Sam & Max: Hit the Road

Moby ID: 745
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Sam and Max - a canine shamus and a hyperkinetic rabbit - are the freelance police: private investigators who receive missions from and are answerable to "The Commissioner". Upon the completion of a rescue mission from the clutches of a mad scientist, the duo drives through the opening credits and immediately receives a new assignment: Bruno the Bigfoot is missing from the circus and seems to have kidnapped Trixie, the Giraffe-Neck Girl. Sam and Max are on the case and will follow the mystery all across the United States, even if it takes them to such locations as The World's Largest Ball of Twine and The Mount Rushmore Dinosaur Tarpit.

Sam & Max Hit the Road is a puzzle-solving point-and-click adventure game. The player directly controls Sam, though Max will usually follow closely behind and is even available to use directly as an item in the inventory. Sam is able to be directed anywhere on the screen, look at objects, try to use objects, try to speak to objects and use items from his inventory on objects. Sam and Max must unravel the mystery piece by piece in order to unlock new locations on their map. They can travel between these locations at any time by using the car keys on their police car.

During conversation, the player is able to make Sam ask questions of persons, speak non-sequitur exclamations, or ask about specific objects, people, and locations (which are also unlocked as clues are discovered). The verb interface from previous LucasArts adventure games has been modified to icon-based commands, allowing the entire screen to be used for the playing area, similarly to Sierra titles.

The game also features a variety of mini-games, which can be accessed at any time once found. These include Highway-Surfing: a game where the player must jump over exit signs on the interstate, Car Bomb: a variant of Battleship, a Sam & Max coloring book, a Sam & Max dress-up game, and a Whac-a-Mole variant entitled Wak-A-Rat. The CD version of the game includes voice-overs for all the conversations.

Spellings

  • סם ומקס מתגלגלים בדרכים - Hebrew spelling
  • 妙探闖通關 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 萨姆和马克斯 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

85 People (77 developers, 8 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 37 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 327 ratings with 16 reviews)

#6 In my Pc Hall Of Fame!!!

The Good
When I first saw this title in the stores I wasnt very impressed with the idea of a comic book game. But when I gave this title a chance WOW! I was impressed that this game could made me laugh that much. Years later when I got married I showed my wife the "wack a rat" scene. She still laughs about it. One of the things I usually dont like about adventure games is that when you finish the game there is virtualy no replay value left. Some games will try to help this with more than one path to finsh a section or multiple endings. But not Sam & Max, they simply placed all kinds of great jokes and comments and hid them all through the game. A good example is in the begining of the game when you are outside for the first time, you can enter a baby products store and talk to the owner. (I wont spoil it for you) I dont know how many times I have played this game but when I cant find a good adventure title on the market (which is been just about every day for the last 4 years) I play this great old classic. Rest assured this game has more laughs per square inch of cd than any other game.

The Bad
They didn't make a sequal.

ENOUGH AREADY LUCASARTS! WHERE IS SAM & MAX II?

The Bottom Line
The age of this title may be showing. But if you can stand a little out of date graphics then..... YOU HAVE TO GET THIS TITLE. WSM

DOS · by William Shawn McDonie (1131) · 2000

Holy jumpin mother o' God!!! What a game this is!!!

The Good
Hot off the success of Day of the Tentacle, LucasArts crafted another bizarre cartoony adventure game, and this time they upped the ante and delivered the most whacked-out adventure game ever and one (if not the!) best adventure game ever. Seriously, Sam & Max stands firmly as one of the most fantastic adventure games ever even when faced against LucasArts legendary collection of adventure games.

The game puts you in the shoes of the dynamic duo of Sam & Max, the Frelance Police (Tm), who take on the case of finding a missing bigfoot from the local circus. From that point on the game develops into a deranged road trip across the United States filled with equally deranged characters and puzzles to solve in order to single out whoever got away with the circus freaks and put a stop to his obviously machiavellian schemes involving .... shudder Country music...!

Your main avatar in the game is Sam, who (as the most rational and collected of the pair) goes around asking questions and getting items. Max, being the most perfect cartoon incarnation of all that is irreverent and chaotic, goes around raising havoc in the best tradition of Bart Simpson only with far more twisted and dark motivations. He moves around freely, poking and touching things and adding sarcastic remarks or exchanges with Sam whenever you try something in the game thus providing the right ying to Sam's yang and creating some truly amusing situations. He's even available as an individual "action" pointer, but be careful whenever using Max... dire consequences await!

Keeping in tune with the characters, the gags in the game are tremendously bizarre, but also tremendously funny and range from sight gags, to sarcastic remarks and situations (love the Virtual Reality sequence) as well as scatology, jabs at pop culture icons and enough bad jokes to make you die of laughter. I cannot stress how good the comedy writing in this game is, in fact for me (perhaps because of my rather twisted sense of humor) this stands as the number 1 comedy adventure game ever. That's right pal, take your Monkey Island and shove it below the equator!

