hit the Road's actors nailed it so awesomely a decade earlier. Sadly, that downgrade in voice acting goes hand-in-hand with a general depreciation in graphics, atmosphere, visual style, and ambition.

But ya know what? I don't hate it. As much as the game often annoyed me, there were still many bright spots scattered throughout all the episodes and constant glimmers of good ideas, like Max as president, that in more talented hands could have really shined. The puzzles were mostly not bad - generally not too challenging (especially given the pathetically tiny size of the game world), but usually still fairly satisfying to solve. Some of the characters were even quite good, such as the game's final villain, who is one of the most unique and amusing bad guys I've seen in ages. So yeah, this game has a few things going for it. But goddammit, it could have been so much better.

Rough ranking:
Episode 6: B-
Episode 5: C+
Episode 2: C+
Episode 4: C
Episode 1: C
Episode 3: C-

Overall: C


Also, the Machinima sketches are dreadful

i think when i was waaay younger i got to episode 5 but i don't think i actually beat the entire game
i also remember being really confused when looking up this game cus i didnt know there were sequels and was like "what the fuck why is there like 20 sams in this scene i never encountered"
i was pretty young so i probably never even considered that it was from a different game lol
i really need to play the whole series (as well as a bunch of other point and click games, i swear if i wasnt such a portal nerd i'd be a point and click fiend)

Two major things having revisited Season 1 recently:

1) The overall plots themselves aren't the funniest setups and are very much of their time. The individual bits and interactions carry the game on their back and hold up well today. This is the earliest Telltale game I really enjoy, and there's still growing pains to overcome both in terms of plot structure and weird writing kinks. Sam and Max are such good characters, and the devs knew how to use them to crank out 6 decent episodes. The quality is inconsistent, but even the bad episodes are still worth the ride just to hear these two characters bounce off each other.

2) There's no heterosexual explanation for half this game.

Should have called it:

Sam & Max: What The Fuck Am I Supposed To Do Now?

(How people figured out the ending to "Reality 2.0" without a guide is beyond me).