My Favorite Games: Sam & Max Hit the Road

Today, I was making a list of nine of my favorite/most formative video games, because I’m on social media too much and I’m a joiner. When I was comparing to the ongoing list on this blog, I was surprised that I hadn’t included one of the most obvious: Sam & Max Hit the Road.

Maybe I had a self-imposed rule that I could only include one SCUMM game? That sounds like something I’d do, since it’s pretty dumb. Maybe it was just too obvious? Like, I’m trying to explain to people how I really got into a Sam & Max game, and the response would be, “Uh yeah, no shit.”

Or maybe the reason it’s different from the other obvious favorites is because it’s the one that felt like it was talking directly to me. I can explain exactly why The Secret of Monkey Island made me want to start working in video games, and I can explain how Half-Life 2 made me completely re-think how games can encompass more than one type of thing. But with Sam & Max Hit the Road, it’s either you already get what makes it so good, or I don’t care to know you.

It’s not perfect. And not only is that not a criticism, I’ve gotten to understand that it’s an essential part of why it was such a big influence on me. It was a case — quite possibly the last case — of my favorite video game studio taking a genuinely big swing. They seemed¹At least from a fan’s perspective, without being aware of what was actually going on in the studio to be at the peak of a golden age of a genre they’d perfected, and they put their resources into making something that was so unapologetically weird.

And not performatively weird, either, which is something that I think a lot of people get wrong about Sam & Max, and which was especially true of underground comics, and then edgelord video games in the early 90s. I almost never got the sense that Hit the Road was trying to be weird, so much as they just couldn’t help it.

My entry point to Sam & Max was through the comics at the back of The Adventurer, and then I found all of the comics collected in long boxes at Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens. So I felt like I inherently understood why anyone would want to share these characters and this sense of humor with a wider audience. It certainly feels like a game completely unconcerned with being a commercial hit, or even being part of the Pantheon of SCUMM Classics for nerds like me to place on its proper pedestal. It more has the feel of guys, you have got to see this shit!

I had two main complaints at the time: one was that the story has kind of an anticlimactic ending. The other was that several of the puzzles were unsatisfying as adventure game puzzles; often, it wasn’t a case of being able to predict what was going to happen, but just “use Max on thing.”

Now I’ve got a greater appreciation for how those are more or less the gestalt of Sam & Max. Being unpredictable is inherent to what makes the whole thing work, even though it’s directly in opposition to what a video game requires. I’ll even be pretentious enough to say it’s similar to what I like so much about David Lynch’s best work: everything that makes it unsatisfying as a narrative is also exactly the same thing that makes it so impactful at the time and unforgettable for years afterwards.

And now a list of (some of) my favorite things about Sam & Max Hit the Road:

• The repair manual knocking Max on the ground, and Sam reading the entire book before letting him get back up
• Always being able to bonk Max on the head during the Whack-a-Rat mini-game
• The gag “I wonder where Bruno and Trixie are.” “I don’t even know where I am, Sam!” had what is almost certainly a “bad” line read from Max’s voice actor, but having it sound like a complete non-sequitur also somehow made the gag infinitely better
• Conroy Bumpus’s license plate “MA TRUK”
• The fact that it actually took me decades to get the gag of a mole man being named Shuv-ool
• The cut away from the VR sequence showing real-world Sam stretching Max’s body as he tries to pull the sword from the stone
• The “use” icon
• The kiddie slide into the tar pit, and the green bungie cords for jumping out of the presidents’ noses
• Building on the giant ball of twine joke from the comics with a gondola ride to a roof-top restaurant
• Sam’s delivery of “Hello.” in the cold open.

And simply the fact that the game has a cold open. And also that it’s an entire scene that I can still quote by heart, even if my other favorite lines from the game are all probably mis-remembered and taken out of context by this point.

“Mind if I drive?”

“Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.”

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  At least from a fan’s perspective, without being aware of what was actually going on in the studio