The locations are some of the most imaginative places ever created for a videogame, with the mistery vortex taking all awards home, and these locations are all lovingly drawn and presented in fullscreen glory thanks to the new interface that thankfully removes the traditional SCUMM-bar that took 30 or so percent of screen room.

Furthermore even if the script wasn't as thight and well-written as it was, the game has plenty of other diversions in the form of memorable characters, multiple mini-games, and loads of funny things to try out and discover! Ain't that enough for you??

The Bad
Can be too weird for some people, and too hard too!! Some of the puzzles here are waaay into advanced territory, especially because of the incredibly crazy leaps of logic you have to take some times...

The Bottom Line
Laugh-out funny, with a clever script and even more clever writing. With enough technology upgrades to be a standout in it's time, winner mini-games like "Car Bomb" and loads of funny extras, a psychotic bunny/wolverine crossbreed and enough wacky and challenging puzzles to spare, Sam & Max is the adventure game to take with if you are going to a deserted island. (that and a computer to play it on!).

Man.... Max is my hero!! I want to be like him when I grow up!!!...well, except for the whole "going around naked poking at things" thing... I already do that on my own thank you very much.

DOS · by Zovni (10504) · 2006

Holy jumping mother o'God in a side-car with chocolate jimmies and a lobster bib! THIS GAME ROCKS!

The Good
Hey there! I've decided I'm going to review the Sam & Max games. I'll go in chronological order, starting with this masterpiece and then on to Season 1 & 2. I would review each episode in individual reviews, but I don't want to clutter up MobyGames. Anyways, before we get started, a little history. Back in the late 1980s, artist Steve Purcell wrote a series of underground comics called "Sam & Max: Freelance Police." While the comic had a cult following (Including Chie, my girlfriend at the time- now my wife) it didn't really go as far as it should have. Purcell was hired by the LucasArts corporation, and for the company newsletter he would draw new Sam & Max strips usually parodying LucasArts products. The guys at the office loved them, and prepped Sam & Max for their very own game.

That year, the titanic monster known as " Doom" came out, got me addicted, and held my brain hostage. I began writing game & movie reviews for my high school newspaper thing, and that year I got my very first request. Chie wanted me to review this game. The review was delayed because I had to get my brain back from Doom, but once I had my brain back and lodged safely in the moist confines of my skull, I sat down and booted up this little masterpiece.

What makes Sam & Max so great is one simple thing: The humour. While it is yet another top notch adventure game from LucasArts, there are some more apparent flaws once you strip away the laughs which I will cover below. Yet Sam & Max is easily the funniest of LucasArt's adventure games, and considering they did the hilarious Monkey Island games and other very funny games like Day of the Tentacle, that's saying ALOT. The humour in Sam & Max is hard to describe, but lets just say that if Salvador Dahli was a comedian, Sam & Max would be his brainchild. Calling Sam & Max surreal just isn't doing it justice.

The graphics, while sadly heavily pixelated, are great. Purcell's rather distinct art style is brought to life and the animation is great as well. The game also has some very vibrant colours which please the eyes, especially when replaying the game in the modern era where the only colour necessary in video games is red for blood and gray for everything else. It's also funny to see Max wander around the sets and interact with some of their unique props.

The game sounds great too, from an excellent Jazzy soundtrack, to the superb voice acting which only enhances the funny. Back in 1993, I'd say that Sam & Max was worth buying a CD drive just so you could have those voices. The voices really do make the game funnier, with pitch perfect voices for everyone, especially Sam & Max. They sound just how you would expect them to. There are various good sound effects too, often very cartoony and sometimes just as random as some of the games jokes.

The game has a very simple, user friendly interface and improves upon the classic interface from previous LucasArts games which was a little more cluttered and complex. By having only a few icons and symbols representing each function when you mouse over something usable really helps. The game also does away with red herrings, meaning every item that you stash in your handy box o' stuff will have a purpose at some point or another and there are rarely any dead end stops. Pixel hunting is also not found here, with every object that you might need clear as day and every object you need to use even clearer.

The puzzles are surprisingly difficult, and while many are good and require logic, others aren't so good; something I will cover below. I like the difficulty, but Sam & Max does push it a little, and I will cover that below as well.

The game has a great and relatively lengthy campaign and gives you plenty of bizarre locales to explore and equally bizarre people and creatures to meet. My favourite location is The Mystery Spot, a place where the laws of physics are pummeled to death as horrifically as possible. I also love one of the characters in the Mystery Spot, a gay hippie mole creature that uses a psychic mood ring to find people or things. His part is small, but I thought he was awesome.

The game has great replay value, not just to chuckle at the jokes again, but also to find new dialogue trees and jokes you would've normally missed on your first playthrough.

The Bad
Although there are several good puzzles and there's no question as to the fact that they will boggle your mind, sometimes the puzzles are a little too mind boggling and insane. I know that it ties into the humor, and I definitely found these funny in the end, but the frustration in learning these solutions is ridiculous since they often throw out all logic; something necessary in these games. Would you know without a hint that you are supposed to attach a severed hand holding a fish shaped fridge magnet to a broken golf ball retriever with a convenience store drink cup on the end into the worlds largest ball of twine? No? Didn't think so.

There are also a couple mini-games which are more tedious than they are fun (Although I did like the battleship variant), and the convenience store locations are somewhat copy-pasted and the jokes wear thin, making it an annoyance to have to repeatedly go to them. The highway surfing minigame is also annoying because it will not let you leave until you reach a certain goal, and sometimes a bug will cause it to be impossible to leave and you will have to reboot the game to go back to the locales you need to go to to complete the game.

Speaking of bugs, this game has a surprisingly large amount compared to other LucasArts adventures, and many of them can be game breaking. They can usually be fixed by restarting the game, but they still might happen which is a real pain.

The Bottom Line
Sam & Max Hit the Road is undoubtedly the funniest game I have ever played. It still makes me laugh my butt off, and like I said in my Full Throttle review, these adventure games are like your favourite movie. They may not be immediately replayable, but you'll want to pop it in from time to time and enjoy it all over again. If you like adventure games and if you need a good cure for your depression, Sam & Max hit the Road will do just that.

DOS · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009

[ View all 16 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Sam & Max TV show on DVD? It can happen! Foxhack (32102) Jun 18, 2007

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Sam & Max Hit the Road appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cancelled sequel

A sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road, Sam & Max Freelance Police, was developed, but cancelled on March 3rd, 2004 because LucasArts thought it was "not the appropriate time to release a graphic adventure game on the PC." Despite many petitions and negative feedback about the cancellation, the game was not put back into production.

Sam & Max

During the time in which Steve Purcell worked at LucasArts, Sam & Max (or only Max) made cameos in many other games, including Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, The Curse of Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle, Rebel Assault II, Jedi Knight, Full Throttle or Shadows of the Empire.

Sam & Max franchise

Sam & Max were not invented for this game, but are part of a whole franchise by Steve Purcell. The media they appeared include the original comics and a cartoon which aired on FOX kids in 1997/98 (awarded with the 1998 Gemini Award for Best Animated Series). Purcell also made one-page Sam & Max spoofs of LucasArts games for The Adventurer, a periodical newspaper for LucasArts employees.

Soundtrack

The CDROM contains four Redbook audio tracks that have the "Sam & Max Theme", "Moleman Music", "King of the Creatures", and "Bigfoot Shuffle" music from the game.

References

  • The music that plays at the World of Fish locale sounds an awful lot like the song "Fishing Blues", which was originally written by blues musician Taj Majal.
  • When you go to Snuckey's, the man serving you is Bernard Bernoulli, a character from Day of the Tentacle.
  • There are multiple references to LucasFilm movies in the game. When Shuv-Oohl karmically links with the Yetis, he says "It's, like, several voices screaming out in terror... and then suddenly silenced.", a reference to a classic Star Wars quote. Using the droid manual on the security droid in Bumpusville results in the droid projecting a hologram of Princess Leia, like R2D2 did. Finally, using the Conroy Bumpus eggplant on the toupee in his bedroom results in a parody of a classic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • When asked what he's reading, Lee-Harvey replies, "Dialenics, by Elrod Hubbel, It's changing my life." This is a reference to L. Rod Hubbard, who started a religion based on a novel he wrote.
  • During the conversation with the Cat outside the office building, Max comments "He looks cute Sam. Can I make a tennis racquet out of him?". This is in reference to the fact that the strings in tennis racquets used to be made from a natural fibre called Catgut, which is produced from the intestines of animals such as cows, horses, mules and donkeys. Despite the name, Catgut has never been produced using a cat's intestines.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #95 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) –#7 Funniest Computer Game
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #8 Most Memorable Game Heroes (Sam & Max)
    • February 2006 (Issue #259) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2005 - # 45 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • PC Powerplay (Germany)
    • Issue 06/2005 - #5 Likeable Secondary Character (for Max)

Information also contributed by James1, John Wallace, Mitch Kocen, NatsFan, Paul Graves, PCGamer77, Satoshi Kunsai, shifter and Trixter

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Nathan Kovner.

Linux added by Sciere. Antstream added by lights out party. Windows added by Ben K. Macintosh added by Jason Savage.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Zack Green, Apogee IV, Sciere, Crawly, Zeppin, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, El Bosso.

Game added January 13, 2000. Last modified March 23, 2024.